How it started

The nest, post-breeding, September 2015

I came to birding a little late but already drawn to raptors - a strategic error because I could only watch one species regularly in 1970s London, the Common Kestrel Falco tinnunculus.  While I always longed to see a Sparrowhawk, the Goshawk was just a creature from a fairy tale.

Pursuit of goshawks started for real in July 2008.  I was in woods on a hillside in the northern Apennines (Piacenza Province, Emilia-Romagna, Italy), a novice looking inexpertly for one of the early porcini fungi rumoured to have appeared after midsummer rain.  I heard distant raptor calls, sounding closer as I meandered uphill, but in ignorance of their source and significance I kept scanning the woodland floor, still looking for fungi.

Eventually the very edge of my vision just registered a movement overhead in the canopy, then more calling, a large shape moving fast above the leaves, then silence.  Looking upward at last, searching almost leaf by leaf through the canopy, I made out a thick yellow leg and a sturdy foot grasping a branch high above me.  And just below - a massive nest!  A nest so big, about a metre across and nearly two metres deep, you'd think it would be impossible to miss!  Then shifting slightly to the side, I saw the leg's owner, looking over its shoulder, returning my binoculars' stare.  Large, but not a buzzard.  Too inexperienced to be truly certain of its identity, I crept away as quietly as possible, thinking it must be a Goshawk, but telling myself - to avoid disappointment - that it was probably a big female Sparrowhawk. It was only when I got home and read (in Clark & Schmitt's 1999 Field Guide to the Raptors of Europe...) that a juvenile Goshawk has a thin white line above and below each dark band on the tail, exactly as I had drawn in my notebook, that I knew for sure that I'd chanced upon an active Goshawk nest.  The calling must have been the juvenile begging for food.  With hindsight, the bird's size was obvious, but I was too wary of misjudging it.

Two birds that had quasi-mythical status when I started birding in 1970s London were now vivid reality: the Honey-buzzard first, and now the Goshawk.  Both well worth waiting 40 years for.  But that first meeting tought me that to get in touch with Goshawks, listening can be far more important than looking.