Predators 2 - Or Did T-rex Roar?

Often when I'm out visiting kids to talk about dinosaurs I get them to pretend to be different types. Now none of these kids have ever seen one of these as a living creature, so it is the collected information from books and other media that they use to build their image of what they were like. When we get to T-rex (a large predatory dinosaur with big teeth and short arms) the children almost always get really noisy roaring to show how fierce they are. It takes a bit to convince them that a noisy T-rex is going to be a hungry one as all his food will hear him coming and hide to avoid being dinner.

This makes a lot of sense and can be backed up by observations of modern animals hunting; being usually stealthy and quiet in the process. Usually once the kids think about it they can understand - but they still like to Roar! Dinosaurs may indeed have Roared, but perhaps not all the time.

I was surprised to hear an unusual bird call a little while ago, a repeated chirruping sound that did not belong to one of my local residents. I grabbed my camera and went out to look for the animal responsible and was very surprised by what I found.

You can hear the sound mixed with some Galahs in the link on this page from the Canberra Ornithologists Group - Collared Sparrowhawk.

He was hunting within the trees that are on a little hill quite close to the Garden - many of our locals go there for food and shelter. 

It took a bit to find him, and I'd have failed totally if hadn't been so noisy. Eventually I tracked where he had perched and was able to get a few photos (ok quite a lot of photos as I inched closer, but I won't bore you with all of them). He occasionally flew off calling, but returned to the same place. On the ground in a few places I could see clumps of bright feathers from Eastern Rosellas and another clump of black & white ones probably from a Pee-wee or young Magpie.

Young Male Collared Sparrowhawk - for some reason he preferred to perch on one leg. Occasionally he would call, but I didn't ever hear a reply.

 It wasn't until the light had almost gone and I was about to give up that I saw his partner. She was larger and less banded, and never made a sound. I only noticed her because he flew toward her from his dead tree location above and landed just so that they couldn't be photographed together.

I looked them up later to find out more and learnt that it was a young male (shape of tail and colour) and a mature female. I don't know if they were a pair or a parent teaching a youngster. The thought that did occur to me then was that they might have a joint hunting strategy. One noisy "Look out I'm hungry and hunting over here" while the other silently grabs the unsuspecting prey in a slightly different location or from another direction.  Alternately he might just not be very good at the being quiet thing (like most kids).

While I was walking through the trees, the Blue Wrens seemed undisturbed by the pair of raptors, but from the size of the feather piles I guess they were in the "not big enough to eat" category.