American Kestrel Nest Box Program
The Warne in the Wild American Kestrel Nest Box Program is a mulit-province/territory program currently with 994 nest boxes installed/planned to be installed by spring 2019 with the following goals:
1) provide safe and secure nesting sites for kestrels particularly in areas with a mix of ranching and farming. Ideally this would help their populations stabilize or even begin to recover, at least in localized areas.
2) provide long term trends of kestrel nest box use at the provincial, regional and local levels.
3) engage landowners and the public using citizen scientists to monitor and maintain the kestrel nest boxes.
4) band chicks and adults when possible.
5) provide opportunities for other kestrel biologists to conduct research.
6) provide feather samples for the 2019 summer as part of the continent wide genoscape project.
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Landowners specific information can be found on the "Landowner" webpage:
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Monitoring specific information (which many landowners would also be involved in) can be found on the "Citizen Scientists" webpage:
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American Kestrel Photo Gallery
The plan for the kestrel program is to install boxes this fall and winter for use by the kestrels next summer (summer 2019). Following this batch I will try to obtain funding for the remaining provinces and territory to add boxes in during the fall of 2019 for use in the summer of 2020. Once all of the boxes are installed I will not have the funds to add more boxes but if additional people wanted to be included in the program they can purchase the boxes at cost with the understanding the information from the boxes will be submitted to the program.
Overall the boxes will be installed in one of two methods. The first method is to cluster boxes in a general area (within a few miles of each other) to allow the local population to expand. The second method is to space out the boxes to locate areas for potential expansion.
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Detailed information on kestrel nest box installation related guidelines is found in the "American Kestrels" sub-tab under the "Wildlife Boxes" tab along the top menu bar. Information for landowners can be found under the "landowners" sub-tab of the kestrel program. Information for monitors (Citizen Scientists) of the nest boxes (which may include landowners) is found under the "Citizen Scientists" sub-tab of the kestrel program.
