Just one swoop and it’s gone
FLICKERING wings that enchanted childhood eyes are thankfully back in the skies to mesmerise and beguile.the sight of marauding kestrels catching the morning light on their fast-flapping pinions have been taking me back to the very first time I saw a bird strident on the breeze.
Few birdwatchers can say they began their odyssey in the pram but listening to my mother point to a kestrel hunting over East End waste ground was my introduction to a lifetime’s enjoyment.
“Poor thing,” she explained, not knowing the bird that appeared “stuck in the wind” was a kestrel demonstrating its hovering flight action while seeking rodents amid the rubble of an old bomb site.
I must only have been two or three but was transfixed instantly by the bird’s plight, fearing it would for ever hang in the sky.
Not long later, having moved with my family to a housing estate in the Bedfordshire countryside, I was reunited with a kestrel.
Forays into the dells and copses that skirted our regimented lines of council terraces were eye-opening for our gang of displaced Cockney sparrows.we made dens and gathered frogspawn. Older boys stole eggs, something I knew was totally wrong.there was one bird I was determined to protect.
Halcyon evenings had seen me bonding with a female kestrel that had chosen a long dead ash tree for her nest site. I kept her haven secret and spent the summer holidays gazing up at her in awe as she mounted hunting sorties over farmland, catching prey for chicks with her dazzling plunge dives.
That same 1960s summer had seen Bafta-winning Kes hit cinema screens. Directed by Ken Loach and produced by Tony Garnett, who died last week, the bitter-sweet story of a working class ragamuffin with a trained kestrel left me both envious and mesmerised. I had to be content with my wild, free-flying heroine.
Of late, the fate of kestrels may not have necessarily mirrored the dramatic downward trajectories of their sky dives, but numbers have declined sufficiently for the bird to be amber-listed as a species of conservation concern, with a 38 per cent fall-off between 1995 and 2015.
One only has to notice how motorway journeys are no longer punctuated by sightings of kestrels to realise 21st century landscapes are not to their liking. Kestrels appear assailed from all directions with competition for nest sites from jackdaws, a paucity of their favourite small mammal prey and predation by buzzards.
Returning to my childhood birding haunts last week, I was delighted to see a dozen kestrels as they quartered and hovered over a few hundred acres of farmland cleared for housing development.
Wondering why so many had concentrated in one area, I discussed the scene with British Trust for Ornithology’s Paul Stancliffe.
“Outside of the breeding season kestrels are largely solitary birds but occasionally they will gather where there is a rich source of food,” he explains. “It’s possible that this winter, in some areas, small rodents have been condensed into clusters by floodwater, seeking out higher and drier ground.
“In turn, this may well result in a temporary increase of kestrels in these places, and that for a short time more of us might enjoy the sight of a hovering kestrel.”
‘Kestrels are now in decline’