In 2019, a camper at Camp Nebagamon asked how far a kestrel can fly in one day. I couldn't answer his question at the time. Even after some intensive Googling later, I had a hard time finding information about kestrel flights. It seemed that very few researchers had tracked their migrations.
That has changed this summer. Banders at Sax Zim Bog, just north of Duluth, installed transmitters on 12 adult American Kestrels to track their movements near their nest sites in the Bog and their migration patterns.
They have already seen some interesting results. One female, #33676, traveled from her nesting location in Sax Zim Bog to Missouri in September. Amazingly, almost half of that distance was traveled in one day! She was tracked in Hastings, Minnesota on September 22 and Neosho, Missouri on September 23. That's 334 miles in one day!
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