Morning visitor.

If you look carefully just above the suet balls you will see a brown bird sitting on the branch. The Sparrowhawk, waiting for rich picking. 

This morning we awoke to see the sparrowhawk sitting in our Acer. It's not surprising because the tree is literally dripping with bird feeders. Suet balls, niger seed, peanuts and wild bird seed feeders all dangle from the branches of the Acer and so it makes sense for the predator to go straight to it's own feeding station. We could hear birds chirruping but the tree was eerily silent and not one bird moved to give away it's hiding place in the shrubs. Whilst we ran for the camera the sparrowhawk flew onto the fence between Jack's house and his other neighbours.

 

Alighting quietly to just underneath the shrubs there was still no movement from any tiny birds and after a few minutes I was sent out to purvey the garden.

 Although I didn't see or hear the bird fly off it took another ten minutes before the birds were prepared to visit out garden again. Here are a couple of gold finches eating the tiny black flecks of the niger seed, a blue tit on the peanuts and two sparrows sitting in the the shrub before attacking the suet balls. It might be worth clicking on the last photo to see the two little dull birds better.