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kestrel hiding food (1 Viewer)

barnowlgirl

Well-known member
when i was doing surveys yesterday up on a moor on my way driving backdown i saw a male kestrel fly into a small quarry i thought sit and watch it see if it maybe thinking of nesting there, it flew down onto top of quarry on small edge where grassy bit still was. I watched it lift its foot up to this beak and then push something into small hole in grass. i waited for him to fly away so i could go look what he was doing, when climbed up to it noticed that he had brought a field vole in and hid it in the hole, i got pics on other guys camera that i will add onto this when i get them.

but they way the kestrel was going was has he was stashing the vole for later i had never seen this before nor has the guy i work with, has anybody seen this before?
 
Yes, I have! After knocking off the Alder Flycatcher last autumn a bunch of us went seawatching at Porthgwarra and an immature Kestrel caught a Bank Vole, thought about eating it, decided against and cached it carefully in a clump of grass.

I went over to ID the vole and photographed it in situ.

I'd never heard of it before either, and mentioning it on here got no reaction.

Fascinating.

John
 
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Andrew Village (The Kestrel, T & A. D. Poyser, 1990, pp. 76-8) has several pages on cacheing by kestrels. According to him kestrels cache food on most days, often on the ground in tussocks of grass or under clods of earth.
 
Cacheing makes perfect sense for any opportunistic predator faced with a periodic glut of prey. Seeing as how poor weather can effectively ground a Kestrel for days and overeating is even worse I'm not surprised they do this.
 
Andrew Village (The Kestrel, T & A. D. Poyser, 1990, pp. 76-8) has several pages on cacheing by kestrels. According to him kestrels cache food on most days, often on the ground in tussocks of grass or under clods of earth.

That's as maybe, but in 40 years of watching them I've only seen it once!
 
That's as maybe, but in 40 years of watching them I've only seen it once!

You're in good company. Village (in the work cited) says he only very rarely recorded cacheing until he adopted radio-tracking which soon made it clear that kestrels cached food regularly ("on most days").
 
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