I very occasionally saw kestrels in the wild in Virginia but was never able to photograph one. I see them more frequently here in California and have managed to get pictures of them, but I haven’t yet gotten a GOOD photo of one. They are so small they are hard to focus on! In fact, they are our smallest falcon. Unlike most raptors, they also display color sexual dimorphism: males and females are colored differently. So whereas I can’t usually tell you what sex of raptor you are looking at in my photos (we often don’t even know the sex of our education raptors in the wildlife centers I work in unless they’ve laid an egg at some point), I can tell you that this is a female kestrel, because of the rusty coloring on her head and wings, which would be blue in a male. I don’t think I’ve photographed a female kestrel before.
I look forward to having an actual GOOD photos of a kestrel for you sometime.
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