Starting a garden from scratch on a wind-blasted coast is a daunting prospect, and one that demands long-term planning and patience. So this garden, with its established shrubs and small trees to provide cover for birds, was a definite factor in the choice of our new house. And, as we hoped, it does attract a variety of birds that come to feed. Blackbirds, starlings and redwing come and go, but present every day are a couple of muscular greenfinches who have made the bird feeder their own. Any other bird attempting to feed from it is soon chased off by the greenfinches, who appear from nowhere to defend "their" peanuts.
A female chaffinch, another ever-present, manages occasionally to stage a successful raid, as does a dunnock which is more usually to be found, along with a song thrush, scuffling round the base of the shrubs picking up morsels from the leaf litter. A little troop of goldfinches sometimes visit, their bright red faces and buttery yellow wing bars bringing a splash of colour to the greyest of afternoons. One day five redpolls appeared to spend the morning flitting from willow to willow.
But we are not the only ones aware that the garden is frequented by so many birds. When my husband hisses for me to come slowly and quietly to the kitchen window I am not sure what to expect, but there, only a few feet away along the track, is a sparrowhawk. It is fiercely elegant, with long yellow legs ending in curving talons, and it is perched atop a starling it has just brought down. As if buffeted by the wind, the sparrowhawk momentarily loses its equilibrium, but then, regaining its poise, it quickly plucks a single billful of feathers from its prey. The wind snatches away most of the feathers, which drift briefly before falling in a scatter to the wet ground. Warily, alert to possible danger, the bird checks its surroundings and then plucks another billful of feathers.
Suddenly there is an explosion of desperate wing-flapping as the starling, which we had thought dead, struggles valiantly to throw off its attacker's weight. Even as I instinctively raise my hand to bang on the window I realise both the futility and the wrongness of my action. I catch myself in time but the movement alone has been enough to attract the sparrowhawk's attention. We stare at each other, I with contrition at the probable consequences of my reflex response, the bird with the fierce burning intensity of a predator caught between hunger and survival instinct. Suddenly it lifts off, flying low over the field into the fading light, leaving me still feeling the impact of its glare and also leaving behind the starling, for which the intervention had anyway always been too late.