One of the best parts of my job is the chance to take our raptors on the road. Yesterday, Aldo the kestrel and I drove carefully up the winding Delta-Drummond Road, past the Delta Diner (wishing I had left earlier so I could stop for breakfast!), over the Bois Brule River, and into the driveway at Camp Nebagamon for Boys.
As the campers began to arrive at the fire ring for our first program, I worried about how I would manage a rowdy group of boys, full of mischief that I assume is part of any summer camp culture. But I quickly found the boys to be very pleasant and chatty, and incredibly inquisitive.
They were full of questions about falcons, kestrels, bird biology, and physics. Many were common questions I often answer during raptor programs. But the boys also had some interesting questions that even sparked my curiosity. Here is a sample of some of their questions:
Q: How far can a kestrel fly in a day?
A: On migration, birds can often fly farther than we'd expect. I figured that a researcher somewhere had put a radio tracking device on an American Kestrel so I put Google to work. Many keyword searches later, I struggled to find research on tracked kestrel migration. But there was one study on Lesser Kestrels, a species that migrates from Europe and Asia to Africa. They found an average distance traveled between 162 - 206 miles per day. Quite impressive for such a little bird!
Q: Are kestrel populations declining in other parts of the world?
A: In North America, the American Kestrel population has declined by as much as 50% in some areas. European Kestrels in England have maintained their population while kestrels in Scotland have declined dramatically. The Lesser Kestrel that breeds in Europe and Asia has declined and disappeared completely from some countries.
Q: Is a bird's beak made from different material than the rest of its skull?
A: The skull is made of bone while beaks are made of keratin, the same material as our fingernails. Just like our nails, beaks grow continuously throughout their life. In the wild, a bird's rough lifestyle files down the beak. Our birds have an easier life in captivity and their beaks tend to get overgrown. To maintain a healthy, functional beak, I often have to help by trimming their beaks with a dremel.
Q: Why is it so easy to crack an egg if they're so strong?
A: As the raptor program finale, we test the strength of a chicken egg, surrounded by a thin layer of foam, by slowly adding weight until it cracks. As I added 35 pounds of rocks on top of an in-tact egg, the campers could hardly believe it. I heard a few murmuring that it must be fake or hard-boiled. They were proven wrong when finally a camper sat down and sent fresh yolk squirting out of the egg smasher box, requiring over 95 pounds to break the egg.
When you crack an egg at home, you are essentially applying 95 pounds of pressure by hitting it quickly against a flat surface. That force, concentrated at one point on the egg's surface, is enough to crack the shell.
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