One morning, a few weeks ago (August 2005) I was in the sitting room at home and Susan and Sarah were in other parts of the house. Our sitting room is at the back of the house with a full-width conservatory adjoining, which almost doubles the size of the room. This looks out onto a garden of reasonable size. It was a hot day and the conservatory door was wide open.
I was just getting up from my chair to take my coffee cup to the kitchen when I was astonished to see a large, brown speckled bird fly in through the doorway, make a tightly banked turn and leave the way it had come! I am ninety per cent sure it was a sparrowhawk. It made no sound and the whole incident was over in about three seconds. The girls just heard my cry of “Bird!” which was all I could manage to utter.
From the smooth and practised manner of its flight one might assume it did this every day and as I remarked to Susan, if I had not been in the room we would never have known it had been in.
I had become quite accustomed to avian visits since making friends with a male blackbird who frequents the garden. I feed him raisins and on a couple of occasions I looked up from whatever I was doing, to see him standing on the carpet in the middle of the room, looking for his next meal!
The accompanying photograph shows the flight path of the sparrowhawk, around the sitting room. No, I did not dream this, it really happened.
