{"id":169785,"date":"2025-10-15T06:15:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T12:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=169785"},"modified":"2025-10-15T07:01:39","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:01:39","slug":"male-american-kestrel-watching-his-mate-being-clumsy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/15\/male-american-kestrel-watching-his-mate-being-clumsy\/","title":{"rendered":"Male American Kestrel Watching His Mate Being Clumsy"},"content":{"rendered":"

A week ago today I found a presumably mated pair of American Kestrels in a city park near my home. They were perched within a couple of feet of each other for quite a while.<\/p>\n

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When the male on the left started jabbering at the female, she…<\/p>\n

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lost her balance on the spindly perch.<\/p>\n

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She tried to regain her balance, with…<\/p>\n

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no luck at all. So she…<\/p>\n

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accepted her fate and stepped off into the wild blue yonder.<\/p>\n

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She spread her wings and tail and basically…<\/p>\n

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fell nearly straight down from her perch, using her wings and tail to parachute down between the twigs.<\/p>\n

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Because I was trying to keep both birds in the frame I instinctively didn’t try to follow the female down with my lens, which may have been a mistake because…<\/p>\n

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I soon lost her at the bottom of the frame instead of getting more photos of her descent.<\/p>\n

But the male sure didn’t lose her. He kept her in his sights as she descended for some distance, before…<\/p>\n

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flying off below him and to his right. Five frames later he was still watching her.<\/p>\n

Much ado about nothing I suppose but I enjoy documenting seemingly mundane events in the lives of birds, so I decided to share.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: I don’t know for sure that these two kestrels are a mated pair. But based on the fact that I saw them together the next morning in almost the same place, I decided to go with it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here’s what Cornell’s Birds of the World has to say about the duration and maintenance of pair bonds in American Kestrels: <\/em><\/p>\n

“Pairs usually remain together from year to year as long as both live, but either sex will readily remate if its mate dis-appears.\u00a0No known cases of divorce. Bond is likely not continuous throughout year, but there have been reports of some individuals paired through winter.”<\/em><\/p>\n

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The male’s jabbering seemed to discombobulate her. (10 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169813,"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":[340,334,395],"tags":[7889,311],"class_list":["post-169785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-kestrels","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","tag-mated-pair-of-american-kestrels","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/american-kestrel-5522-for-FB-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-Iat","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169785","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=169785"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169821,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169785\/revisions\/169821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}