That morning I’d seen three different kestrels on the island so I couldn’t ‘assume’ that just because I saw a male kestrel it was the same one I’d reported to HWI.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nSo since this bird was far away, he wasn’t doing anything interesting and I wasn’t fond of his perch, I eventually left him and drove on down the road to look for other birds.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/ameican-kestrel-4622-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"ameican-kestrel-4622-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n
1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n21 minutes later I came back to the same pavilion. He was still there but now he had prey in his talons – a vole. This time I could (barely) tell he was banded on at least one leg and I took many photos of him while he was eating the vole but I couldn’t read the band numbers\/letters.<\/p>\n
Then he did something completely unexpected and more than a little puzzling.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/american-kestrel-4687b-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"american-kestrel-4687b-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n
1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nWhile he still had most of the vole left, he took off toward me and landed on the ground about halfway between me and the pavilion, which put him much closer to me. He left the vole behind and the force of his takeoff pushed it behind him so I presume the vole rolled partway down the back side of the roof because I could no longer see it.<\/p>\n
A split second before this photo was taken I could still see the vole.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/american-kestrel-4696-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"american-kestrel-4696-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n
1\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nWhen he landed on the ground in front of me I could tell by his frantic behavior that he was trying to catch some kind of prey, but whatever it was I never saw it and he never caught it. I have no idea why he left prey in the hand (foot) to chase elusive prey on the ground, but that’s exactly what he did.<\/p>\n
I got 15 photos of him while he was on the ground but in most of them he had his back to me so I couldn’t tell in the field if he was banded or not.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/american-kestrel-4695-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"american-kestrel-4695-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n
1\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nBut I got lucky on this one shot. I not only could tell for sure that he was banded on both legs, I could actually read the lettering on the larger green band on his left leg. And that’s all I needed, especially in combination with the silver USGS band on his right leg.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/american-kestrel-4695-big-crop-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"american-kestrel-4695-big-crop-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n
Sure enough, he’s my old friend “AOM”, the same male kestrel I reported to Jesse Watson at HWI on February 1. He still has vole bits on his lower mandible.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/american-kestrel-2679-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Here’s the photo I sent to Jesse two weeks ago.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/american-kestrel-2679-huge-crop-ron-dudley.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Without a doubt, they’re the same bird. Jesse requested that I report any “further re-sightings” of this bird so that’s what I’ll do later today.<\/p>\n
Jesse also wants to know if this fairly young bird will finally breed this year and two days ago I witnessed some circumstantial evidence suggesting that he’s in the process of pairing up with a female, so I’ll report that to Jesse too.<\/p>\n
I’m not fond of photographing banded birds (or, more importantly, of banding in general) but since banding is a necessary evil for the welfare of birds, I’ll try to squeeze all the ‘good’ out of it we can get.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Note: I published this post nearly half an hour ago and WordPress still hasn’t sent out the post email to my blog subscribers. Usually it’s sent out immediately. I hope they get their act together soon but at this point it’s not looking promising.<\/em><\/p>\nUpdate: Finally, the post email arrived at 6:13 AM. Better late than never. but on time would have been much better.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AOM continues to thrive. (8 photos)<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":153375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[340,334,8,392],"tags":[31,7342,131,1432,7319,256,6087,1918,7343,311,315],"class_list":["post-153370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-banded-male-ameerican-kestrel","tag-falco-sparverius","tag-hawkwatch-international","tag-jesse-watson","tag-prey","tag-reading-bird-bands","tag-reporting-bird-bands","tag-usgs-bird-band","tag-utah-2","tag-vole"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/american-kestrel-4695-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-DTI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153370"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153479,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153370\/revisions\/153479"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/ameican-kestrel-4574-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"ameican-kestrel-4574-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n