The red kite thing is tricky. I'm seeing more and more around here now and they must be competing for food with buzzards and other scavengers like ravens. To my mind the local buzzard population is too high but it's hard to know what a normal population is supposed to be. Kites seem to have wider foraging territories than most birds though so maybe they'll find their own niche that way.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
As others before me have stated, nature can be cruel when witnessed up close. But it's been going on for a long time now and goldfinch numbers have soared in recent years. Sparrowhawk predation will have very little effect on those numbers but human activity has a much greater potential for adverse influence, what with habitat loss, melting icecaps etc.
Kites and buzzards I believe have the same type of needs so I expect that buzzard numbers may decrease if kite numbers increase. Round here I remember many years ago a pair of buzzards were quite the thing to see as they were rare and yet today every time I look up in the sky I generally see one (13 in one thermal once!).I have only seen one kite here on the Isle of Wight,my sister in Bucks sees them all the time. They have both been round for thousands of years so will find their own balance.It was just humans that threw them off for a time!
“Every day is ordinary, until it isn't.” - Bernard Cornwell-Death of Kings
Kites and buzzards I believe have the same type of needs so I expect that buzzard numbers may decrease if kite numbers increase. Round here I remember many years ago a pair of buzzards were quite the thing to see as they were rare and yet today every time I look up in the sky I generally see one (13 in one thermal once!).
38 buzzards feeding in one field was recorded to the local county bird recorder this month. Good mix of pheasant shoots near major roads, sheep farming and arable farm land for worms around here I suppose.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
I think what happens with birds hitting the window is the flock scatters and some inevitably panic in the wrong direction. So giving the BOP (usually sparrowhawk here) an easy grab. We have had occasional window hits like this, and not a regular or often occurrence. It goes very quiet for a good few minutes afterwards too.
@Lizzie27 Quite understand your feeling too, even though you know, it is what it is. Seeing it in the back of your mind takes a little time to shake it off, it does with me anyway.
The Sparrowhawk here comes regularly, but has only caught two wood pigeons and not smaller birds ( that I have seen) . The birds hitting the windows are usually spooked by the blackbirds alarm calls.
They mostly got wood pigeons in our last garden too. The smaller birds were quicker at diving into the nearby shrubbery to save themselves. Haven't seen one here but there are smaller birds of prey which seem to prefer hovering for voles and other small rodents and buzzards too.
Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
"The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
The sparrowhawks here only seem interested in the smaller birds but usually miss as their potential victims dive into the nearby deutzia. I wouldn't mind in the least if the took some of the pigeons.
We also have buzzards and in the last couple of weeks have had a kestrel hovering over the garden but I haven't seen it catch anything.
A male sparrowhawk is a bit too small to kill a pigeon but there have been stories of them dragging them into ponds and drowning them. The male is called a tiercel which some people think came from the bird being a third smaller than the female or taking prey that is a third smaller than the size a female can take.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
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Round here I remember many years ago a pair of buzzards were quite the thing to see as they were rare and yet today every time I look up in the sky I generally see one (13 in one thermal once!).I have only seen one kite here on the Isle of Wight,my sister in Bucks sees them all the time.
They have both been round for thousands of years so will find their own balance.It was just humans that threw them off for a time!
@Lizzie27 Quite understand your feeling too, even though you know, it is what it is. Seeing it in the back of your mind takes a little time to shake it off, it does with me anyway.
We also have buzzards and in the last couple of weeks have had a kestrel hovering over the garden but I haven't seen it catch anything.