Date: 8/12/25 2:57 pm From: Bud Anderson via Tweeters <tweeters...> Subject: [Tweeters] Kestrels
At Sea-Tac Airport about six years ago, we had an unusual summer concentration of kestrel family groups.
A normal family group is 7 birds, 2 adults and 5 young.
They congregated in mid-July through mid-August on the grassy areas between runways, feeding on the late summer grasshopper bloom.
I caught, banded and relocated 35 birds during that short period and, unfortunately, many others were struck by aircraft.
It was a remarkable storm of kestrels and I had never seen that number at the airport before.
So, good productivity of young kestrels and good grasshopper numbers can definitely create concentrations of these small falcons.
I have heard reports of a kestrel decline in the eastern US, but in my experience and that of others, I don't know that there is hard evidence of a decline here in WA.
Perhaps Sue Cottrell or Kent Woodruff could comment here. Both are banding large numbers of kestrels in WA.
Finally, I hope that people understand that ageing kestrels in the field can be very difficult. Females, even in hand, especially so.
Relatively recent studies have demonstrated that the old characteristics for ageing females, used since the 1950s, were inaccurate.
