Shape in the blue is a swept-wing jet fighter

A very delicate little sailing boat anchor, not a hefty ocean liner's.

The shaft thin and long, the two holding irons curved well back. And this one above the garden was then starting to fall. In a second this magician had changed its shape into a Roman spear.

The wings were closed, the missile now was aiming up to strike. Even more strange was the target.

A buzzard no less, sauntering along above his territory seeing if all was well and maintaining air space for his two young ones who have been flapping about the treetops like barnyard chickens, all legs and scrawny necks and flappy wings doing not very much.

The buzzard patrols this wood every afternoon and enjoys himself as master of the sky.

Now and then he will enjoy circling almost up into the fair weather clouds and skirl his pipes, then the two will tumble free-fall and touch each other's talons with what can only be described as the kiss of claws.

But things were not to be quite so this time for our buzzard.

The hobby like all good fighters in the sky, came out of the sun. This took humans a long time to learn.

You don't every day when watching the countryside going on around you, have a moment when you catch your breath, put hand to mouth, and stand transfixed.

They are good moments when they come though. This was one.

Suddenly I wondered if the hobby was in fact a peregrine. It was rapidly getting bigger.

Last year a raven was found at Goodwood with a hole in the back of its skull suggesting that a peregrine had tapped the old black boy on the skull at 150 miles an hour.

At such times you never know whose side to be on.

The buzzard had no idea what was happening. Suddenly a missile shot like the speed of a bullet an inch from his eye.

He folded his wings, somersaulted, held his claws to the moon waning the distance and looked in alarm all around.

By then the hobby had arched up in a bowbend and was laughing half a thousand feet above the mini eagle, which looked as slow as a Thames barge.

The hobby shook himself like a cat and re-arranged his feathers, then sailed off into the blue yonder with just a happy thought in his head.

But by now, I was thinking: he's not an anchor, this shape in the blue is a swept-wing jet fighter.

The buzzard is nothing more than an old transport plane.