It was Wednesday, and the clouds were skittish minnows in the vivacious autumn sky. On the ground, everything appeared to be still, the atmosphere full of the languid tension of autumn – the state of being where anything could happen, but a catalyst is yet to emerge.

Sometimes, in these situations, said catalyst will be the decision to take a new path on your daily walk. And sometimes it will be a flash of mottled brown and white as a sparrowhawk slams into a bush, jolting you out of your monotonous morning routine – an unexpected burst of violence shattering the calm of the morning. I stared in wonder as the brutal scene unfurled in front of me, the sparrowhawk thrashing as its prey evidently put up quite a fight. Its body writhed, lithe and dominating as it sent barrage after barrage of attacks into its unfortunate target. As it turned out, the target in question was a green woodpecker. I discovered this as it burst from the bush, having managed to free itself from the sparrowhawk’s embrace. It was not a pretty sight. Many of the lustrous feathers that make up the green woodpecker’s amber cloak had been stripped away, and it propelled itself, naked and mangled, across the lawn and into another bush. As it did so, it screamed with an intensity that can only be mustered by an animal in the throes of panic and agony – a high, discordant noise emanating again and again from the foliage under whose cover it cowered. I was worried. I couldn’t see the sparrowhawk, and the bird was clearly past the point of recovery. Had I scared it away? If it didn’t return, I’d need to free the woodpecker of this mortal coil myself – I had no desire to end a life if the bird wasn’t going to be eaten, but it was far too weak to survive and as such, leaving it wouldn’t have constituted an act of mercy.

It was then that the sparrowhawk decided to demonstrate its camouflage skills, and with the precision of a drone strike leapt from the bush upon which it had been watching its quarry. It struck me that the predator could have attacked at any point during the woodpecker’s (flightless) flight from the bush. The woodpecker’s refuge was simply a place which was more convenient to attack, as it would be unable to fly away. All it had done in its last-ditch effort to escape was play into the sparrowhawk’s talons, and they weren’t going to let it go again. The woodpecker’s death was not swift. The sparrowhawk had it pinned against the floor, one domineering wing stretched over it like a burial shroud as it ripped into the doomed bird’s flesh. To the woodpecker’s credit, it seemed to know when its time was up, and stopped screeching, giving only the occasional thrash as the sparrowhawk dismembered it. That or the sparrowhawk had punctured its syrinx. Eventually, the woodpecker succumbed to the assault it had been subjected to for the last six minutes, and the sparrowhawk lowered its wing. This was the moment I will remember for the rest of my life. The sparrowhawk swivelled its head and looked me in the eye. I was paralyzed as the hawk stared me down, eyes a deep, commanding amber. They seemed to blaze, holding me in place. I felt adrenalin course through my body as a creature more than ten times smaller than me rendered my limbs leaden, my breath rapturous. Then it turned back to its meal. I stood in awe of what had just transpired not three feet away from me, as the sparrowhawk took to the air and flew into the hedge, carrying the dishevelled carcass of the woodpecker in its talons. I turned, and left it to its affairs.