Lesser Kestrel: Photo Jormo Tenovuo, www.jtenovuo.com
Before humanity's insatiable needs lay waste the farthest corners of our world a few more will be born who'll follow 'the way of birds'. And although they have only ever been a tiny percentage in any one human generation these birders, or ornithologists, will have helped document man's deepest disaster. Planetary degradation. Even though today's birders, like people everywhere, must register unwelcome change from a standpoint, or benchmark, made in the halcyon days when they themselves are young.
Out of all the great bird orders of our world one - the falconiformes or raptors - has probably suffered most from mankind's ecological ambivalence. As hunters of flesh raptors are seen as competitors for 'our' resources; simultaneously admired or hated right down the ages. However out of all the raptors, one species the Lesser Kestrel (Falco naumanni) has been spared because, by being very largely insectivorous, it's considered innocent of such crimes. In fact it was accommodated across the Old World as beneficial to man. Despite this the status of the Lesser Kestrel today demonstrates, as clearly as does that of any bird, the grave evolutionary risks of forging too close a relationship with man.
[0]Lesser Kestrel nest: Photo Jormo Tenovuo, Spain 2005Lesser Kestrels are highly sociable long-distance migrants that feed almost exclusively on large insects. Flourishing on a diet largely composed of grasshoppers, locusts and beetles they were made welcome in our fields from the earliest times in human history. They prefer to nest colonially, in holes in cliffs and as near as possible to their feeding areas, so they quickly occupied the artificial cliffs we built, overlooking the source of our golden wealth, the city walls and holy places in our most ancient towns and cities.
Only fifty years ago, in summer time, one could enjoy watching them circle around their colonies great and small, on mosques and castles, in churches and at ruined temple walls, across a vast range which extended from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to beyond the Great Wall of China.
[0]Lesser Kestrel 3: Photo Jormo Tenovuo, Spain 2005
[0]Lesser Kestrel 2: Photo Jormo Tenovuo, Spain 2005Yet now they are classified by BirdLife International as "Vulnerable to Extinction". More casualties beside our road to freedom. Why? How?
Virtually all the Lesser Kestrels from those widely scattered populations spend the northern winter in tropical Africa, in three principal areas. The western populations fly to the savannas of the far west, the west asian population to the equatorial savannas of the east and, by far the greatest number nowadays - those from Central Asia, flying all the way to the High Veld of Africa's deep south. 
[0]Lesser Kestrel: Photo Jormo Tenovuo, Spain 2005It seems likely that the majority of these eastern birds pass through (or over) Tanzania at least once each year and that is where their lives and mine converge. The feathered travellers on their hazardous journeys, and this earth-bound birder, lost in admiration for all of bird migration.
At Easter 1965 on board HMS Andes our family crossed a grey and rolling Biscay, not once but twice. On each crossing large numbers of migrant birds, returning to north west Europe from their wintering grounds in Africa, landed upon the ship. And a nine year old boy found many of them, passerines chiefly, as they fluttered-out from temporary refuges under deckchairs and the like, to hop around his feet. One bird, the individual whom I remember most vividly of all, a 'lifer' of that moment, a beautiful may-green and primrose-yellow Wood Warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix) actually fell into my lap one lunch-time as our family sat around a table on deck. To this day I can clearly picture my recently-widowed mother attempting to rekindle it with a quarter teaspoonful of Cognac!
Ever since that day, in migration season I have felt the urge, and managed whenever possible, to climb aboard this real flying carpet. Utterly fascinated at the sight of visible migration I doubt anything could give more lasting pleasure than close encounters of the migrant kind. Perhaps influenced by those experiences of finding exhausted migrants about the decks of the gently pitching Andes I've become anxious for the welfare of these migrants in a world gone astray.
If one wants to observe long-distance migrant birds, and gauge how they are faring, one must first of all pay attention to weather in migration season. More important, one must try to appreciate the factors which govern their food supply. One must consider their nutritional requirements, in summer and in winter, and along the great journeys that they undertake.
And if one wants to know the future, not just for migrant birds, but for mankind also, I recommend cultivating a compassionate interest in insects. 
Spanish locust: Photo Martin GoodeyIn particular one should familiarise oneself with some of the needs of myriad flies, the needs of some of the incomprehensibly vast (and as yet unknown) number of beetles, and of grasshoppers great and small, of ants, of bees and wasps, and of course of dragonflies, whilst in the tropics termites, and everywhere of the obliging lepidoptera. And all the while, like a chameleon, one should keep that watchful eye, on events in the sky, above your head.
Consider too this one representative bird species, a bird of which I am inordinately fond, stalwart, once widespread friend of the ways of agricultural man, the sociable, 'little-rattler of the towers'. We should ask some basic questions about the Lesser Kestrels which visit us here in Tanzania, or simply pass-us-by; if we're lucky twice each year:
What do they eat? Is that food supply in any sense secure? Are these birds getting enough food to nest and raise their young in far-off Kazakhstan? Enough food for this year's young to replenish those losses suffered on great journeys, circle routes of 10,000 kilometres and more in each direction, south and north, each year?
Particularly from my current perspective, here in tropical Africa, I wonder are they getting enough good food on the wintering grounds, in South Africa especially, to power their northward journey? Enough to regrow feathers of wing and tail? To perfect those instruments of flight, without which on migration, they'll very likely die somewhere en route, perhaps by becoming exhausted and drowning in an Indian Ocean storm; or being tossed around, like tumble weed, downed in our expanding deserts.
In the mid 1970s Leslie Brown, penning the species accounts for the birds of prey, in Volume One of The Birds of Africa, could not have predicted the heart attack that would soon fell him, one of the last giants of African field ornithology. Yet perhaps he, of all people, should have predicted the imminent and catastrophic decline of this once very widespread 'african wintering bird' - the Lesser Kestrel.
He wrote: "Locally very abundant at winter roosts and the commonest small raptor in the high veld. No recent decreases documented, either in breeding or wintering quarters, may have been favoured rather than otherwise by increased agriculture in winter range."
Certainly he can be excused for not anticipating then the unfolding dimension of climate change and the fundamental havoc this would wreak on all the world's ecosystems. I feel however that, as a distinguished Colonial Agricultural Officer, he should have had a better idea of how the inexorable trend toward industrialized agri-business, combined with a mind-boggling growth in human population, would adversely impact migrant birds, especially those such as the delightful Lesser Kestrel; birds that had until then prospered, co-evolved in fact, with the expanding activities of agricultural man.
To many of us who were fortunate enough to be travellers during the1980s it became quite clear that the world was quickly going pear-shaped; that the so-called leaders of world were too corrupted by the love of money and the delusions of power to ever give a damn about lowly, boring nature.
I vividly recall the moment when my climate penny dropped. It was in mid May 1984, and I was standing on a scrubby hawthorn-hillside searching for returning spring migrants, by Leighton Moss
[0]The day the earth caught fire: Sci-Fi movie 1961 RSPB reserve in Lancashire, England. The day I realized for once and for all that we had entered a Science Fiction film, a real one, just as shockingly impossible as 'The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961).'
Early January 2004: "Twenty years later, now with a family of my own, we're renting a tiny blue and white farm labourer's cottage beside the valley of La Janda, in the southernmost corner of mainland Europe. Early one sunny Sunday afternoon, munching on a sandwich, we're sitting in a jewel. An 'ecologically-managed' spur of fragrant cattle pasture; which rises landward from the intensive agriculture of the valley of La Janda; the first and last flood plain on the western seaboard, slap in the middle of Europe's premier big-bird migration route.
After a week of frequently torrential rain, at long last, the sun shines from a cloudless sky. In the fields below us four hundred wintering Grey Cranes (Grus grus) the colour of slate are hopefully oblivious to the fact that two more huge windmill abominations are awaiting construction on the far side of the valley. So they trumpet and dance on a meadow grazed by shining chestnut Retinto cows whose auburn calves prance about seemingly in time to the cranes' music.
Windmills and Storks: Photo Martin GoodeyAs the winter sun reaches its zenith at about half past one the scattered silhouettes of five small falcons drift into view from the direction of the gaunt sierras that rim the southern horizon. I saw a pair of Lesser Kestrels feeding here, over my favourite flowery butterfly and beetle bank, only four days ago and assumed that they were late southward migrants or perhaps part of the very small population that winters in the broad valley of the Guadalquivir where it flows through southern Andalucia. These birds however behave like north bound migrants returning early from the savannas of Senegal.
Gradually the five forms sweep closer and closer, floating - no fairly sailing, on this gentlest of southerly breezes. As they come right overhead they pause on their journey and commence feeding. They circle on invisible thermals only metres above us, coursing through the convective bubbles of warmth which rise above this insect-rich island on the eastern shoulder of the valley. A very real island of life in an arable valley that has been plunged over the past twenty years into a dark age of chemical-driven desertification. A small biodiversity hot spot survives however, a home for countless plant and insect lives, through the benign management policies of the land owners who are fortunate enough to be able to be guided by interests other than pushing the monochrome profit of the bottom line.
I admit it, I've fallen in love again with these delightful little falcons. Ever since our reunion, when we moved south into Iberia from western Scotland, in autumn 2002. Declining throughout Mediterranean Europe they have become a rare pleasure for the avid birder wandering the open fields and little towns of southern Spain. I remember with strong emotion that as recently as the early nineteen seventies they were a familiar and daily sight throughout the province of Cadiz.
La Janda: Looking towards Africa. Photo Martin Goodey
On our journey south through Spain in autumn 2002 we did not encounter any until we reached the alley-ways at the heart of old Seville. Here they could be seen every evening, even after the October darkness had fallen, circling and chittering around the floodlit Giraldillo, the bronze weather vane that embodies 'Faith', and crowns the cathedral's tower where Roger Peterson, a man always aware of his birds, first drew international attention to them over forty years ago. He and Guy Mountfort, who died in his nineties in April 2003, were en route to an early bird survey of the Coto Doñana - you can read all about that in Mountfort's book "Portrait of a Wilderness". Later the close association between Lesser Kestrels and this remarkable cathedral tower was further enshrined by Dan Zetterström (Collins - European - Bird Guide). This book has become the rightful heir to Roger and Guy's most famous collaboration - the Peterson, Mountfort and Hollom 'A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe'(that's hardly a EU-PC title is it?).
As I consider these departed founders of our modern birding community I like to think that the seven hundred year old Moorish towers of Seville cathedral is the destination for my gang of five "Lesser Ks" once they've circled-off due north from this sunlit hilltop beside La Janda. After gracing this sweep of so very welcome azure sky for twenty long and joyous minutes; hovering and fluttering, gliding and chinking, momentarily pausing in mid-air to capture and consume something from that insect bounty floating overhead, in my very personal Sunday bubble of hope.
It was so encouraging to think that these five Lesser Kestrels were, in effect, hoping to raise their young on ledges of that Gothic immensity - the largest cathedral in Europe, towering through its eighth century, high above grand old Seville. As surely as we are, all of us, being spun again into yet another year of great uncertainty."
Easter 2008: Without doubt an overarching love, throughout my life, has been for the avian magic carpet - the visible migration of birds. It continues unabated. On Monday evening last week (March 10) a steady stream of over 145 Lesser Kestrels trickled low across our small, yet very insect-rich, rough and ready, peri-urban garden. They passed over not just the once; but twice, and in the space of only fifteen minutes. And, perhaps you guessed it, they appeared at sunset. They were leaving Tanzania, or trying to. Elsie and I watched them arriving over our western hedge, one after another, in a long low line, steadily flapping past the dark grey base of Mount Meru. Seemingly right under a great wide rainbow suspended there, gloriously humbling, everything the perfect aftermath of an evening thunderstorm in tropical Africa.
Out of a fantastic saffron, lilac and orange, rain-streaked western sky there came more yet. Heading very resolutely north east exactly, plodding-on into the ominous gloom. Out across the 'prospering' little city of Arusha they flew, over the clustered hovels of poverty's charcoal smoke space, a vanguard searching for lofty trees, a secure place in which the flock might roost. (Only last week many such trees were felled, or at best crassly mutilated, by our national power supplier TANESCO, having been scape-goated for erratic fluctuations in Arusha's all-too dodgey power supply). Finding no such sanctuary in which to pass the night their leaders turned about, and presently they all came back, now heading south eastwards, and clearly they were lowering to a roost. Now at less than thirty feet above us, they aimed for the shade trees, dignified old Cordia and Grevillea in the main, beyond the electric fence in nearby Burkha coffee estate.
Our inexpressible joy at watching them pass so closely overhead was rudely tempered. For some of these lovely little falcons were very raggedy; seemingly still in wing moult. Each flapping of the falc revealing that at least one middle primary, or mid-secondary, was missing. And were not these the individuals straggling behind? Yes, seemingly they made up the rearguard, struggling-onward, reliant on ragged and gappy feathers of flight.
Sadly we have seen this before. I first noticed it last year among some April Amur Falcons (Falco amurensis), passing just offshore along the Tanzanian coast. I dare say a significant proportion (maybe 5% - perhaps more) of these two migrant species, as they depart Africa for Asia, are similarly afflicted.
This suggests they're unlikely to survive the rigours of the journey ahead; unless perhaps they're very fortunate, and find a delight of dung beetles, in old-pastures-new of the 'failing states', in the last living landscapes on the anarchistic Horn, or beyond the Arabian Sea in some Asian people's -Stan.
We conclude that this small minority remains in wing moult - a moult begun last year in Asia, that was suspended on the southward journey of autumn, and which should then have been concluded by the end of January. Bravely, being members of such social species, they feel impelled to follow their kin streaming north, valiantly they try to keep up!
During the last five years; first at Tarifa, where we lived in Spain, and now on the Tanzanian savanna; I've come to suspect that uncompleted or retarded moult has become a widespread and serious problem for many of these long-distance migrant birds.
Now I think it's become undeniable, and is yet another awful cost of our living beyond what's acceptable.
The fabric of this magic carpet, it's worn and getting dangerously thin. It's so conspicuous, obvious really. And more tragic than losing most of mankind's stuff and gadgets. At least for those few humans who still need to watch and sometimes, momentarily to follow, these beautifully sociable, even kindly, migrant birds.
So many of our migrant birds, not just Lesser Kestrels and Amur Falcons but 'the common ones as well' from all four hemispheres, are very fast disappearing - dying-out and within your life-time. This Titanic, our bogus global market place, is it being steered - or just steaming close behind?
We remember the Japanese Wild Bird Society's seventies slogan:
"Today bird, tomorrow human"
March 17, 2008
Kestrel photos by Jormo Tenovuo, from www.jtenovuo.com [1]
Other photos by Martin Goodey [2]