The Food Chain - Raptors and Cherries
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22012026/michigan-cherry-farms-american-kestrel-food-safety/
Every spring, raptors return to nesting sites across northern Michigan. The smallest of these birds of prey, a falcon called the American kestrel (Falco sparverius), flies through the region’s many cherry orchards and spends its days hunting for even tinier creatures to eat. This quest keeps the kestrels fed, but it also benefits the region’s cherry farmers.
Fruit farmers have been working symbiotically with kestrels for decades, adding nesting boxes and reaping the benefits of the birds eliminating the mice, voles, songbirds and other pests that wreak havoc by feeding on not-yet-harvested crops. In addition to limiting the crop damage caused by hungry critters, new research suggests kestrels also lower the risk of food-borne illnesses.
The study, published in November in the Journal of Applied Ecology, suggests the kestrels help keep harmful pathogens off of fruit headed to consumers by eating and scaring off small birds that carry those pathogens. Orchards housing the birds in nest boxes saw fewer cherry-eating birds than orchards without kestrels on site. This translated to an 81 percent reduction in crop damage—such as bite marks or missing fruit—and a 66 percent decrease in branches contaminated with bird feces.
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Finding a good strategy for managing pests is essential for cherry farmers. Pests cause expensive damage that worsens yields already impacted by other threats to the cherry industry, such as climate change, labor shortages and the vagaries of international trade. To stop the added damage from pests, growers have turned to nets covering their trees, noisemakers, scarecrows, pesticides and even the removal of natural habitats around crop-growing areas.
However, these options can be expensive and aren’t always effective. Even with these management strategies in place, birds like starlings, robins and crows cost farms in some top cherry growing states—including Michigan, New York, Oregon, Washington and California—about $85 million annually. For many growers, this is where the kestrels come in.
It may seem counterintuitive to solve a bird problem by bringing in more birds, but kestrels are skilled hunters whose presence drives off songbirds afraid of being eaten. Habitat loss, competition for food and climate change are leading to slow and steady population declines for the American kestrel, losses of about 1.4 percent annually. Still, these birds are abundant enough that, in many areas of the continental United States, all farmers need to do to attract them is add a nesting box to their land.
“I’ve noticed a difference having the kestrels around, hovering over the spring crops,” said Brad Thatcher, a farmer based in Washington state who has housed kestrels on April Joy Farm, an organic fruit and vegetable farm, for over 13 years. “There’s very little fecal damage from small songbirds at that time of year versus the fall.”
