{"id":1468,"date":"2009-08-26T00:08:05","date_gmt":"2009-08-25T23:08:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/1468"},"modified":"2013-11-13T20:43:11","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T20:43:11","slug":"definitely-not-a-kestrel-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/definitely-not-a-kestrel-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Definitely not a kestrel…"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

I was over at the local kestrel valley today. There were one or two about, but only at a distance. What did catch my eye though was this slightly larger bird of prey. It was flying high above open ground, circling and occasionally swooping. The speed, movement and range discounted it being either kestrel or sparrowhawk. From the ground it looked like a peregrine (if a small moving dot in the sky can 'look' like anything).
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It was too high up to make out much detail while I was there (these are all hefty crops), but when I looked at the images on the computer I noticed what appear to be straps (jesses) on the bird.
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This got me thinking. I couldn't see anyone out flying the bird, but the straps suggest a kept falcon. I've posted over on Wild About Britain and one suggestion is that its a Saker. However, an alternative proposal is that the straps are part of a radio tracking device on a juvenile peregrine. I'm slightly leaning to the former on the basis of the wing patterns but I'm not sufficiently familiar with either breed to be certain. <\/p>\n

Here's one more shot (a 100% crop).
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The consensus is that the second bird that appeared is indeed a juvenile peregrine. I was slightly confused by the vertical banding on the breast, but having checked further I'm fairly sure about the identification. And yes, I got both birds in one – very long distance – shot \ud83d\ude00
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Here's a better shot of the second bird. The markings do look quite different from those of the 'saker'.
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\"Nature<\/a><\/span>
Camera note: all shots taken with the EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L USM IS lens.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[990],"tags":[302,573],"class_list":["post-1468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bird-of-prey","tag-peregrine","tag-saker","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}