The American Kestrel is probably our most beautifully marked hawk. Females are uniformly rufous brown in color, while males have blue-gray wings and a rufous brown back. Both male and female have a mustached black and white face pattern. About the size of a blue jay, the kestrel is primarily a bird of open country and woodland borders. It is commonly seen in the characteristic pose of falcons; hunched up on high, exposed perches scanning the ground below for prey. They also hunt by pointing into the wind and hovering over fields, looking for prey and then shifting to hover in another spot if nothing is seen. The kestrel has been nicknamed “Killy Hawk” because of the sharp cry it emits when it has spotted an intruder.
The diet of the American kestrel includes a variety of insects, small mammals, and birds. They have a very widespread range throughout the western hemisphere. Kestrels breed from above the Arctic Circle in Alaska and northwestern Canada, south through Canada and the United States into Mexico, parts of Central America and most of South America. In the spring the male selects a nesting site (usually a cavity within a tree) and waits for the female to appear and approve the site. The kestrel normally lays 4-5 eggs which hatch in about 30 days. Although both parents incubate the eggs, the female does the majority of the incubation, while it is up to the male to bring in food. Within 30 days of hatching the young kestrels are fully fledged and have plumages very similar to the adults. The kestrel is one of few species of raptors where the juvenile plumage differs between the sexes and resembles the respective adult plumages.
Starting early in September the kestrel moves southward in large numbers from the northern parts of its range. The Migration peaks in late September and early October with the largest number of birds moving along the coast.
American kestrels have been declining throughout most of their North American range at a rate of approximately -1.4 % per year (Sauer et al. 2019). The exact cause of the decline is unknown.
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