Hawks, kites, harriers and eagles
Common species first: the buzzard and sparrowhawk you are most likely to see, then the scarcer birds of moor and coast.
Buzzard or kite: the tail decides
The Buzzard is the raptor you will see most. Europe holds at least 700,000 pairs, far more than the sparrowhawk with over 340,000 or the kestrel with over 330,000. It hunts mostly from a perch, taking voles and other small mammals, and its main call is a mournful, carrying ‘pee-yow’.
The Red Kite soars with its long wings angled up in a shallow V and steers with a long forked tail that twists as it changes course. The body and tail are rufous. In Britain, kites start laying at the end of March.
Ambush hunters of garden and forest
The male Sparrowhawk is blue-grey above with orange barring below; the female is brown and up to 25% larger, one of the biggest differences between male and female found in birds. It specialises in woodland birds but also hunts garden birds in towns. Most live about four years.
The Goshawk is its heavyweight cousin. It is absent from Ireland. In Great Britain almost all of its hunting attempts start from a perch, and an English study put woodland at just 8% of the ground it used.
Harriers and eagles: losses and returns
The Marsh Harrier had probably vanished from Great Britain by 1900 and from Ireland by 1918. It has since returned to both, and in Britain it has pushed north into eastern Scotland. The Hen Harrier fares far worse: red-listed in Britain, it suffers from lost habitat and illegal killing on grouse moors.
The White-tailed Eagle has been reintroduced to Scotland, Ireland and, since 2019, England, mostly on protected stretches of coast. The Golden Eagle lives mainly in the Scottish mountains, where in winter it soars a great deal to scan the ground for carrion.