Hi James,

Two excellent images there!  Well done and thanks for sharing them.

Before seeking to identify a raptor species, it's often helpful to attempt to assess the age of the individual in question.

Generally, juvenile Accipiters tend to have streaked underparts, buff tips to the feathers on their upperparts, particularly the wing coverts, and highly contrasting barred tails.

I can see none of these features on the bird in your photograph.  There are indeed a couple of secondary feathers that appear more fresh and slightly shorter than the rest. These are new feathers but the fact that they so closely match the ground colour of the other feathers further confirms that all the upperparts are already adult plumage and that these are simply natural replacements.

The colour of the legs, eye-ring and gape appears dull pale yellow with the cere being almost neutral grey brown.  This lack of brightness of these bare parts is typical of juveniles but can also be seen in adult females.

Finally, the eye looks surprisingly dark. On close inspection it seems that the pupil is highly dilated and that the iris colour is pale yellow.  Another feature that occurs in juveniles and some adult females.

In summary, the lack of juvenile plumage characteristics, generally dull-brown upperparts, lack of any rufous on the underparts, dull coloured bare parts and yellowish eye colour all point to this individual being an adult female.  This gender assessment is supported by the thick and robust legs visible in one of the photographs.

With this in mind we can perhaps more easily seek to identify the species.  Eurasian Sparrowhawk can be quickly ruled out by a range of features, including the complete lack of a pale supercilium.  Your bird appears to be generally dull-brown above, even the new feathers. Based on my experience Shikra always appear more greyish and slightly paler, even adult females.  Moreover, the two central tail feathers of adult female Shikra are most often almost uniform in colour, although sometimes several dark relatively narrow but generally rather faint bars can be present.

I am least familiar with African Goshawk - a species which seems to have quite wide variation in plumage colouration.  However, a quick scan of the internet uncovered images that matched your bird reasonably well.  Key features are the three (only) relatively thick dark bars on all of the tail feathers (including the two central ones). Perhaps I'm imagining it but there also appears to be two or three pale areas on the shaft of the central tail feather which seems to be highly visible in some photographs of African Goshawk but I've never observed this feature in Shikra.  All the other features noted above match too.

Best regards,

Nick