Tracking kestrels in Northern Virginia

Today, we're actually deploying a GPS transmitter on our final Kestrel of the season. This is our pretty adult female. We call this the Northern Virginia Piedmont American Kestrel Project. And the goal of this project broadly is to learn as much as we can about the movement ecology and the behavior of American Kestrels in this region, to try to inform better management of the species, given long term population declines. When we began the project, we realized that there was actually a lot of basic information that we didn't know. Two, wing. And just recently, the tracking units that we have are light enough to put them on Kestrels because they're the smallest Falcon that we have in North America. We've been deploying these transmitters for the last, this is our fourth season now. We can track them at, like, very high resolution, GPS tracking. We can see exactly how much space do these birds actually need in order to successfully raise young. I'm using all the data up to this point. And I'm specifically interested in how there's differences between the sexes, how far are the males willing to go. Maybe they don't go very far. We've definitely seen some variation. I'm also going to look at the biggest thing is habitat, and like the habitat that's available around these nest boxes. We'll also be looking at the survival of the nestlings, and if there's like, clutch reduction events, eggs don't hatch, if that relates at all to, like, the movement strategies of these birds. We have a really good opportunity in this environment because there's so many land owners that are interested in managing the land in a sustainable way and doing things potentially differently based on new information. Virginia Tech has just been just a wealth of knowledge and so many professors there that are really there to drive me forward, figure out how I'm going to analyze this, like, think outside the box. It's been an amazing experience. And there's something so, like, gratifying to see that I'm helping hopefully, you know, learn, like, what can we do to, like, bring these birds back?