Let’s not mess with the sparrowhawks

It’s unlikely that birds of prey have anything to do with the decline in garden songbirds, says Rod Liddle, and anyway, what right have we got to play God with wildlife?

But oh! The crewel sparrer’hawk
E spies im in is snuggery,
E sharpens up is bleedin’ claws
An rips im aht by thuggery

anon, 19th c.


There was a fearful commotion outside, in the garden, a screeching and frantic flapping, the sound of water being urgently displaced, of aggression and terror. I rushed to the door and looked through the glass; three feet away from me, in my daughter’s half-collapsed paddling pool — replete with winter snow-melt and rain — a wood pigeon was getting its head kicked in. The pigeon had its head down, as if it were ashamed, the beak inclined gently towards its breast; it offered no opposition to the assault, save for the sort of passive resistance nonsense pacifists used to urge upon us; wings by its side, knowing that it was morally in the right, and being killed.

The creature doing the killing hacked away frantically with its sharp beak and talons and then, as I stood by the door, suddenly stopped its murder and fixed me with two bright, nasty, f***-you yellow eyes, as if to say; ‘yeah, so what, mate — your point is?’ I felt embarrassed and briefly looked away, much as if I had blundered into a public convenience and witnessed a senior member of the Church of England performing an act of oral love upon a policeman. One knows that this sort of thing goes on, one simply does not wish to witness it. When I looked back, the aggressor had flown off, and the pigeon was paddling broken and hopeless in the pool, next to a plastic figurine model of Peppa Pig, usually pink and white but now flecked with crimson.