Ready for takeoff Berlin park offers blueprint for bringing goshawks to British cities

Firing off rapid keck-keck-keck cries, the goshawks soared high above the trees of a park in central Berlin and circled before swooping to chase off a ragtag bunch of crows that had begun to mob them.

- Ajit Niranjan

"It's basically a flying Batman bringing law and order to the city," said Paul O'Donoghue, a conservationist, peering through binoculars at two breeding pairs of the large pale-bellied birds as they dipped and dived through the sky. "They're like stealth bombers."

The goshawk is an apex predator - and, if O'Donoghue has his way, it will soon be bringing awe and delight to British cities as well as German ones. In Britain the fast-moving raptor, which was hunted to virtual extinction and only began to recover in rural regions in the 1960s, is still widely persecuted on shooting estates and grouse moors.

In other parts of Europe, the goshawk is thriving - even in bustling capitals such as Berlin, Amsterdam and Prague. From Berlin's Viktoriapark, where a large nest sits in the crown of a tree less than 100 met from a war memorial, the "phantom of the forest" hunts pigeons in the street and even perches on rooftops.

The birds have adapted to the busy traffic - though tall glass buildings still pose a threat - and are far more at ease with the stream of dogwalkers, runners and children than their forest-dwelling counterparts would be.