Lesser kestrel | Falco naumanni

Voice

Much noisier than a Kestrel and audible at the colony all summer: a hoarse, rattling chay-chay-chay, lower and rougher than the shrill kee-kee-kee of a Kestrel, usually from dozens of birds at once above the roofs. The din over a town centre peaks around fledging in June, and the birds still call in the evening at the communal roost.

Identification

Slightly smaller and more compact than a Kestrel, with shorter, more pointed wings and a shorter tail that ends not rounded but wedge-shaped, the central feathers projecting. The male is the recognisable bird: the back is plain rufous and lacks the black spotting of a Kestrel, a blue-grey panel runs across the greater coverts, the head is pale blue-grey and virtually without a moustache, and the underparts are pale ochre with sparse spotting. At very close range the claws are white rather than black. Female and juvenile are brown and barred and closely resemble a Kestrel; on those you must work from structure, the wedge-shaped tail, the paler head and the voice. It hovers more briefly and less steadily than a Kestrel and hunts a great deal on gliding wings, in parties and close to the colony.

Confusion species

In practice Kestrel is the only confusion species. It is larger and longer-tailed, with a tail rounded at the tip, a clear dark moustache and black claws; the male's rufous back is covered in black spots and it has no blue-grey wing panel. Kestrel hovers steadily over one spot for long periods and is usually alone or in a pair, whereas Lesser Kestrel is almost always in company and roosts over the roofs of a town. Females are barely separable on plumage: go to the shorter wedge-shaped tail, the paler head, the faster wingbeat and the hoarse call. Hobby is darker, far more sharply streaked and longer-winged, and never hovers.

Habitat

Steppe, dry grassland, lucerne, stubble and extensively farmed arable land, and in Iberia the open oak pasture of the dehesa as well. There it hunts low on gliding wings for grasshoppers, beetles and mole crickets, often in loose parties and preferably in the warmest hours. For nesting it depends on cavities in old buildings — church towers, castles, roof tiles, ruins — and on cliff faces, breeding without nest material in colonies of ten to several hundred pairs.

Range and movements

Breeds from Portugal and Spain through the Mediterranean and the Balkans east to Central Asia, China and Mongolia. Western birds winter in the Sahel, eastern birds in southern Africa. With some twenty thousand pairs Spain holds by far the largest share of the European population, concentrated in Extremadura, Andalusia and Castile. In Britain and the Netherlands it is a vagrant with only a few records.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

April to June in Extremadura, Andalusia, La Mancha or southern Italy. Go at first light to the square of a town with an old church, a castle or a city wall and look up: the birds shuttle to and from the roof cavities and call incessantly. Then find a hunting bird over the surrounding cereal land and check the male's unspotted back and blue-grey wing panel; on a female the short wedge-shaped tail settles it.

Conservation status

Not threatened (IUCN: Least Concern). The species was listed as Vulnerable for many years after a collapse in the second half of the twentieth century, when the conversion of steppe to irrigated cropland, the loss of large insects to insecticides and the renovation of towers and roofs struck at the same time. Since numbers in Spain and Italy recovered — helped by nest boxes, nest tiles and restoration work that spares the cavities — the lower category applies, but the species remains tied to insect-rich, extensively farmed land close to its colonies.