Backyard and Beyond

A Common Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), the “dapple-dawn-drawn-falcon,” as Hopkins alliterated to the nth degree, hovering over the Northumberland beach. Hopkins’s poem The Windhover, although another of his mash notes to his Invisible Boyfriend, captures something of the impression made by these birds hovering with head to the wind and eyes to the ground, searching for prey. But then so does the non-canonical nickname, cited in Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, of “windfucker.”The first bird pictured is a male. This is a female, looking like she’d made a splash, paralleling the edge of a golf course near Bamburgh Castle.Hover-hover-hover-hover, swoop down on prey or swoop down to take up another hovering position further along. Lovely to watch them in action. (I was not quick enough to get a picture of one perched on a sign warning of the dangers of unexploded ordnance.)A third sighting was along the flank of Edinburgh’s monument-studded Calton Hill. We had just descended and were looking up to from David Hume’s tomb.
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The American Kestrel (F. sparverius), which is a more colorful bird, does the same thing. The grasslands at Floyd Bennett Field are one of the best places to see them do this in the city.