Think about the ways you get your food. Unless you have a garden or an orchard, you probably make a visit to the fridge, the grocery, a restaurant or the school cafeteria where the food has already been prepared for you. Animals in the wild have to find and catch food for themselves. The American kestrel has three different ways it hunts: hovering, hawking and perch hunting.

To hover a kestrel has to have just the right wind conditions to keep it up in the air as it flutters its wings and stays in one spot. Once the kestrel sees its prey, it dives down and pins it to the ground. Most of the time, the kestrel captures its prey on the ground like this. However in hawking, the kestrel flies low over a field to catch prey like large insects out of the air. The last method, perch hunting, is used most often by the kestrel. The kestrel sits on a high perch, like a telephone pole, and simply watches for prey, which it can see moving up to 900 feet, or nearly three football fields away.

Kestrels like to live in open areas like meadows, pastures, farmlands, parks and even in the suburbs, as long as prey is available. They like to have tall objects to perch on, like utility poles, wires, trees and fence posts. If a kestrel finds more prey than it needs, it will store food in tree stumps or holes, in bushes or on top of fence posts or telephone poles. Since the American kestrel lives in Ohio and hunts in the daytime, you may be able to see one in action—keep your eyes open!