Wind Rider

(American Kestrel)

Where to begin? When I first identified these stunning members of the Falcon family, they were called Sparrow Hawks. At some point, that name fell out of fashion and, today, any self-respecting birder refers to them only as Kestrels. They are ubiquitous from the east coast to the west and are found far into Canada and deep into Mexico.  Their population is dwindling, especially in the northeast. Habitat destruction, and the concomitant loss of nesting cavities, is the suspected culprit.

My personal attachment to these inveterate hunters began when a teaching colleague brought me an injured juvenile shortly after he had seen the fledgling bird fly into the school’s boiler room and crash into a wall. The bird was subdued but alert. I could not see any obvious injuries.

He’d recovered somewhat by the evening, leaving me to ponder what next. I built a small cage and placed it in a corner of my garage. The next day, he’d left the bottom of the cage in favor of a more falcon-esque perch I’d provided along with some water. The next day I offered him a stunned mouse. There was no question he was familiar with mice and he got quickly to the business of consuming it. He soon began chirping at me any time I passed near. At that point, I figured he might be with me for a short time as he gained strength and more mature flight feathers and so I thought he deserved a name—Reggie it was. I worried about him a lot, but limited my time near him as I didn’t want him or me to develop much of a bond. My intent was to return him to the wild as soon as possible.

Two weeks passed and it was time for Reggie to fly free. I lived in a subdivision that bordered on extensive farm and wooded lands. I hoped, once free of the cage, he’d head in those directions. With the cage door opened, Reggie hopped, then flew, about 10 feet away from me and perched on  a low fence. He looked back at me, and then chirped by then a familiar call, “Feed me.” Hmmm. He’d need to learn to hunt. I took a freshly stunned mouse and tossed it out into the grass. Reggie looked at it, then at me, then expectantly repeated, “Feed me.” I retrieved the mouse and tried the exercise several more times with the same result. Then I held it up by its tail to tantalize my feathered friend and was startled when Reggie sprang from the fence to hover a foot from me at eye level while he examined the mouse. Then with precision, he slowly reached out with one taloned foot, seized the mouse, flew a few feet away where he dropped to the ground to enjoy his dinner.

After a few more days, I was able to toss a mouse further and further from me with Reggie increasingly interested in playing the rewarding game. The next step was to toss live mice and that really sparked his interest. Within a few days, he’d graduated to retrieving a live mouse and carrying it to the top of a phone pole to dine. By this time, he was the lord of the domaine and spent his days and nights perched on the phone wires that ran across the back of my yard or on the roof of my house. Morning and night he called, “Feed me. “