April 14

     There was a very significant push of kestrels through my area today which, given the fairly strong NNW wind that developed this afternoon, was a bit of a surprise to me. I always expect to see larger numbers of birds passing through when  the winds are favorable from the S or SW.  Today I got to thinking that perhaps the NNW winds don't necessarily encourage the birds to move through but, rather, holds them up a bit, concentrating them over prime food sources and making them more visible.  Today I had at least 6 kestrels hover hunting in one 15 acre parcel off of Middle Road in Ellington for most of the afternoon. 

     Since my last post, I have trapped 4 more birds, none of which were banded. It is interesting to me that 2 weeks earlier there was a higher percentage of recaptured birds that were previously banded locally. For the last five days or so, all of the birds trapped were unbanded. This seems to suggest that local breeders MIGHT (I emphasize MIGHT) move into my study area earlier than other migrants. The strike against this possibility is that if these recent migrants are still moving on, one would think that since they have to cover more ground to get to breeding areas north of here, they would have had to get an earlier start-making them among the very first captured birds. There is so much we just don't know. My sample size is way too small to make any decisive judgements on this, but it will be something I will be watching closely as we accumulate more data over the years. 

     The other trend I have noticed this season is that active starling investigation of the kestrel boxes has, until the last three days or so, been way behind last year's pace. In the last three days there has been a noticeable increase in the number of starlings occupying boxes, but overall it is much, much less than last year at this date. So far this year I have  eliminated 13 starlings. Last year at this time the number was over 40.  

     For those of you who have been following along, you probably have some sense of just how much time this takes if you want to do more than just produce more kestrels.  My daughter Jennifer, an Excel whiz, has been a huge help to me this year. I now have a very large spreadsheet that is allowing me to much more easily track what is going on. The flip side of that is my last 4 year's excel sheets were very poorly designed. Every night I try to spend at least an hour re-entering data from the last 4 years into the new format. So, a typical day involves being out in the field 10-12 hours a day, coming home and entering all the data from 20-45 box visits (plus trapping data) for the day and then working on the previous year's data to make it more accessible. Oh yeah......trying to keep up with my journal (blog) entries as well.  

    Miles traveled this season =1,669   Number of box visits to date this season = 431