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Showing posts with the label American Kestrel

The Beauty of the Kestrel

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Often on a Sunday Peter and I go birding.   Today we spotted a Kestrel sitting on a telephone wire.     .   Kestrels are the smallest falcon and they have very sharp eyesight.   We watched this bird sit quietly looking on the ground for food.   All of a sudden he swooped to the ground and then flew to the top of a telephone pole with an insect.   He stayed there and ate his snack   – probably a grasshopper.   I enjoyed his feather patterns of peach, reds, gray, brown, and yellow mixed with beige.   The Kestrel is the most colorful of all raptors.   He has a pair of vertical black stripes on each side of his face often called a moustache or sideburns.   He is most often seen in deserts and grasslands that extend to alpine meadows I was reminded of the Kestrel we saw in the desert near Picacho Peak AZ.   We noticed a bird making several trips to one of the trunks of a dead palm tree.   Kestrels use other bird’s nests for their homes and this Kestrel probably had babies in the nest.   Qui