A hovering common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), Bird of the Year 2025, which owes its scientific name to its tinkling call. Photo: ImageSelect
With the Year of the Common Kestrel, bird organisations are sounding an alarm bell for this increasingly scarce bird of prey.
The common kestrel had to relinquish its crown as the most abundant bird of prey in the Netherlands to the common buzzard in the early 1990s. Now it is finally climbing back to the top rung – albeit in a different competition. The common kestrel is named Bird of the Year 2025, Sovon and Vogelbescherming Nederland announced on 6 January on their websites. It is, however, a dubious honour, since the common kestrel owes its title primarily to the fact that it is faring poorly, and bird organisations therefore wish to draw attention to its plight.
The decline in common kestrel numbers in the Netherlands is probably linked to the deteriorating fortunes of its main prey: voles. Their habitat is being lost to intensive agricultural land use. Bird organisations and the Dutch Mammal Society are therefore joining forces; 2025 is also the Year of the Vole. The kestrel hunts these small rodents by hovering in the air before dropping to snatch its prey from the ground.
That ability to hang motionless in the air appears to be the common kestrel’s most distinctive trait, yet its scientific name makes no reference to it. Linnaeus first described the common kestrel as Falco tinnunculus in the tenth edition of Falco tinnunculus – wait, let me redo this properly.Systema Naturae (1758).
Falco is an unsurprising choice; in antiquity the word was already used to denote falcons. Its etymological origin is unclear. It may derive from the Germanic term for ‘grey bird’, or from the Latin word falx, meaning sickle – a reference to the shape of the wings or talons. For tinnunculus too, Linnaeus drew on his predecessors. The Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner writes in his Historiae animalium of 1555 that the Romans also called the common kestrel tinnunculus. According to him, this was an onomatopoeia – though he does not explain how the kestrel’s shriek resembles a tinkling sound (tinnunculus means ‘to tinkle’ in Latin). Today the name might well be more aptly interpreted as a reference to the ringing of an alarm bell.