While hiking at the Tijuana River Estuarine Reserve south of San Diego, I had a close encounter with an American Kestrel. She sat on the barbwire top strands of the Imperial Air Base fence hunting grasshoppers in the tall brush of the Reserve. She was so intent on her hunt that she paid little attention to me. There was no way to avoid walking past her, as that is were the path went. Twice she got up and moved down a few sections of fence, before finally circling back around to land on the fence behind me, very close to where I had first seen her. And she was still there, an hour later, when I came back by on my way to the car.

Of course I took a lot of pictures, both going and coming back.

In my world, the Kestrel shares favorite bird status with the Green Kingfisher, so this was a very special treat! On the way back, as I pushed by her, she got up and hovered over the brush. I had just the presence of mind to shove the control dial on the camera over to Sports Mode, and get off a burst of images while she hung in the air above me at 35 or 40 feet. The lead shot here is the best of the hover shots.

It was not until I got to processing the image that I realized what I had captured. Anyone who has ever watched Kestrels for any length of time knows they hover, but I, for one, had never thought about how they manage to do it. There are only a few birds that actually hover…that is, remain in one spot in the air, while beating their wings to maintain both altitude and position. Hover, as opposed to “kite”, which is, as the name implies, to hang in the air, weight balanced by force of the wind, with extended wings more or less stationary. It is a quiz I like to give when teaching birding. Name the birds that can hover. And then, name the birds that kite.

The hummingbird is the most obvious of the hoverers, and one almost everyone knows. I know, from my little study of hummingbirds, that they manage to hover so effectively because they, unlike most birds whose wings are relatively fixed at the horizontal, can rotate their wings on the axis of the wing to almost any position. Until I saw this image of the Kestrel, I had not thought through the implications. Rotating the wing toward the vertical is a requirement for any bird to truly hover. The bird has to spill air on the upstroke. And, from the image, the Kestrel actually does rotate at least the outer half of its wing to remain stationary. Amazing.

Now there might be many people who already know this about the Kestrel, but I was not one of them, and I have not found another in showing this image to quite a few birders. The Kestrel, like the hummingbird, can rotate at least part of its wing to the vertical. You learn something new every day!

And that brings us to the Sunday Thought. “You learn something new every day.” That is what attracts me to birding, and photography, and watching dragonflies and butterflies, and to reading, and to watching good movies, and to social media, and to the life of faith. You learn something new every day! I love to learn, even more than I love to know. The love of learning new things is a different motivation than the accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge is the by-product. The satisfaction comes in the learning itself. And I truly believe that the love of learning is inherent to the human, to all of us in our native state. Like the children in Jesus’ parable, those who love learning, will inherit the kingdom of heaven. Those who love to learn…those who great every day, every moment, as an opportunity to learn…those who live to learn…are already well on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.