Our new tenants – a family of American kestrels
Back in April, I built two boreal owl nesting boxes, hoping I could convince an owl that was spending a lot of time within a few feet of our home, to stay and raise a family. The boreal owl didn’t stay, but one of the nesting boxes is now home to a family of American kestrels (Falco sparverius), and a couple of days ago I was treated to the most amazing bird experience of my life when the adult male fed a frog to a chick who was standing at the entrance hole. And I caught it with my camera – this post gives a bit of background and then there are 10 of the 24 photos I shot of that feeding.
Luckily, I had bought lumber enough to build two nesting boxes, as the first one I built isn’t being used.
Once I picked out a second suitable tree for the box, I had to dig through 30 inches of snow to get to it! That was a rough winter.
On April 12th, installation of the second box was complete. It’s mounted 14 feet above the ground.
This map from my Cornell NestWatch account shows the location of the two boxes. The first one overlooks my bee garden (which didn’t yet exist when that image was created), the second overlooks part of the back yard, and the corral.
The second box is very visible in the distance from our breakfast table, which is where the next photo was shot from yesterday with 180mm of zoom. The barn is just out of the frame to the right.
We had seen some activity around the box, but not enough to make me confident that it was now a nest, but finally on July 19th a chick appeared.
The next day I was set up beside the barn with my camera and chair when two feedings happened. The first was a dragonfly but my focus was off. The next was a frog. The following photos were shot from about 25 meters away, with a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 7D Mark II and Canon 100-400 lens, with the ISO set at 1,000 to get images at 1/500th of a second, with motordrive (10 fps) in 3 or 4 bursts to get 24 photos in about 5 seconds. First I’ll show you a full-frame image – the rest were cropped from this format.
Okay, the show begins when mom arrives, with a chick standing at the entrance hole. This is an older chick than the one the previous day – at least a week older, almost ready to fly, I can see by his actions.
I can now see that it’s a frog! In all my guessing about what they might be eating, frog never occurred to me. At the west end of Mary Lake, though, 2 kilometers away, is a large marsh that should be frog-friendly.
The hand-off has been completed.
Mom leaves.
Now the chick has to deal with that beakfull!
The chick has bulging eyes and is nearly choking but that frog is going down!
Well that was quite a show, even though it only lasted about 5 seconds. I’m hoping for more in the next month or so, but I’m a little stressed that there isn’t more action around the nest than I would think there would be. Next winter I’ll add a camera looking into the box to answer some of my many questions about what’s going on in there, and perhaps another one mounted on the barn looking at the box.
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