From film star to a sad decline
The sight of flickering wings over freshly-harvested fields always brings back fond memories of distant school summer holidays.
Watching hovering kestrels on the hunt for voles and mice was part of growing up on the rural edges of a new town in an age when children could play in the countryside unfettered.
As a youngster, I dreamed of having my own little falcon like Billy Casper in Kes,
Ken Loach’s Bafta-winning film about working-class life in the 1960s.
However, somehow I knew keeping a bird of prey captive was against the natural order, so I would make do with spending hours monitoring the comings and goings at a kestrel nest in a long dead elm tree.
Back then these birds were abundant but, over the following decades, their numbers have plunged fast. British Trust for Ornithology surveys have tracked the downward trajectory of the kestrel over the past six decades, showing a 48% decline between 1970 and
2018. An estimated 31,000 pairs nest across the UK today.
Agricultural intensification on farmland habitats with its impact on small mammal numbers has been blamed for declining kestrel numbers in the latter years of the last century.
However, a new study by scientists, including experts from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, has been exploring whether kestrels are being exposed to toxic rat poisons from eating small rodents.
Dead kestrels were analysed and two-thirds of 241 birds studied revealed detectable levels of rodent poison in their livers. The higher levels found in adult kestrels rather than juvenile birds suggests rodenticides may accumulate over time. More research on the impact of these poisons on predatory birds is planned.
It may be down to favourable weather conditions or simply that voles and field mice are enjoying a population boom this year, but kestrel numbers seem to be soaring around my old stomping grounds.
With schools having now broken up for the summer holidays, showing my grandchildren the birds that illuminated my formative years will be high on the agenda.
I dreamed of having my own little falcon like Billy Casper in Kes