Hello mrs-O ! Welcome to this section as it's a great Hobby.
As long as he has plenty of food to feed on he will be back again.
You might be lucky to get a Photo next time !
mrs. o, it kind of sucks you in once you get a bit interested. only been doing it a few years myself but now find i can't go for a walk without my bins just in case i miss something :)
My friend has started making bird tables and boxes with fitted cameras inside ,the most amazing Blue tits today ,all on camera also birds can be watched by night,also whilst birds eggs are hatching.
i'm not keen on woodpigeons, they eat all the bird food i put out and drive me nuts with their monotonous coo-cooing. two of them had a fight right outside the patio door a few weeks ago and one actually killed the other.
We have conifers to one side of the garden and two woodies are nesting there. When they have a wander around my garden I have to admit I eye their plump breasts and find myself longing for an air rifle
slinky, when i first started i thought all the small brown birds i saw were sparrows. i was really surprised that there are so many that aren't, just by the smallest difference.
We`ve got a lot of rooks coming around here lately. My gran used to make rook pie. My dad said that when the birds were fledgeling they used to go to the woods with an air rifle and fire it. All the adult birds would fly off leaving the fledgelings because they couldn`t fly. Then they used to pick them off with the rifle. They only ate the thighs and you put an egg in the pie apparently. Don`t fancy trying it though.
The last time I saw a sparrowhawk, it was (unfortunately) eating a lovely tame blackbird that used to come into my porch and sit on a tub of mealworms, waiting to be fed.
It's nature, I know, but nonetheless it was sad to see, . They are beautiful birds though.