Peaches, a female kestrel, has been flying round trip from Warrenton to Georgia and back for four years now, breaking records in the scientific world. Her travels are being tracked with a backpack monitor to learn more about this type of falcon, and to stop its decline. (Photo/ Sarah Cain, The Clifton Institute)
Kestrel’s migration tracked for four years
Peaches, a five-year old female kestrel outfitted with a tiny solar-powered backpack transmitter, arrived in Warrenton on March 18 after completing her 560 mile spring migration journey from a farm in Georgia. This feat was a scientific first for those tracking kestrels.
“We tagged Peaches with a transmitter in May 2021,” said Joe Kolowski, a research ecologist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute (SNZCBI) in Front Royal.
“Ever since then she has continued to migrate to the same farm in Georgia each winter and then return to our Warrenton study area in the spring,” he said. “This is a ‘first’ because a kestrel’s migration route has never been tracked for four consecutive years.”
Since the 1970s, the population of kestrels — a smaller variant of a falcon — has suffered a decline of about 50% with even higher rates in the Piedmont region of the Eastern United States.
Kolowski tracks kestrel movements for the Northern Virginia Piedmont Kestrel Project, a program managed by SNZCBI, Bert Harris co-executive director of the Clifton Institute in Warrenton and Alan Williams, a volunteer ecologist who works at Shenandoah National Park.
During Peaches’ travels, Kolowski has been able to plot over 11,200 tracking locations providing important information about the kestrel’s migration route, breeding habits, choice of habitat and wintering grounds.
He has also tracked a dozen or so other kestrels including “Dee,” another female who was tagged on Eldon Farm in Woodville in 2023. Dee, who has made two round trips to Georgia, recently returned to Woodville.
“This data gives us an idea of what kind of habitat kestrels prefer, their stops and the time it takes for them to reach their destinations,” Kolowski said. “Having this information helps us make conclusions about potential threats to the kestrel population. For instance, knowing which types of fields they prefer can inform us of how practices on crop or pasture lands might be managed for agriculture along with kestrels and other grassland birds.”
Dick Raines lives in Rock Mills and is a key backer of the kestrel project. “To date volunteer landowners have erected over 400 kestrel box nests in Rappahannock and adjacent counties,” he said.
“Installing video cameras in some of the nest boxes and outfitting some of the kestrels with specially designed backpack radio transmitters allows us to monitor these birds in ways that have not been previously possible,” he said.
Raines praised the kestrel research team for producing groundbreaking science. “Never before have we been able to track a kestrel’s daily movements and match that against the territory where they hunt, and the nest box video cameras give us insight into the kind of prey they eat,” he said. “All of this data can be used to develop conservation strategies that will help halt the kestrel’s decline.”
