Her first winter in deep Texas has been a windfall; the weather good, the food great. But it’s time to go north.
She is a kestrel, a falcon from a brood of five youngins born and raised in southern Saskatchewan last summer.
Jared Clarke found her. Clarke is an
elementary school teacher who lives on a farm near Edenwold. He was
driving Highway 1 with his wife Kristen and their three-year-old twin
sons Rowan and Teal in late June last year. A few years earlier, when he
was with the Saskatchewan Burrowing Owl Interpretive Centre, Clarke
nailed nesting boxes for kestrels on telephone poles on the outskirts of
Moose Jaw. He hadn’t checked this box lately.
“Let’s just see,” he said to his family.
There she was, she and her little kestrel
sister and her three little kestrel brothers, a carton of white,
feathery fluff that had big black eyes and big yellow feet and big pink
beaks. Jared, a biologist, banded a leg on each kestrel with an aluminum
ring, size 3B. The bands were from the Canadian Bird Banding Office in
Ottawa...Continue reading...
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