Girl Power

Black Sparrowhawk diva

- MARGARET MACIVER

I used to assist Anne Koeslag and her team monitoring Black Spar-rowhawk Accipiter melanoleucus nests on the Cape Peninsula as part of the raptor research programme at the FitzPatrick Institute. We would find nests, both new and old, at the start of the breeding season in the Western Cape, which unlike the rest of the country is in winter. Once the birds started mating and building new nests or refurbishing old ones, we would visit regularly to watch the progress. It was both very time consuming and totally addictive as I discovered that every bird has its own personality.

In the middle of the season we would wait to see fluffy white chicks appear on the nest and then our amazing tree climber would go up, place them in a basket and lower them down to us. Ann would ring them and take measurements, then place them back in the basket to be returned to their nest, adorned with shiny, coloured and numbered leg rings.

We often wondered why we never noticed the juveniles a few months after they had fledged. For a while we would see them, usually with their noticeable rufous fronts, and then they would disappear. Approximately three years later some of them would return as adults to breed, looking for territories or to take over a territory where one of the pair from the previous year failed to reappear.