Explains why I have had very few smaller birds in my garden this summer!
Not really. We have sparrow hawks, kestrels and merlins here and believe me we're blessed with a mass of songbirds. A heck of a lot of quite rare ones too. They will take an occasional small bird but never anything significant so you notice a decline. We know if one of the falcons is around because the bird feeding station suddenly empties. I do have a variety of things to stop the falcons thinking my feeding stations and garden is their dining table and to stop them getting a clean strike. I posted the other day that I have hanging feeders with a cage round so the small birds can duck in if there's a strike. I also have a cage round the bird table for the same reason.
The kestrel tends to be partial to thrush and blackbirds and the merlin to goldfinch. But of course they will all take small mammals and small birds.
My experience is not surprising though because it's no different to the research findings of research undertaken by the BTO and confirmed by the RSPB and in response to some people worrying that such as sparrowhawks eat too many small birds and cause their population to fall or even become extinct.
Research points to the contrary. Long-term scientific studies have shown that sparrowhawks generally have no or little impact on songbird populations.
A number of previous studies found that songbirds were no more common when sparrowhawks were absent than when they were present.
It is also worth remembering that sparrowhawks and songbirds have existed side by side for thousands of years without any detrimental effect on songbird numbers.
Food availability and the number of suitable nesting sites naturally restrict the number of sparrowhawks in an area.
The ones that in my opinion tend to take so"too many" and so that it leads to noticable decline are the likes of magpies. They'll dessimate songbirds nests and remove all eggs and kill all the fledgelings 'just because'. They're a bit like the fox of the bird world.
My photo isn't as good as yours but here's one of ours and just taken from the office window. It struck and got a blackbird that was sitting on the horsebox wingmirror. It never knew what hit it!
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Not really. We have sparrow hawks, kestrels and merlins here and believe me we're blessed with a mass of songbirds. A heck of a lot of quite rare ones too. They will take an occasional small bird but never anything significant so you notice a decline. We know if one of the falcons is around because the bird feeding station suddenly empties. I do have a variety of things to stop the falcons thinking my feeding stations and garden is their dining table and to stop them getting a clean strike. I posted the other day that I have hanging feeders with a cage round so the small birds can duck in if there's a strike. I also have a cage round the bird table for the same reason.
The kestrel tends to be partial to thrush and blackbirds and the merlin to goldfinch. But of course they will all take small mammals and small birds.
My experience is not surprising though because it's no different to the research findings of research undertaken by the BTO and confirmed by the RSPB and in response to some people worrying that such as sparrowhawks eat too many small birds and cause their population to fall or even become extinct.
Research points to the contrary. Long-term scientific studies have shown that sparrowhawks generally have no or little impact on songbird populations.
A number of previous studies found that songbirds were no more common when sparrowhawks were absent than when they were present.
It is also worth remembering that sparrowhawks and songbirds have existed side by side for thousands of years without any detrimental effect on songbird numbers.
Food availability and the number of suitable nesting sites naturally restrict the number of sparrowhawks in an area.
The ones that in my opinion tend to take so"too many" and so that it leads to noticable decline are the likes of magpies. They'll dessimate songbirds nests and remove all eggs and kill all the fledgelings 'just because'. They're a bit like the fox of the bird world.
My photo isn't as good as yours but here's one of ours and just taken from the office window. It struck and got a blackbird that was sitting on the horsebox wingmirror. It never knew what hit it!
Thanks for that Northern Lass, very interesting!