The rise of the Goshawk

Last Saturday morning I had four encounters with Goshawks within an hour's birding along the Mickleham Valley (above). The first was a loud, robust and piercing call from an unseen bird; the second an enormous female, flying along a hillside of yew and box showing off its muscular athletic build, long neck, long wings and rounded tail, with a dark mask beneath a thick white supercillium; next a distant displaying bird big-dippering; and lastly a streaked juvenile, just at tree top height, circling the hillside giving fine views (but for the thin tree canopy great photographs could have been obtained). It would take a highly inattentive birder to wander across my part of the Surrey North Downs and not realise that Goshawks are doing rather well here. For the past three years I've been able to expect to see them in the late-winter/spring with some regularity and so far this year if I don't see at least one when I'm out and about then I am rather surprised. It wasn't always this way.

The county avifauna of 1900 (Bucknill) mentions just four records, all unsurprisingly shot or caught. It was not until 1959 that the next appeared, with a further 80 records up to 2005, with breeding being recorded from 1990. Escaped or deliberately released falconers birds and a drop in raptor persecution have been attributable to this recent rise in numbers. My own Surrey Goshawk experience began with a male on Jan 31st 1993 (Nutfield Ridge), followed by a juvenile female (November 20th 2005, Canons Farm), a pair (April 13th 2014, Leith Hill) and a female (April 12th 2016, Canons Farm). It was during the Hawfinch eruption in the late winter of 2018 that I started to connect with this charismatic raptor with a modicum of regularity, no doubt helped by the fact that I was spending so much time in Gos-friendly habitat at the right time of year. And since then there hasn't been a year when I haven't seen them, often in multiples across several locations. They have really taken off over the past three years, with birds coming out of the western part of the Surrey North Downs - where they have been known in the Effingham Forest complex for some time - and spreading along 'my' section of the hills, in particular the stretch between Denbies and Buckland. Hopefully the maps below, detailing my personal records will give you a flavour of this spread. It may be difficult to make out the place names on the maps but the distribution of records should be clear. I make no apologies for the inclusion of the sub-standard image of the juvenile Goshawk, which flew over my head one murky morning as I was standing in open farmland at Buckland (October 17th 2024). It was a special encounter.


These Surrey downs, to some, appear to be hard going for the birder, but they possess a fine suite of birds. The following all breed: Little Egret, Red Kite, Goshawk, Peregrine, Hobby, Woodlark, Firecrest, Marsh Tit, Raven and Hawfinch. The spring and autumn passage will provide surprises and a few days of top-class visible migration. Like all birding, the more time that is put in the luckier you will get. There is a manicured beauty to the area, a fine array of both plants and inverts to divert your attention if you want a birding break, and the knowledge that, with so few birders out there looking, your observations are all the more valuable to upload onto BirdTrack or whatever your preferred method of record submission is.

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