I am an awful person and I think I might vomit

[JoshandJamie]

I came home to find what I thought was a bird being attacked by a cat just outside our front door. Being the world's most squeamish person, I went through the back door to avoid the situation.

But the bird has been shrieking in pain for ages now. I am too scared to even go and look close up at what's happened - but I managed to take a peak through a window and amazingly it looks like two birds, one of which is a small hawk or similar who have had some kind of tussle. They are both lying on the ground but one is still definitely alive.

I know the humane thing would be to go and kill it. But I just cannot. I am literally choking back the vom as I type this. I feel sick to my stomach. I almost want to call someone to help but don't know who??

God I am being ridiculous but there was a very good reason I didn't take biology at school.

Fantastic, fair play too the blackbird managing to escape.

LOL at imaginary RSPB phonecall

it's probably a sparrow hawk. This is what they do. It's not horrible or cruel. It's nature.

pmsl joshandjamie,this is the best thread I've read for ages!!
Seriously though, I know it wasn't meant to be funny, and I know how you feel. When my cat was really young it caught an ooking great starling (I know they're not big but it was the fact that my moggie was small!) then didn't know what to do with it, and the noise was awful. I managed to go out armed with a coathanger (Yes, in retrospect I did wonder why I grabbed a coathanger but anyway.....) and the cat dropped the bird and the bird staggered off and I grabbed the cat, what a squirming ball of hissing fury he was, I can tell you!!! I was shaking like a leaf at the thought of what I might find...

JoshandJamie you are very funny, and as a bird phobic myself (I once had a baby blackbird who kept flying into my kitchen window and giving me the vapours until I built a barricade of cereal boxes so I wouldn't have to look at it) I know how you must have felt!!

coathanger. pmsl!!
My cat caught i wren once, horrible noise it made in the outhouse type thing we got.
Went to scare cat off, she ran inside and upstairs with the bird,i managed to corner her and she let go of the bird. i put it outside and she got at it later. Bloody animal.

Ladymariner, perhaps if I'd been armed with a coathanger I might have been a bit braver. Or not. Probably not.

Can't believe this thread still hasn't died. It just keeps coming back to haunt me and remind me of The Day of the Birds. The patch of poo still loiters outside our front door as a grizzly reminder of a the brutal assassination that almost took place, only didn't.

Branflake, I'm going to go look up sparrow hawks - and quite possibly start a campaign to have them outlawed.

I saw a kestrel down a pigeon and dismember it on our neighbours front pathway (middle of London too).

Strangely, my dd thought it infinitely fascinating