Two garden birds for ID please

[Pete Collins]

Apologies for the very poor photos, they were the best I could manage!

This small bird has been frequenting our back garden for the last couple of days or so. Is it possibly a Chiffchaff (obviously I'd know if I heard it!)? As one shot shows, it definitely was feeding on the ground at times, which my bird book says they do.




When I went into the garden this morning to try to get a shot of that bird, this much larger bird landed briefly on a conifer. I could only really see it's silhouette (I'd accidentally left the exposure setting on my camera to -2 so everything was way too dark!), but I thought it was speckled around the throat, and was possibly a juvenile green woodpecker. Obviously not, when I loaded the shot onto my PC and used the 'fill light' feature in Picasa. I'm now wondering if it's the Sparrowhawk I saw the other day. Shame it turned it's head at the crucial moment!

[Picidae]

Hi Pete

The first two pics is a Chiffchaff and the 2nd pic, does indeed look like it could be a young/male Sparrowhawk.

[Pete Collins]

Thanks very much Picidae!

The Chiffchaff is a first for the garden. A Sparrowhawk passes through quite often - annoyingly, that's the closest I've come to getting a decent photo of one!