The Cheek of It All

The cheek of it all, I thought, as I watched our resident sparrow hawk perch on top of our feeding station as though staking his claim to it. The garden, of course, was otherwise completely empty. He stayed there for about a minute, then flipped across to perch alongside the other two feeders that hang in our blossom trees. He was of course in a place where he had no chance of catching anything, so, though this might be fanciful, his tactic seemed to me to be purely intimidatory, entirely a matter of saying to the regular users of those feeders, "This is all my patch, really. Don't ever feel safe here, I can take you any time I want."  In fact, the majority of attempted sparrow hawk strikes are unsuccessful - but it's also true that all of our small birds live pretty much their entire lives in a state of intense trepidation; they need to, the world about them is a deadly place.