No one knows exactly what’s driving kestrel losses or where the birds are running into trouble—making it difficult to figure out how to stop or reverse the trend.
ON A CHILLY, OVERCAST DECEMBER MORNING in North Texas, a car prowls a pitted dirt road. The occupants are straining forward, looking intently at the sky. “Kestrel!” says Maddy Kaleta from the passenger seat, pointing to a tiny black blob on a power line ahead. She whips out binoculars and confirms the bird isn’t banded. “Let’s go,” says her advisor, University of North Texas ecologist Jim Bednarz. Kaleta grabs a ring-shaped wire mesh cage the size of a small throw pillow with two oblivious mice scampering inside. She opens the car door, leans out, and, as the car rolls to a stop, gently sets the contraption on the grassy shoulder.
Kaleta snaps back inside as Bednarz quickly reverses, stopping a few hundred feet away. The American Kestrel bobs its tail as it scans the muddy fields of a future housing development strewn with construction equipment. The humans are watching, willing it to fall for the bait. “You’re an apex predator,” Kaleta says to the distant falcon. Bednarz joins in, urging the bird to strike: “You’re an eagle! A kestrel eagle.”
As they banter, the colorful predator flies to a wire above the trap, then swoops atop it. After trying to catch the just-out-of-reach mice, the kestrel flaps its wings—but goes nowhere. While trying to snatch the mice, it had slipped a foot through a loop of fishing line sprouting from the trap.
Bednarz floors it, racing the short distance to the captive. As the car rocks to a stop, Kaleta and Brooke Poplin, both graduate students who work with Bednarz, leap out and scoop the trap and falcon off the ground. The robin-size bird doesn’t squawk or flail; it just glares indignantly at the jubilant humans as they untangle it from the fishing line. Victory: They caught an American Kestrel.
This time of year, Texas is the place
