It’s not a brilliant photograph but I had a surprise visitor to my garden a few days ago.

I was watching a sparrow on one of my feeders in the garden (I never knew they fed on mealworms until recently) and suddenly I saw a fast moving shape fly straight down parallel to my fence.  At first I thought it might be one of the pigeons that regularly visit my garden and try to eat the entire contents of the feeders if I forget to position them out of their reach.  Then I noticed that it was actually a sparrowhawk!
The sparrowhawk had its back to me and had its head partially in some ferns at the back of the garden.  What really caused me to recognise it was that it had spread open its wings after it landed which they do to hide their pray from other birds.  Unfortunately for the sparrowhawk it had either missed the sparrow or didn’t have a particularly firm grip on it as I saw the sparrow fly off and then the sparrowhawk turned around enough to allow me to take some photos (I’m not sure whether it was posing or sulking!).

It just goes to show that it’s always worth keeping your camera handy!