Posted by Bryant Roberts on March 29, 2003 at 21:58:44:
In Reply to: Nesting Kestrals in south Florida. posted by Robert Kelley on March 29, 2003 at 19:29:34:
Your question prompted me to check my old copy of "Florida Bird Life" (the 1954 version with a 1963 addendum) which gave the range of the Little Sparrow Hawk (Falco sparverius paulus) as "Resident and locally common throughout the state, except on the lower keys, where it is not known to breed".
My personal experience with this bird is limited to Alachua County where it nests in the southwestern part of the county in areas with scattered large pines with a grassy understory maintained either by fire, grazing, or mowing. These areas are also frequently inhabited by Sherman's Fox Squirrels and other plants and animals characteristic of dry and open grassy pineland. According to long time Gainesville birders Kestrels were once a common nesting species throughout Alachua County when most of the county was used for ranching but they withdrew to the fringe areas with onset of residential development in and around Gainesville. There has been an attempt to encourage Kestrels to resume nesting around Payne's Prairie by setting up nesting boxes in open grassy areas but to my knowledge they haven't made use of these boxes.
With the return of Eastern Bluebirds and Brown-headed Nuthatches to the Long Pine Key area of Everglades National Park area there may be some reason to hope for a return of Kestrels as a breeding species. But there are some things that may impede this, at least for a while. One is the size of the trees that are required for a large enough nesting cavity, another is the continued loss of what little dry pineland habitat remains in South Florida. Providing nesting boxes in suitable areas that lack large enough trees may encourage the return of the nesting Kestrels, but the restoration of large upland areas to open pineland would probably be necessary.
It would be interesting to hear about any summer kestrel sightings from the area just north of Lake Okeechobee southward to get some idea of the current southern limit of the Little Sparrow Hawks range.