Peregrine hovering??!! (1 Viewer)

[Biancone]

I was standing on a ridge in the northern Apennines (Italy) today, enjoying a sublime landscape of wooded mountains and upland meadows bathed in late afternoon sunlight, with the wind like ice in my left ear, when a small dark falcon cut across the ridge in front of me. I assumed it was a Kestrel (which here seem much wilder and more dynamic than the verge-patrollers in the UK) as it first hung motionless in the blast rushing up the ridgeside, and then actively hovered, and lowered to drop on something in the fresh stubble of a hay meadow. It looked about the right size and was doing the right things for Kestrel. Then it rose up and banked showing a classic Peregrine shape (relatively short broad-based wings, shortish tail) and the typical dark blue dorsal colour (turning slaty grey or olive-tinged in different light). It had a very dark cap, moustache, a white cheek and half-scarf, and several very dark bars across the tail. Banking the other way, it showed a generally very pale underside (later closer views revealed the slightest trace of sparse streaking on the breast, and a fine chequered pattern on the coverts, paler on the flight feathers). The outermost primaries were distinctly darker than the rest of the wing, dorsally and ventrally. I was convinced it was a Peregrine (perhaps a juvenile at some stage between juvenile breast streaks and the clean or finely barred adult plumage).

Which was why I couldn't believe my eyes when it spent the next ten minutes behaving like a Kestrel: hovering (actively hovering just like Kestrel, not just hanging in the wind), lowering, dropping to the ground (sometimes jumping around a bit as if something had escaped). Didn't see it catch or consume anything, but I wasn't really close enough. The stubble was swarming with grasshoppers of various sizes and also often has skinks and other lizards. I'd have trouble pinpointing differences from the specialised Kestrel hover. It did the same little upward near-stall into a new position. Perhaps it just looked a bit amateur overall, and I don't know if it could have done it in still air.

So has this been recorded before? All my reference material is at home so can't check myself. Could I have got the ID wrong? I briefly wondered about Hobby, which also breed in the area, but the shape wasn't right and I've never seen a Hobby on the wing without strong breast streaking, and I'm pretty sure Hobby doesn't show tail barring on the dorsal side. And Hobby seems even less likely to hover, even as juvenile. The trouble is, the bird was so bloomin' small! Are juveniles of the Med race particularly small?

Perhaps most surprising of all, a real Kestrel male came zooming along, dived to have a brief tussle with the hovering 'Peregrine', and sent it packing. The Kestrel then took over the patch, doing just what the imitator had been doing!!! Not a bad ending to a walk that started tinged with regret (OK, gloom and despondency) that the local Honey Buzzards seem to have packed their bags and set off.

 

[Biancone]

OK, I'm going to be really really grown-up and admit I made an ID mistake (almost certainly). Let this be a lesson to all! Don't try and force an ID on a bird you're not certain of (or you risk looking foolish and talking rubbish). I should have learnt it by now. Anyway, I wasn't 100% sure of this bird's ID. I did make that almost clear (didn't I?). So I went back to the spot today, just in case the bird was still around. Lo and behold, a very similar bird, conceivably even the same individual but I think probably the same species, was in the area. The light was good, the howling gale had dropped, and it was hunting from telegraph poles instead of hovering. It was catching prey almost at will, usually waiting until perched to eat but sometimes eating in the air in Hobby fashion. An hour spent willing the thing to come closer paid off. The only species it fitted, really fitted, is Red-footed Falcon. I don't have THE field guide with me or any raptor books, but it cannot be anything else but a female Red-footed, somewhere between juvenile and adult plumage. Even got some less-fuzzy-than-usual record shots on my compact travel zoom (but don't have a card reader with me so can't upload here). Never seen one before, or the ID might have occurred to me. Apart from the bird itself, what clinches it is that I've just found out that there is an outlying breeding population near Parma, only about 30kms from where I am now. Silly me.