Congratulations to arbitrage for winning Feature Thread of the Week with 3 votes - View Previous Winners
I know these are an invasive European lizard that is proliferating in our area....I was lucky to be informed about a local AK nest that was doing their part in controlling the lizard population of Victoria.
This is the first time I've ever observed American Kestral nesting, feeding, hunting behaviour. It was fascinating to watch and learn. I spent time with them from 6:30AM till 3:30PM and learnt a lot.
The male looked to do all the hunting of lizards. He seemed to go way down the mountain into the residential area to find his lizards (maybe into people's yards where these lizards are prolific?). I never saw the male actually hunt...he'd disappear from view.
The female perched on a number of nearby tall trees. She certainly had her favourite perches but no single one. She kept an eye on the nest from afar most of the time but not always. As you can see from the photos the young are very close to fledging so I don't think she worries as much about them considering the nest hole is just big enough for a single one to squeeze through.
The male would either bring the lizard directly to where the female was perched or sometimes the male would fly up and perch on another tree and the female would fly to him. They always did a very chaotic/messy/frantic lizard handoff and the female would drop down a few perches from the male. Within the next minute the male would fly off. Only after the male left did the female then fly to the nest within a minute or so and feed whichever chick was at the hole. She quickly left the nest after delivery and straight back to one of her favourite perches.
Supposedly, AKs lay 4-5 eggs on average. The nest hole was too small to ever see more than one young at a time. I went and compared all my shots of the young when they stuck there head out. I can definitely identify two different males but never saw a female stick her head out. Possibly even 3 different males but I'm not certain.
This had to be one of my best days of photography since leaving my eagle nests in the Yukon. The eagle nests are what got me into bird photography and this Kestrel nest brought back that excitement. Hope to get back to this nest tomorrow as it is dark and raining today.
Hope you enjoy these shots and my life history story.
I sure missed your Yukon Eagles, but these Kestrel photographs are well beyond any of your eagle photos. One or two of these would have been superlative, but 24!!!
Great shots but for me, the wall lizards held my interest. Unlike the Burmese python in Florida, these critters seem to be pretty benign except maybe to alligator lizards.
I don't know Geoff.......I've been hanging around here for a long time looking at images and remembering the challenges we all had capturing BIF.
To see this number of incredibly accurate images on such a challenging subject is impressive to say the least.
I'm just going to go ahead and vote though that doesn't even do this series justice but it's the best praise I can offer
All good, I'll look these over and over and over
Karl
Geoff, this is unbelievable. If anything can convince me about the power of Sony for inflight shots, it has to this series. Cannot pick a fav. VVVFS - go figure out the acronym.
