Telegraph Staff Writer
KEYSTONE HEIGHTS—A member of Santa Fe Audubon told the Keystone Heights Rotary Club about a project Audubon hopes will help researchers restore the populations of a vanishing falcon species.
Bill Chitty told the civic group that over the last 40 years, the kestrel populations in North America have decreased by 40%, with up to a 90% population loss in the southeast.
“This guy used to be common throughout the southern states,” he said of the Southeastern kestrel. “Seven states had them, and now they’re only common or relatively common in Florida with a few little isolated areas in coastal Alabama and Georgia, and nobody really knows why.”
Favorite food: grasshoppers
Chitty said the Kestrel is America’s smallest Falcon and also the nation’s most widespread and numerous.
“Its favorite food is the grasshopper,” Chitty said. “Its lifespan in Florida is less than three years in the wild. In fact, less than 30% survive the first year.”
The retiree added that Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission lists the species as threatened, one level below endangered.
Kestrels are cavity nesters. However, they do not make their own cavities.
“They use old woodpecker holes or boxes,” Chitty said. “We have both year-round residents that breed and raise young and migrants that come from up north.”
Chitty added that, like their human counterparts, kestrel snowbirds balloon Florida’s population in the winter months and then return north for the summer.
To help the birds, Chitty and other Audubon members built and installed nesting boxes for the kestrels in the Etoniah State Forest between Keystone Heights and Palatka.
He said he based the project on a similar one in Gold Head Branch State Park.
Chitty said the southeastern subspecies prefers open-area habitats with natural grasses, less than knee-high, “with grasshoppers,” he stipulated, “because that’s their favorite food.”
Chitty showed the Rotarians a map of the project, in which Santa Fe Audubon installed nesting boxes for the birds in the state forest north of State Road 100 in Putnam County.
“This is about 7,000 acres, all together,” he said, “and historically, we don’t have reports of anybody seeing nesting kestrels in that area.”
Initial failure
Santa Fe Audubon launched the project in 2015, initially erecting 21 nesting boxes on trees. Chitty said he had to get approval from the Florida Forestry Service and Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission before starting the project. He also had to sign a 14-page contract with Florida Power and Light to erect boxes within the utility’s right of way.
Chitty added that transmission line corridors, with their lack of trees and abundant meadows, make ideal nesting areas for the grasshopper hunters.
The retired police officer said the project did not go as planned initially.
“The first two years of these boxes, we didn’t have any success at all,” he said. “One of the reasons was that we had lots of other things use our boxes like the eastern fly squirrel. They were a serious problem.”
Chitty added that the flying squirrels squatted into 17 of the group’s 21 boxes, wrecking the project’s mission.
Audubon solved the problem by moving the boxes off trees and posting them on poles.
The change not only eliminated the problem of squirrels inhabiting the boxes but also allowed the group to place the nesting receptacles further into transmission lines right of way.
The change also increased safety because the hinge-mounted poles allowed volunteers to stay on the ground when inspecting the boxes rather than climbing a ladder to reach them in trees.
“We’ve only had two boxes on trees that have ever produced kestrels,” Chitty said, “whereas 10 of our polls have. We’ve produced 84 baby kestrels that survived long enough to fledge.”
Kestrels with cell phones
Chitty said the project’s success attracted the attention of the Avian Research and Conservation Institute, which banded young kestrels and attached cell phones to the birds.
Chitty said a federal license is required to handle the birds and that regulations restrict the payload on each bird to three percent of its body weight.
“So, the radio, the antenna, including the battery, it’s all less than three grams,” he said, adding that the devices are also equipped with solar cells that recharge the batteries.
Chitty said the cell phones help volunteers and researchers to locate birds by triangulating them between towers.
He joked that the biggest problem with having the birds fly with the devices was teaching them how to dial to make a call.
