ABOUT THE KESTREL 89 



One of the accompanying illustrations shows a female Kestrel at the 

 moment of her arrival at the nest— which contains quite small young ones — with 

 a mature meadow pipit in her beak. It was once criticised as being a probable 

 ' fake,' because the critic was under the impression that Kestrels invariably 

 feed their young by the process of regurgitation — whereas actually they only 

 sometimes do so. 



But there is another point of interest about this photograph, which is this : 

 How can so slow-flying a bird as a Kestrel catch such a clever flier as a mature 

 meadow pipit ? It certainly could not do so in fair flight, and we can only 

 presume that the Kestrel, whilst hovering overhead, chanced to spy the pipit 

 amongst the grass, and without any unnecessary warning, potmced on it. 



When otir Kestrel had distributed all of the food, she stayed with her young 

 for a while, and then, apparently satisfied with their appearance, flew off to 

 a favourite perch in a neighbouring tree. 



Within less than an hour the male again uttered his call note, and as 

 before the female soon afterwards retiu-ned to the nest — ^this time with an 

 immature lark in her beak. This lark was in fact so young that it is doubtful 

 whether it would have been able even to crawl, and the only flight feathers 

 it had consisted of little quills with the suggestion of webbing at their tips. 



So the male Kestrel is evidently not above settling by the nest of some 

 ground-building bird, which he has espied from aloft, and proceeding to drag 

 out the unfortunate occupants. I am of the opinion that one can judge pretty 

 accurately the mentality of a bird by studying its face ; just as one may 

 ' size up ' a human being. And of all the hawks I think that the Kestrel, judged 

 by its expression, is the one that would do such an undignified thing as to 

 drag half-fledged birds from the nest ! One certainly cannot imagine the fero- 

 cious wild-eyed Sparrow Hark doing anything of the kind ; nor indeed the 

 keen, bright-eyed little Merlin. 



But to return to the nest. I next tried for some cinema records about 

 a week later, and was quite surprised to see how much the young Kestrels had 

 developed. They appeared not to be much bigger, but the way in which their 

 speckled feathers were coming through the down imparted to them a very 

 much more ' grown-up ' appearance. 



Also they were much more upset at the shock of seeing me than on the 

 previous week, for they fined up facing me, on the farther side of the nest, and 

 with raised wings and open beaks prepared to fight to the last. During such a 

 demonstration, yoimg hawks, be they MerUns, Sparrow Hawks, Hobbies, or Kes- 

 trels, make a curious little gasping sound, which suggests that they are so 

 frightened that they cannot get their breath properly. 



However, when all was quiet, they presently regained their composure, 

 and soon resumed their pastimes of preening, exercising their wings, and clutch- 

 ing with their talons at imaginary victims. It is interesting to note how young 



M 



