{"id":2374,"date":"2011-07-25T09:55:32","date_gmt":"2011-07-25T16:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=2374"},"modified":"2011-07-26T13:45:43","modified_gmt":"2011-07-26T20:45:43","slug":"kestrel-bonanza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=2374","title":{"rendered":"Kestrel bonanza"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday, I saw my first kestrel\u2014my first ever\u2014and\u00a0not just one, but two chicks and three adults. I owe it all to Derek Kite. I have never been able to find kestrels on my own, and certainly wouldn’t have found these ones. Yet, only a few hundred meters from a road, Derek had found a birch snag with kestrel chicks peering out. He took me there. We sat on the ground at a discrete distance and watched for a few hours. The nine pictures below offer a taste of the morning.<\/p>\n

Sometimes one, sometimes two chicks peered out of an opening high on the birch snag.
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If chicks are there, adults cannot be far away. On an adjacent snag sits a female who has captured a June beetle,
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that she then delivers to the nest,
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for a happy chick to eat.
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An adult male captures a smaller bird, eats the tasty brains,
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then delivers the rest of it to the nest. (My most satisfying image of the day).
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For reasons that are unclear, another male (one with a ragged tail) also visits the nest. One of the males might be an elder sibling helping out. Who knows?
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A final shot of an adult male at the nest hole.
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All in all, a superb morning; thank you Derek.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sunday, I saw my first kestrel\u2014my first ever\u2014and\u00a0not just one, but two chicks and three adults. I owe it all to Derek Kite. I have never been able to find kestrels on my own, and certainly wouldn’t have found these … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2374"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2389,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2374\/revisions\/2389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}