Bird Watch: The kestrel
Then... AG in 1959 and Now... AG in 2020
WITH his grey head and wings, buff underparts with dark streaks, and chestnut back and wings spotted with black, the male kestrel is a most attractive gentleman, but his wife is less colourful – though both have long, black-barred tails.
Because of their habit of hovering in mid-air, from where they spot their prey on the ground beneath, kestrels are known locally as ‘windhovers’.
They are typical birds of prey, their yellow eye-rings and hooked beak giving them the characteristic fierce facial expression, but they are not such enemies of birds as is often stated. I have devoted much time to their study and found that about
85% of their food consists of small mammals and insects – and they are champion vole-catchers.
Kestrels build no nest, being content to lay their eggs in cavities in trees, cliffs or old buildings, or to appropriate the old nests of other birds. Their bluishwhite eggs are heavily blotched with reddish-brown and rarely more than five in number.
B Melville Nicholas
‘I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn
Falcon, in his riding’.
So begins Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem The Windhover, 14 exquisite lines likening the kestrel’s soaring and swooping to the life of Christ and the Fall of Man. The bird’s other cultural touchstone is, of course, the 1969 Ken
Loach film Kes, about a troubled lad who almost finds redemption through learning to train a kestrel.
This little falcon is our second most common bird of prey, after the buzzard, though its numbers fell in the 1970s, possibly due to the intensification of farming.
Since then they have adapted to life around humans and can be found in cities as well as in the countryside, usually spotted hovering over fields or grassland, then dropping onto their unsuspecting prey below. They are even known to ‘mug’ much larger barn owls, using their speed as a surprise tactic to steal their prey!
Ruth Hayes