visit from the sparrowhawk

Looking out of the sitting room window this morning, I saw a pile of grey pigeon feathers by the little oak tree.  We must have had a visit from a sparrowhawk, for I can't think what else would stop to pluck its prey that close to the house.  A fox, if it managed to get a pigeon, would surely take it away into the woods, and as I know from those odd times when the cats have caught pigeons (I'm sure they were very old and ill pigeons) cats don't bother to pluck them.  I noticed yesterday afternoon that there were periods when the bird table was suddenly completely deserted, and wondered then if there were some predator about, though it could just have been one of the cats.  Some people who feed the birds get very upset when sparrowhawks take any of 'their' birds, but while I'd rather sparrowhawks ate pigeons than blue tits or robins (there are too many pigeons around here.  They cause damage to crops and gardens, and although it is a strictly subjective judgement, I find the noise they make quite annoying), I think to have raptors in your garden is thrilling.  The owls were calling vigorously last night, and I like them too.  They eat voles, which are the enemies of gardeners as they eat crocus bulbs and chew through bark and kill branches, if not whole young trees, so the vole's enemy is my friend, but I like owls anyway.

The wind had dropped and the air outside suddenly felt pleasant to breathe again.  Shoots of the dwarf iris are visible through the gravel, and the buds on the two shrubs I bought eight days ago, that have been sitting in the front garden waiting to be planted, have swelled visibly since I brought them home.  The world is stirring.  I would not call it spring, exactly, not on 8 January, and there could be cold weather to come (I do hope not.  It could cause a lot of damage, the way plants are coming out of dormancy), but things are on the move.  I never know how to respond to non-gardeners who blithely assume that of course in January I won't be doing anything outside.  Weather permitting, it is always a busy time of year, and the earth feels anything but dead.

As I was feeling stronger and the weather was kinder I did a run to the dump at Clacton.  It is just off Jaywick Lane, not the most salubrious spot.  There was an armed robbery at a farm shop in Jaywick Lane five days ago, and Jaywick itself was the most deprived place in England in 2010 according to the Multiple Index of Deprivation released last March.  That places it bottom among 32,482 neighbourhoods, based on statistics for income, employment, health, disability, crime, and living standards.  As the leader of Tendring District Council said, that's quite an embarrassment for somewhere only sixty miles from London.  Jaywick has a beautiful beach, and if history had worked out differently it could be a thriving retirement or commuter town.  Unfortunately, it has a legacy of very grotty (though historically interesting) housing left over from the interwar Plotlands movement, which by now are homes to some very troubled people.  Still, everybody at the dump was carefully putting their carloads of stuff into the right containers like exemplary citizens.  I did a woodland talk at Jaywick, a few years ago, and the audience were perfectly nice.  In fact, they gave me a donation for the charity above the going rate, which was generous but unnecessary, and I did notice on the letter they'd sent me confirming the booking that they received funding from Essex Council.  Groups which have to raise every last penny themselves from membership dues and fund raising events tend to be more frugal about how they spend it.

Then, as the trip to the dump hadn't prostrated me, I move more iris, and some asters.  I am absolutely sure that now is not the right time to be disturbing asters, but I had a clump that turned out to be shorter than I was expecting.  Either I hadn't read the label properly, or the description at the nursery where I bought them was wrong, so they'd ended up too far back in a bed for their diminutive height, and I wanted to move them to the front of that bed, and replace them with another taller aster that I'd optimistically tucked in by a rose bush in the front garden and which turned out to barely see the light of day, poor thing.  I really don't want to save all this rejigging until March or April, when the soil would be warming up, the asters starting into active growth, and it would be officially the right time to do the job.  I want to get those two beds weeded, replanted, mulched and sorted, ideally by the end of February.  I'll let you know if the asters survive the experience. 

a bird in the hand

It is almost the shortest day.  When I went out at half past seven to open the pop hole of the chicken house and sprinkle their morning treat of porridge oats and Value sultanas, the chickens were still lined up on their perch, and just looked at me through the windows.  It was obviously too early and too dark for them to get up.

The remaining Christmas trees are meeting a certain amount of consumer resistance.  One couple asked me if we would be cutting any more, which I took as a coded comment that they didn't like the ones we had.  I explained that there probably wouldn't be any more, as I thought there weren't any more left to cut, a coded response that yes, I knew the trees were an odd looking lot but unfortunately they were the absolute last scrapings from the bottom of the barrel.  Some people did buy trees, one man saying cheerfully that his tree only had one side, but he didn't want to go up the road and pay fifty pounds for one.  My colleague sawed the bottom off a tree for someone dressed in full biking leathers, face piercings and skull necklace.  I didn't nip out into the car park to see if he was actually going to drive away on a Harley-Davidson with the tree strapped to his back.  I should have really.

A customer came to tell me that there was a sparrow hawk 'in your thing down there'.  I went down to the bottom of the plant centre, and there was indeed a hawk flying around in the top half of the shade tunnel.  The tunnel has a green netting roof, but open sides, and the bird could have flown straight out if it had come lower down, instead of which it was battering itself against the netting roof as it tried to fly upwards towards the sky, which it could see through the shade netting.  Small birds have done the same thing in our conservatory at home, flying repeatedly into the transparent roof, and very difficult to remove they are too, but I've never had to deal with a hawk before, and didn't honestly know how I was going to get it out.  I went into the tunnel from the other end, and walked towards the bird in the hope that it would fly away from me and find the end opening, but it went on flying into the roof, then flopped down on to a plant and fell on its back on the ground.

I picked it up, holding its wings against its body so that it couldn't flap.  I don't know if that is the recommended way of handling a tired and frightened wild bird, but I thought that if it flapped in real panic it might injure itself, or I might drop it in surprise, or it might catch me in the eye.  I put it down, the right way up, in the border outside the tunnel and suggested to the customer that the best thing now might be to leave it to recover.  The owners don't have cats, and were out with the dogs, so it seemed a fairly safe bet just leaving it on the ground.  I checked five minutes later and it had gone.

It was a very beautiful creature, with a lot of red in its colouring.  It looked huge with its full wingspan extended, but tiny in my hands, no larger than a blackbird.  I can identify a kestrel hovering because I know that is the only UK raptor that can hover, but I don't know much about the markings of hawks and haven't seen many close up.  The Systems Administrator on hearing about it thought that it was almost certainly a kestrel and not a sparrowhawk, because sparrowhawks hunt among trees quite close to the ground, and shouldn't have had any difficulty finding their way out of the tunnel via the side openings.  That sounds sensible to me, but having seen the bird ineffectually flying around in the tunnel, and then held it, I still couldn't tell you what species it was.  The customer seemed relieved I'd rescued it.  Compared to him I did have the strategic advantage that I was wearing gloves, and some people are squeamish about handling birds, which I can understand.  Birds are very alien creatures close up, so bony and light, with scaly legs and strange eyes.  Add talons and a hooked beak, and they aren't something you necessarily want to mess with.