Following a Honey-buzzard, found a Goshawk

Adult male Northern Goshawk, 29.vi.2018; wingtips look
atypical because of regrowing inner primaries.

Several recent visits to my usual watchpoints here in this quiet side valley in the North Apennines have been 'no show' for the Goshawk.  But the overall ratio of eight sightings in 20 prolonged site visits this year is not too bad (a couple of visits produced double sightings but are just scored once).  And on a couple of visits I've heard one or two fairly subdued kek-kek-kek calls from surrounding woods without seeing the bird during the visit.

But today was very unusual, unique in my experience, limited as that is.  I had been trying to make more observations on a particular local female Honey-buzzard.  She's been showing quite often recently and seems prone to 'butterfly' display and to rushing a kilometre or two across country to confront some errant Honey in a place she seems to think it shouldn't be.

Leaving that aside, mid-morning on July 3rd she appeared over the woods along the top edge of 'white scar' (an old high landslip scar I use as a watchpoint).  I was thrilled at first because she started heading quite low in my direction and I was hoping to record more details of her ventral patterning, but for no reason apparent to me, she abruptly changed direction and flew fast and direct across what I've started calling Gos Valley, just as shorthand in my notebook.  Looking that way, I could make out two distant specks in the sky, one was a pale-bellied Honey-buzzard, and the other looked like it could be a Goshawk.

Four images to show Honey-buzzard/Goshawk encounter. Note left-hand image showing size of Gos, to rear, relative to Honey-buzzard, not far in front. Northern Apennines, 3.vii.2018.

I got the binoculars back on the female Honey and by the time she caught up with the distant birds, the pale-bellied bird had vanished so she swerved at the Goshawk and then pursued it several hundred metres until both were just thin profiles against the wooded skyline hills, and I lost them.

Was that a wise thing to do?  The Gos didn't seem very bothered.  I'm pretty sure the hawk was 'my' adult male (he looks in an identical moult state, with a couple of inner primaries growing back to length, making the wingtip look a bit Sparrowhawk-like; see image at bottom of previous post for comparison with condition on 16 June).  Perhaps a larger female would have been less inclined to let it drop.