Kestrels Update

A favored perch. For a few days. We thought it was too crowded up there for sex, but it wasn’t.When you see a bird doing a series of wide-open yawn-like movements, they’re probably yawping up a pellet of undigested remains of yesterday’s meal. Two of these pellets are visible on this platform, there’s another behind her. They look turd-like, but avian excrement is liquid. These got lighter as they dried. A study of captive kestrels found they could take up to a day to process the remains and they most often puked them in the morning.The female has been eating and eating and perching and perching. A couple of afternoons she has spent most of the time just sitting. It’s going to be any day now that she retreats to lay an egg. They usually lay on alternating days.Here they are around 1pm the day before the last storm.

Today is the #MarchForOurLives, but don’t forget, defense spending is a bipartisan outrage; it floods the gun industry with cash (the U.S. is the world’s number one exporter of weapons). The industry then turns around and funds its fascist lobby, the NRA. Don’t let your Democratic reps get away with their “I’m for gun control but also defense spending” sleight-of-hand.