A new noise stopped me dead in my tracks; a sort of pulse-quickening, primitive shriek, more banshee wail than bird call. Through the still-bare March treetops I saw the source of the sound barrel straight overhead – my first thrilling glimpse of sparrowhawk in this neck of Ecclesall Wood, near my home.
In the long light of a clear May evening came a second sighting, not far from the first; a revelatory 10 minutes of spectacular aerobatics in the full view of Ecclesall Road South, the bird’s fluidity of movement spellbinding.
More recently, when the woods were muffled and dense with August foliage, I heard those sounds again, but more frequent and insistent, and produced by at least two birds. I waded towards them into the bramble-tangled understorey, but the calls simply receded as I pushed onwards, always one effortless step ahead of me, like a rainbow.
A few days later I managed a frustratingly obscure glimpse, but a close-up look at these birds – which have, after all, evolved to be invisible in domains such as this – was proving elusive.
That night I dreamed a huge sparrowhawk flew over me in a field, so close I could clearly make out the bright yellow of its irises and the horizontal bars of its plumage – distinctive features that, having recognised sparrowhawks previously by sound, I had not consciously memorised. The birds were eluding me in the day but somehow invading my nights.
The following day I resolved to try one last time. After an hour of waiting, scanning the foliage, the sound began again. I lifted my binoculars, more in hope than expectation, but landed straight on a sparrowhawk, poised with disarming stillness on a conifer branch. I had the nape-prickling feeling of looking at a ghost. A little later I located the juvenile, the source of all that noise. I watched both for half an hour, the three of us silent and still.
Only after they moved on did I see the messy scattering of pigeon feathers on the ground. All that time I had been searching in the trees, while a tell-tale sign had been unnoticed at my feet.
