Have you ever seen a starling murmuration? Hundreds and thousand of starlings preparing to roost in the same area is an amazing sight. When birds are so numerous and so close together one can smell their feathers, the warm musky smell like an old sofa or a pillow after a good night's sleep...

It's bitter cold in our cottage, so cold that wearing a hat and wooly socks is almost mandatory at all times, even at night. Rain has fallen relentlessly in the west of Ireland. Our bird feeder has many hungry visitors these days: sparrows, chaffinches, greenfinches, blue tits, coal tits, great tits, black birds, magpies, dunnocks, goldfinches, and a single gold crest. There, eleven different species!

As a falconer, I see garden birds both as a delight and as food for larger avian predators such as sparrowhawks. So when I watch a goldfinch chipping away at a peanut on a bird feeder I secretly hope that a sparrowhawk would swoop and take him.

Is it bad to want to witness nature in action in front of my eyes? I don't think so. Obviously this is a deeply philosophical question and many are repelled by the thought of death. At a knitting club I regularly attend I mentioned that the hawk that I hunt with caught a pheasant (a very rare occurrence for me) and one of the women there almost fainted with disgust when I said I was going to gut the pheasant and eat it. But most of us eat meat so what is wrong with gutting and cooking a wild animal? Does she think the chicken she gets is produced by TESCO? Every animal has to die before it gets to out table, only with wild ones it happens in an instant. One moment it is there grazing and walking freely and the next it's dead — there is no trauma of life in battery cages. Such ignorance really annoys me.

Wanting to witness a bird kill another bird might not be your thing of course. But whether we want it or not, everything belongs to a food chain and to deny and ignore death is to deny reality. Wild animals are not just cute and fluffy, they also kill — black birds eat worms, sparrowhawks catch black birds, goshawks eat sparrowhawks and so on...

As a falconer I am constantly fascinated by birds in action and inevitably by how they kill. But it's not the kill itself that I always look forward to, but the action of hunting, the flights and stoops, the agility of prey as it escapes, the evidence of how clever nature is. Watching a falcon stoop at snipe is like watching a dance, it's beautiful.

During these past weeks I've attended several falconry field meets. A field meet is where falconers catch up, see each others birds and hunt together. The idea is as old as time itself — you get together with your hunting partner to hunt.

Such meets are usually reserved for a particular species of raptors — either falcons OR hawks. This distinction is important because different species specialise in hunting different prey. Broadly speaking (but not necessarily true all the time) falcons hunt agile avian prey while hawks hunt rabbits and pheasants. Anyway, the meets were a fantastic opportunity to see birds in action and to admire falconers' skills too.

One falconer sadly lost his male peregrine falcon. We helped him track it for several days, but unfortunately when we finally found it 130 kilometres away from the original spot, the bird was dead. This tiercel was the finest falconry bird in Ireland. For fifteen years he brought joy to his partner, but on Sunday he took off never to be seen again. Falconry is like that — much joy, but much sadness and birds sometimes decide to leave.

This is him with his beloved bird.

The joyful news is that we've applied to take a sparrowhawk chick from the wild with the purpose of training it as a falconry bird. Ireland is one of the few countries in Europe where wild take is still practiced. Each year several licenses (usually 2-3) are issued based on mortality rates among wild raptors. Mortality rate among birds of prey chicks in their first year in the wild is incredibly high — over 60% will not make it past their first winter. So when a falconer takes one chick from the nest it does not affect the overall population because most likely that chick would not survive in the wild.

This is how sparrowhawk chicks look like when they are only a few weeks old!

We are yet to see the result of this application, but at the moment we are going to start looking for nests. Sparrowhawks are common in Ireland but they are illusive and shy birds and it's very hard to spot them. I will keep you posted about our progress.

Meanwhile I have a knitting project in the pipeline — my long dormant design called Fox in the Snow inspired by a road kill fox we found and skinned, sorry if some of you might be fainting with disgust by this point. :)

x.

Animals are not just cute and fluffy, they also kill