Taking flight
Time is passing and it's not always possible to be at the nest when significant things happen. That's particularly true of late, so it was no surprise to happen by the Block of Flats the other day to find that our chick had taken wing! It had been obvious that this was on the cards, …
Dreamtime
What does a rapidly growing Kestrel chick do when the day is hot and the parents have been ferrying an ample supply of lizards and bugs to consume? Later in the day, it's hard not to feel a little sleepy. And they say it's healthy to sneak in the odd nap in the afternoon, right? …
Out and proud
When I took a quick look on Monday, the chick had come out of the hole in the tree: This is just what the two chicks from 2023 did: This is a major development and means our little sprout will soon be on the wing. It's been getting too big for the hole it calls …
Noises off
While the kestrels' chick continues to grow at a fantastic rate, I wouldn't want to give the impression that my lens isn't occasionally focused elsewhere. Travelling to and from the nest site, there's a plethora of other wildlife to be seen -- a bonus, as it wouldn't be seen without the kestrel obsession to drive …
What’s for dinner?
Let's take a break from the sadder aspects of the Kestrels' struggle to raise their offspring at the Block of Flats and have a look at something common to all living things' drive to survive: food. The wise scholars at Wikipedia tell us that the Nankeen Kestrel's "Diet is varied, with a large number of …
The chosen one
Well this is not really going the way I had imagined or indeed hoped it would. I'd envisioned an account of the dedicated Kestrel parents striving to raise three vigorous offspring; that idea took a dent when the third and presumably weakest chick disappeared from the nest. And today there's no point sugar-coating it: when …
And then there were two
Recently we had a couple of days' rain and wind which prevented me from visiting the nest site. I figured it would be a good thing to give the poor harassed parents a break from my sticky beaking (pun totally intended). But when yesterday dawned beautiful and clear, I hotfooted it up there to have …
The Currawong menace
While waiting for signs that the Kestrels were working on raising a family in the Block of Flats, I witnessed a few skirmishes in what seemed to be a serious territorial dispute. And it wasn't the other residents of the Block who were the aggressors, but a bunch of Currawongs -- the pied variety (Strepera …
Checkin’ out the chicks
As usual, updating this blog is going more slowly than developments in the real world. In other words, I'm not keeping up. I've got a good post nearly done, but in the meantime, stuff keeps happening. So I thought I'd jump the queue and do a quick post just introducing the offspring of our hard-working …
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