I had put in a lot of hours waiting to capture images of this juvenile female Sparrowhawk and when it finally showed I was gob-smacked by how big it was and thought for a while that it might be a Goshawk.
When the bird first arrived I had a 1.7 Tele-converter fitted to my Nikon 500mm F4 lens but immediately found its magnification to much for this large bird so after taking the close ups posted below I hurriedly removed it to gain some full bird images.
Below I have merged a scaled image of a mature male Sparrowhawk taken on the same perch point last year while using the perch for size correction to show the much larger juvenile female's proportions.
Sparrowhawk ID data seems to confirm that the female can be up to 10cm longer, 15cm wider in wingspan and up to three times the weight of the male.
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