There's.a peregrine falcon in my garden...

[mamaduckbone]

....casually eating a pigeon on the patio.

Well, I think that's what it is. If I leave it long enough do you think it will finish it off, or is there going to be a bloody mess to clear up in the morning?

It's an amazing sight to be fair.

I also think that's a sparrowhawk.

There's one who's a regular visitor to my garden. She swoops down every so often and helps herself to one of my lovely little goldfinches who congregate around the bird feeder.

It's not nice to witness but I guess it's a sign of a healthy garden ecosystem.

It was - think it was from the Look and Read series. And it was an incredibly important topic - in the 1970s, Peregrine falcons were at incredibly low levels, less than 50 breeding pairs and, on top of the almost annihilaton of numbers due to pesticide use and persecution by shoots/gamekeepers/farms, their near extinction made the theft of eggs incredibly lucrative.

This was the sparrowhawk we saw eating a pigeon in a café garden a few weeks back..

We had a sparrow hawk catch a pigeon mid flight. It left a fair bit behind and my poor partner had to dispose of the rest of it. We
had feathers on our drive for weeks

The collared dove probably thought it could take it on. They're not that gentle. I saw one square up to a bothersome pair of magpies, a few years back, and the magpies didn't hang about.

Yeh it’s really not guaranteed to eat all or even most of it. We have one catch pigeons in our garden sometimes. There’s usually at least a lot of bloody feathers, a big if gore and the beak if not the entire head. I’ve never known one to take the corpse away like pp said. I guess maybe if it has a nest it is possible