Six Kestrels have been spotted resting in hawthorn at the edge of the reserve. Birdspotter Barry Robson caught them on camera and shared this beautiful picture with us. These beautiful birds of a prey are a regular sight in the skies over RSPB Geltsdale and are the second most common bird of prey in the UK after Buzzards, so we are sharing some facts and figures about them.
Kestrels (Latin name: Falco tinnunculus) have a distinctive shape, with pointed wings and a tail which is long in flight and fan-shaped while hovering over fields, woodland edges and roadside verges as use their sharp vision to hunt for food. They are a relatively small bird of prey, approximately the size of a Magpie, measuring between 32 and 35 cm in length and weighing between 156 and 252g, with a wingspan on 71 to 80 cm. Kestrels have light brown feathers. Males have a grey-blue head and tail, with a prominent black band, a gingery-brown back and creamy underparts, while females are more uniformly brown, with dark bands on their tail.
Kestrels’ diet consists of small mammals and birds, worms and insects, but field voles make up the majority of their food intake. They fly into the wind, using their tail and wings to hold their position, while keeping their eyes fixed on the ground, searching for food. Once they spot their prey, they will drop swiftly to the ground to grab it. They have razor sharp eyesight, able to spot a beetle from 50 metres away, and can even see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to the human eye – this means that they can see urine trails left by rodents and track them this way.
Instead of building nests, Kestrels lay their eggs in cavities such as holes in trees, cliffs and walls, and on rooftops. They also use nests which have been made and abandoned by other species. Females lay four to five eggs in April or May, which hatch after about a month, and chicks fledge five weeks after that.
Numbers of Kestrels have declined since the 1970s, which may be a result of changes in farming which have reduced numbers of field voles, secondary poisoning from feeding on voles and mice which have eaten poison intended for rats, and loss of nesting sites. They are now classified as Amber under Birds of Conservation Concern and there are 31,000 breeding pairs in the UK.