On Wednesday we got a phone call from the National Parks & Wild Life Service saying that they have approved our Wild Take license. So now it's official - we can take a wild sparrowhawk chick from a nest this summer.

That is if we can find a nest of course.

Nest searching is difficult this time of year simply because there are no nests to be found and there are no voices of the hungry young coming from the tree tops to help us locate it. What you can find are plucking posts from previous years where male plucked prey before he took it to feed the young and the mother.

A plucking post looks like a small mound or a tree stump covered in moss.

Something like this:

It's hard to see from this photograph because the quality is so bad, but spar's plucking post usually contains feathers from prey such as blackbirds, pigeons, jackdaws etc.

Today we found not one but several plucking posts in a mixed woodland close to where we work. It was a great discovery because we found handfuls of damp feathers of several bird species spread around a large territory- a clear sign of plucking activity. We also found lower and upper mandibles of a jackdaw which could be a substantial size prey even for a female spar. One stump contained a skeleton of a rat and we also found clean bones of a whole bird neatly arranged on another mound.

We were so excited about these findings that we forgot to take good photographs. Next time we will certainly remember this small detail.

I don't know if those fragments are remains of several meals or not, but finding them was like finding a treasure!

To me searching for plucking post is like doing archaeology. There is a sense of adventure and mystery. Finding fragments of someone's meal a year ago, then finding more fragments nearby, then looking up and around, and through trees - trying to imagine what the set up would have been. Would this spot be a good place for a nest? Would sparrowhawk pluck his meal with this view in front? Would those fields in the clearing provide the necessary food for the clutch? There is so much room for imagination and so many opportunities to get your hands and knees muddy too!

I enjoy our outings in search of a nest and it's a good thing because this will become a regular and important activity in the coming months in order to locate that one special nest containing a downy creature like this:

x.

Findings