Georgia

=__American Kestrels__=

Question:
Does development have an effect on the American Kestrel population?

Hypothesis:
I think that the American Kestrel population has gone down a little bit in the last several years due to habitat loss.

About American Kestrels:
American Kestrels are the smallest falcon in North America and the only Kestrel. They are about the size of a large sonbird, growing up to 8 inches. They like to eat things like grasshoppers, dragonflies, mice, lizards, and voles. Kestrels like to hunt in open areas like feilds, where they have room to dive. Unlike most other birds, Kestrels don't make nests, they nest in tree hollows. That's why I think that their population has gone down, because construction would destroy their feeding and nesting grounds.

Variables:
Independent-Development in Pennsylvania Dependent-How many American Kestrels there are Control-I'm focasing my project on birds in Pennsylvania

Methods:
After I came up with my idea, I did research and I found out that there was a lot of developement between the years 1983 and 2010. So I decided to use those years for my project. I used a website about Kestrels in Pennsylavania to find out how many there were per year. I collected the data then put it into my graph.

Data:
I used a table to show how many Kestrels there were for each year starting in 1984 and ending in 2010


 * ===Year=== || ===Kestrels=== ||
 * 1984 || 331 ||
 * 1985 || 383 ||
 * 1986 || 455 ||
 * 1987 || 577 ||
 * 1988 || 634 ||
 * 1989 || 839 ||
 * 1990 || 726 ||
 * 1991 || 632 ||
 * 1992 || 546 ||
 * 1993 || 646 ||
 * 1994 || 688 ||
 * 1995 || 655 ||
 * 1996 || 367 ||
 * 1997 || 650 ||
 * 1998 || 798 ||
 * 1999 || 732 ||
 * 2000 || 519 ||
 * 2001 || 581 ||
 * 2002 || 515 ||
 * 2003 || 376 ||
 * 2004 || 358 ||
 * 2005 || 468 ||
 * 2006 || 411 ||
 * 2007 || 526 ||
 * 2008 || 294 ||
 * 2009 || 461 ||
 * 2010 || 565 ||

Then I used a graph to show how the populations went up and down.

Conclusion:
The data didn't really support or deny my hypothesis. The population changed so much every year, so it wasn't consistant. Over all the line does seem to go down a bit, but it's hard to tell.

Discussion:
One of the things that I did for my experiment was chose years where there was a lot of cunstruction to test. But something other than construction could have affected the Kestrel population. Another problem was that the website I got my information from showed how many Kestrels were spotted, so there might have been more birds than were spotted. If I were to do this experiment again I would use data from several sources and avarage the numbers to get more accurate information.

Bibliography:
wikipedia.org [] hawkmountain.org [] paulnoll.com [] leesbird.com []