Surprise Visitor - perhaps a brown goshawk?

["" <>]

This bird alighted on our brush fence mid-morning today (in “Emu Ridge”, Belconnen) and spent about 25 min eating what was the remains of a bird carcase (ie no feathers, but one avian foot clear) with quite a lot of the meat already (presumably) consumed.  These pix are side-on and front-on of the bird, with the side-on showing a vestige of the prey to the right of the tip of the beak.  Probably due my camera colour setting, the colour in the pix is somewhat greyer than in reality, which was distinctly brownish-grey.  The pix are cropped and resized, to reduce from around 3 MB to just over 100 KB.  If anyone would like to see them in better resolution, send me a personal email address and I’ll email the original pix.  As a non-expert birder, I’m unsure which bird it is.  Looking at the images in “The Australian Bird Guide” (Menkhorst el al, 2017), the closest I can find is the brown goshawk (Juvenile, or perhaps somewhere between Juv and Ad?), except that neither the br. goshawk, nor any of the raptors shown in the book, show the very distinctive white “blotches” on both upper sides of the bird – best seen in the front-on shot.  There was no sunlight at that time, so the blotches can’t have been due to reflected sunlight.  Clear features (using binoculars) were:  estimated (approx.) size about 450 mm head to end of tail; very yellow eye with black pupil; black tipped, curved beak; a narrow but distinct line of white on the tip of the tail; and – in reality – brownish rather than greyish darker ‘lines’ on the breast.  I apologise for taking your time with all this detail for what is probably instantly recognisable by all/most of you, but the white blotches have puzzled me.  We’ve never had any raptor visit us in this way – and it returned very briefly just a few minutes ago.

Kevin Bray

Attachment:

Description: No 1 Resized and Cropped.jpg

Attachment:

Description: No 2 Resized and cropped.jpg

ATT00001.txt
Description: ATT00001.txt