Life and death.

Rather a pretentious title, but it seems appropriate.

I'm afraid the  buzzard didn't recover, his injuries were just too severe.  In spite of the glucose, anti-biotics and TLC, as well as the help and advice of my vet, he died.  It's sad, but I did the best I could.

 In the wild, something like 40% of all birds of prey die within their first year.  This can be from injury, disease or starvation and the factors can be cumulative. For instance a young bird  loses a few feathers making a bad landing in a tree. This means that it can't quite catch a prey item, which means that it gets a bit weak from lack of food. It picks up an internal parasite from somewhere ( maybe eating carrion), and gets weaker. Because it can't fly fast enough to catch food for itself, it starves or is taken by another predator. A predator has a very precarious existence, in the wild. 

By contrast, a non-predator sometimes seems to have it made. Someone once pointed out to me that   " If you're a herbivore, living somewhere like Exmoor,  the ground is a never-ending platter of food, laid out in front of you".     True enough, I suppose, but not when the ground is three feet deep in snow like it has been for the last couple of winters. 

At the moment, there's no snow, just rain.  I knew Devon was meant to be a bit damp when we moved here three years ago, but I didn't realise just how damn damp.  My car has developed a green mould on the black rubber surround of the windscreen. It's no consolation to know that the summers have been  " unseasonably wet" for the past three years, when you're developing webbed feet.


A week ago today, I picked up our latest recruit.  This is a female sparrowhawk ( in falconry terms,a "spar" , as opposed to a male sparrowhawk, which is a "musket").  She was born on 16th June, and is developing at an astonishing rate.  When I got her, she wasn't able to stand. She learned to do that over just three days and is now happily trotting around. Over the past two days, she's learned to stand on one leg, as hawks do when they are relaxed. She's also learned to scratch her head with one foot, without falling over.  
But the biggest change has been in her appearance. A week ago, she was a ball of white fluff, with a few brown feathers sticking out of one end. Now, her breast feathers have come through while her back and wing feathers seems to grow as you look at them.
This fast development is part of Nature's way of giving the birds as good a start as possible. While they're in the nest, unable to fly, they're extremely vulnerable. She seems to know this at some level and spends most of her waking time plucking at the white down to get rid of it and encourage proper feather growth.

I took her outside today for the first time, to meet some customers on a hawk-walk. The rain held off long enough for us to see some nice flying from Lady Macbeth and Cassius. Additionally, the customers were able to admire the sparrowhawk as she sat in mobile nest on the passenger seat of my car.   One of the customers, Claire, is conservation officer for the British Dragonfly Association.  What a great job!  She's also a keen photographer so hopefully, I'll be posting some of her pictures either on www.NorthDevonHawkWalks.co.uk , or on here.   In the meantime, I attach a few I've taken recently.
Next Saturday, we'll all be at the mid-Devon show, together with my friend Tom and his son Daniel ( also known as the youngest falconer in the UK).  With Daniel in his pram, and the sparrowhawk in her nest, it'll look more like a creche than a falconry stall!