The female Kestrel has had the lions share of my blog since it was first published back on the fifth of February this year, This has been mainly due to the fact that the female tends to spend more time around the nest site area during the build up to the incubation period and is still able to forage for her own prey if it is not forthcoming from the male, prey hand overs and mating tend to occur more randomly over a larger area so that the photography is more difficult to bring together, Things change at the start of the incubation period which begins some time around the laying of the fourth egg at which time the female will not want to leave her eggs, So she now needs the male to bring prey to the nest site to hand over to her, This year our incubation period started just five days ago on the 13th April and we now have a total of six eggs under incubation
So our male Kestrel below has been more in focus over the last few days and bringing prey to the female on a more regular basis
Mating still continues even though the pair now have a full clutch of eggs, Six is the maximum number of eggs recorded over the last six years. The male will often hang around after a prey delivery looking to mate with the female before she returns to her eggs and he will then be off hunting again,
Today was a good day for mating images with four such events recorded during a four hour period and as we are focusing on the male I included this close portrait shot of him in action, lovely bird !
And so when the fun is all over he will be off foraging for more prey to keep his new family going.
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