Tree Creeper

Two interesting visitors to our garden this afternoon. The first is a bird I've been looking out for all through the past winter, but without success - common enough, but hard to spot: the tree creeper. We had one the winter before (in harder weather, admittedly) that hawked about on our brick walls for what it could find. Today's bird was doing what tree creepers always do - creeping in a mouse-like way up the trunk of a tree, in this case the elm just to the back of us, which is well laden with flowers, I notice. It will often creep in a circular motion up the trunk, and will then fly back down to start again. Unlike the nuthatch, it can't creep down the tree, only up.

The second visitor, arguably less welcome, was a magnificent male sparrow hawk, a pocket version of the female, and very handsome in slate grey. He perched on top of the feeding station, which I suppose gave him a good field of view; at any rate, the speed at which he dashed off would suggest he'd seen something to fly at. We've lots of pigeons around at the moment, so they might be good food for a sparrow hawk, though perhaps too large a prospect for the smaller male.