On a recent day, I watch as Maya Lapp carefully climbs a 10-foot ladder to reach a large bird box attached to a utility pole at the edge of the Fall Line Sandhills Wildlife Management Area in Taylor County in west central Georgia.
Lapp, a wildlife technician with Georgia’s Wildlife Resources Division, gingerly removes the box’s occupants, two baby Southeastern American kestrels, the smallest falcons in North America. They’re a subspecies of the American kestrel, also known as the “sparrow hawk.” She deposits the two chicks into a handbag.
She takes them to a pickup truck where a fellow wildlife technician, Henry Garcia, has laid out tools on the tailgate to clamp a small metal band onto each chick’s right leg.
Each band has a number that will be unique to that chick. It will be recorded in a database to help wildlife managers identify the bird as long as it lives. The data will help them determine strategies to increase survival of the Southeastern American kestrel, whose population has plummeted over the past few decades — mostly due to loss of its open forest habitat in which it nested in tree cavities.
Before returning the banded chicks to their nest, Lapp and Garcia also determine their age, sex and weight. They’re about 20 days old, about a week from fledging.
Under the supervision of senior wildlife biologist Nathan Klaus, Lapp and Garcia have banded more than 80 kestrel chicks this season from some 60 nest boxes erected by the Wildlife Resources Division and power companies to substitute for the birds’ natural cavities. “It’s a banner year for Georgia’s kestrels,” said Klaus. “To think that we were down to nine nests only a few years ago.”
The strikingly beautiful Southeastern American kestrel (slightly smaller than a mourning dove) is nonmigratory, unlike its larger “northern” cousin, the American kestrel. It’s found in Georgia from the Fall Line to the Florida line — one of the Southeast’s few remaining populations. Hovering as it hunts, it forages for insects, grasshoppers, mice and other prey in open forests and grasslands.
IN THE SKY: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: Summer begins at 5:14 a.m. Tuesday — the summer solstice and longest day of the year. The moon will be last quarter on Monday. Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter are low in the east a few hours before sunrise. Saturn rises around midnight.
Charles Seabrook can be reached at charles.seabrook@yahoo.com.
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