Northamptonshire Hawk centre stage at Wimbledon's Centre Court
17 year old Rufus has been keeping pests at bay at the famous tennis Championship since 2008.
The players at Wimbledon have been getting a helping hand from a Northamptonshire Hawk.
Ahead of the men's and women's singles finals this weekend at the Championship, we've been hearing from the handler of the Hawk who has kept pests away from Centre Court, and the others for years now.
Donna Davis from Avian Environmental based in Brigstock, tells us the partnership with the tennis tournament started whilst she watched the Wimbledon final in 1999, as Pete Sampras faced, and finally defeated Andre Agassi:
"Sampras was being interrupted by pigeons coming down to eat the wonderful nectar of grass seed and and it happened once and then it happened again.
"And then it was several times and they were really getting frustrated because obviously every point in that match is critical. After that I thought, well, do you know what? I'm just going to give them a call.
"And fortunately, they said 'Well, can you come down and show us what you can do?' And here we are!"
Donna has been working with Wimbledon since 2000, and American Harris Hawk Rufus helped to keep birds away since his first outing in 2008 when he was just a few weeks old.
She explains how Rufus acts as a deterrent:
"Any predator, no matter how big or small and any other bird is going to try to get them away, they don't want their presence there. They need to kind of move them on. And if they can't do that, they know that they're young or they may be the next meal for them. So it just makes them kind of makes them nervous. They don't want to nest"
The pair work throughout the year, intensive initially and then a maintenance programme afterwards whilst throughout the Championships it's every day.
Donna made light of suggestions in the Telegraph that there are worries over Rufus's successor as he's not managed to breed yet:
" Rufus is now 17 and in the wild they would probably live to about 12 to 15 years in captivity, but by that I mean he's not kind of captured. He flies free every day. He's got a good and plentiful food source so they can live anything up to 30 years.
"So whilst you know I know there's been a lot of talk about his successor it's certainly not not something that we are very concerned with. We have other Hawks as well that we fly too. It's just Rufus has kind of, you know bonded with Wimbledon and everybody seems to kind of have taken him to their head."
On Saturday five-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek faces Amanda Anisimova for the women's title. On Sunday the men's final will be decided later today as defending champion Carlos Alcaraz takes on Taylor Fritz.
That's followed by a meeting of world number one Jannik Sinner and seven-time winner Novak Djokovic.