Walking back to work in my lunch hour I noticed this poor thing lying there in the gutter - poor thing. I don't think it is a Peregrine - but not sure what it is - any ideas ?
Thank you for your replies - a really unusual thing to see. It was big enough that I saw it and stopped to have a look. Over time that is the second unusual bird to see in that spot - within about a metre of that poor buzzard - I saw this little fella siting on the pavement one morning a few years ago - it could not fly. I took this picture with my phone it was so close ! I tried to pick it up but it hid under a parked car. I wonder if both of these have hit a glass office block window and then dropped down to the deck ? This taken a few years ago in the same spot:
I showed that picture to one of our clients - a super keen (and quite wealthy) bird watcher who once hired a helicopter to go up to Scotland to see a rare bird that had just been sighted. He could hardly believe it - to get that close to this tiny little bird and get a picture of it with a phone It was sat on the pavement, almost fell over it ! Unusual to see such things - amazes me, something out of the ordinary
They are tiny, our smallest native bird I think. I had one land on a window sill I was repairing years ago, lovely little things.
What a thing to see - you must have been amazed. You could go a lifetime and not see one and then one just appears for a moment. Amazing.
We retrieved this from one of our Boeing 747’s in Orlando a few years ago. It is apparently the remains of a bald eagle which took out the leading edge of the one of the flaps of the aircraft. It caused a right old stink because it is the national bird of the You Ess Aye, therefore lots of forms needed to be completed as it needed to be logged with the state department and various questions asked about how it had now become a dead bird. Caused me personally a long night liaising with the team in Orlando to get the aircraft fixed so that it would be ready to bring all the holiday families home again from their trips to Disneyland… Just look at the size of those talons! Massive!
What a picture ! The size of it - that is impressive. I bet that did some damage, even to something as big as a 747. Pilot must have said " what the f....k was that !" when he hit it. I bet there could be trouble for killing a protected bird. Well done for getting everyone back on their flights - probably none the wiser !
There’s no grey hood or back and a lack of a white rump. Could possibly be a female but the leg length and markings don’t look quite right to me.
Fun fact: bald eagles look nails, but they actually have a rather feminine sounding call (it’s a bit like a cross between a thrush and a seagull), so whenever they are featured in patriotic American films and TV, they usually overdub it with the call of the much more macho sounding call of a red tailed hawk.
I think it's sparrow hawk as well... buzzards are really quite big birds and sparrow hawks are about the size of a (slim) pigeon. We get the occasional sparrow hawk in the garden and we always know when there is one about because all the other birds disappear and fall silent. I remember one occasion sitting on the bench when a sparrow flew at incredible speed just above my head with a sparrow hawk giving chase... I'm sure I could see the fear in the sparrow's eyes.
