Red in tooth and claw (and bone)

Alfred Lord Tennyson used 'red in tooth and claw' to describe nature in 1850. Two episodes in my garden confirm that this is a fair point. The first involves a blackbird's nest. The parent birds have been running themselves ragged feeding the young these last few days.  A cacophony of alarm calls brought me to the window and in seconds it was from this...

to this......

via this.....

The crow, having taken the chick to the roof ridge and torn it apart, hopped off and just left it there.

Last week I had been watching a blue tit bringing nest material into a nestbox.  Hour after hour every few minutes, in and out of the hole.  I watched it come out and fly directly over a low hedge into a neighbour's garden.  Seconds later, the flash of a sparrowhawk over the hedge and a silent nest box.  The box is re-occupied now - maybe with a smarter, faster and more vigilant blue tit.

Meanwhile, the red bone in the title still remains a mystery.

Pigeon turns into Sparrowhawk - pure magic

In my last post I made passing reference to the day a sparrowhawk ate its way through a pigeon in our back garden.  What I didn't mention was the hours I spent rummaging through my digital photos failing to find the pictures I knew I had.  Well, today I found them, in a cardboard box - prints from the last days of film.

So after all that, I decided to share a couple of blurry scans of only half decent originals snatched through window glass.

And the pigeon?  Not a lot left I'm afraid!

Not bad for urban Newcastle - especially as I can remember the bad old days when sparrowhawks were a rare sight indeed.  How things have improved since then.