Confused Kestrel

walsworth

walsworth

Journeyman
Joined
Jul 19, 2006
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Location
North Herts
On my way to the Market today I came across a Kestrel sitting on a window ledge of the old town Telephone Exchange. It was awake and watching my every move, but it let me get extremely close to take a couple of photos on my phone. My experience in these circumstances is to leave things alone, Nature will sort it out, but on my return I noticed a couple of senior gents, even older than me, taking an interest. One of them even picked the bird up, he appeared to know how to handle it, maybe a chicken man, he was old enough to remember chiken runs in every other garden. He then proceeded to look for a suitable tree to put the bird in, at this point I continued my way home.
I will put the photos up later to show how close the bird allowed me to get, but it will probably be about midnight before I can do it. I can't download from the phone to this computer and they won't let me use Photobucket at work, so I have to download at work and then email the photos to myself, then upload to Photobucket.
 
Photos as promised:
kestrel003.jpg

kestrel002.jpg

kestrel001.jpg
 
Don't know anything about birds of prey, Walsworth but is this a juvenile ?

Last Saturday lunchtime, we all set off for a farm visit. Going down one of our narrow laes, Phil suddenly swerved and I just caught sight myself of what he had seen. Which was a young owlet on the ground in the middle of the lane....

Luckily, it didn't go under the wheels. Phil stopped, ran back and as he got near it did fly off into the hedge. Phil'sdad, Reg, said he'd also seen the bird on the stone wall by the Church earler that week.

Does this mean that food is hard to come by? Owls hunting by day ?
 
It may have been a young bird, but there were no fluffy feathers in evidence, so if it was, it wasn't recently fledged. I didn't notice at the time there is a mark on the window behind it in the last pihoto, perhaps he had hit the window.
The old Telephone exchange is quite a big building and it's quite possible that there was a nest on top of it. The ledge that he was perched on was about shoulder height from the floor & I still think it would have been best to leave him alone.

Little owls will hunt by day and they are tiny, about blackbird sized.
 
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Smashing photos, and a beautiful bird, Wals. How exciting! Our gulls are now very noisy in the early, light mornings. They come in from the sea at around 3.30 a.m. and shriek loudly for a good hour. In the street outside we have a Buddhist centre, above which gulls have nested for decades. Their latest bundle of grey fluff can be seen in its eyrie of small chimney pots, in customary hunched, servile posture, awaiting its early morning brekkie. How the Buddhists manage to concentrate on their meditations when the parents are busy feeding it through the day, to an accompaniment of its shrill piping and their shrieks, goodness knows. But to the gulls it's a case of "ohmmm, sweet ohm"...
 
That's a male Kestrel. Which is slightly smaller than the female. I think it quite likely that he has hit a window and was somewhat concussed,
 
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