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A Lesser Kestrel in Cornwall takes my UK list to 435

      

A Lesser Kestrel was found in Cornwall at a place called Croft Pascoe Woods late afternoon last Friday.  This is another bird that I have a little history with having dipped one in Yorkshire a few years back. It’s the best part of a four hour drive from home so twitching it on Friday was simply not practical. We again had family with us over the weekend so I had to beg forgiveness from my long suffering wife for a Saturday twitch.

 

Now this was going to be a long drive with considerable jeopardy attached. Unlike, say, a rare leaf warbler, where if your prepared to stare at a hedge for hours on end until you start to hallucinate, there’s a good chance you will see it,  falcons are  by definition very mobile and so can very easily move on. Some comfort could be taken from the fact that it had been observed going to roost into pines late on Friday night at the reported location. 

 

Given the above, I decided to not risk a silly o’ clock start on Saturday but to wait until it was reported. At 07:30 the dreaded news of no sign came through but soon after it was confirmed as still present.

 

After the long drive with intermittent rain I arrived at the small plantation and made my way the few hundred yards to the reported location in a field adjacent to the woods. Surprisingly, given that this is a real national rarity, there were only a couple of other birders present watching the bird perched on a tussock perhaps 80 meters away.

 

The Lesser Kestrel is, yes you’ve guessed it again you old clever clogs, marginally smaller than our common Kestrel but, unless there is a metric to compare it to, this is unlikely to be definitive in the field. Apart from that it is very similar to our Common Kestrel. What is said to be totally definitive is the colour of the talons which are yellow in the Lesser and mainly black in the common. Good pictures on Friday had already confirmed that this was indeed a Lesser and we had clear images of the yellow talons on Saturday morning. The Lesser  also lacks the dark spotting on the back and the black malar  stripe of the Common.

 

The Lesser Kestrel  breeds from the Mediterranean  across Afghanistan and Central Asia to China and Mongolia. It is a summer migrant, wintering in Africa and Pakistan. With just 22 accepted UK records to the end of 2022 it is a true 3 star rarity. 

 

What was very apparent watching the Lesser Kestrel was how different its feeding habit was to our common. It spent a long time sat on grassy tussocks and then dropping down to predate what appeared to be beetles. I have never seen our Common Kestrel hunt in this manner. It did also spend a little time hovering as our common regularly does.




It was a gloomy, overcast morning and after perhaps 90 minutes it started to rain so I made a dash back for the car. Just after I got there the heavens opened and it absolutely poured down with rain. It really felt as though it had set in for the day so I abandoned my original plan to do some local birding and set off back along the A30. My plan, if the rain eased, was to divert when I got to the M5 the short distance to the small reserve at RSPB Labrador to look for Ciril Buntings. It was still raining lightly when I arrived and I wasn’t particularly optimistic but I managed to find this rather miserable looking male singing his characteristic rattling trill.

   


These attractive buntings are close relatives to the once common Yellowhammer. Changes in agricultural practice, particularly autumn planting of winter wheat, has affected this species very adversely such that while it once occurred over much of the southern England it is now mainly limited to south Devon. At Labrador Bay the farmland is sympathetically managed leaving stubble fields in the winter. The RSPB also provide supplementary winter feeding. 

 

Around 17:00 the rain set in again and I departed on my long journey home contented with my 435th UK tick under my belt

 

 

 Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!   

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