In message , Sacha
writes
Collared Doves!! That quite amazes me. Sparrows yes but wow that's a big
bird to take.

There's a sparrowhawk round here which plucks and dismembers some of its
prey in our back garden, and I have found collared dove 'bits' below her
favoured post. Jackdaws, too, occasionally.


Ha! All our collared, or ring neck doves have gone to sparrowhawks, as
did our attempt at keeping white doves. They're just the right size
for those damned hawks. We ended up returning what remained of the
white doves to the person we bought them from. We felt that we were
running a sort of buffet for sparrowhawks. At the time, we had someone
doing some occasional work here who told us that the worst of it is
that the sparrowhawk pins the victim to the ground and eats it from the
inwards, while that victim is still alive. After that, I just couldn't
go on offering up the white doves. But last year we had 4 pairs, at
least, of ring neck doves in the garden. We don't have one now, dammit.

We had a pair of visiting pheasants, for the first time ever, for about
8 months - they'd turn up every morning for the bird food, nearly always
together, and became quite special to us. About a month ago I saw the
sparrowhawk take the hen. I've only seen the cock once since then, a few
days later ...

--
Klara, Gatwick basin