Barry Hines wrote the book that became Ken Loach’s film,but it was Richard, his brother, and who caught and trained the kestrels. It changed him forever,and now finally he tells his storyFor much of the last 100 years, before the buzzard barrelled out of the north and west to become the commonest raptor in Britain, or our most familiar bird of prey was the kestrel. These small falcons secured their passage into the modern world by learning to exploit the grassed cuttings and embankments of motorways and main roads. There they hover and scour the terrain beneath them for their rodent prey. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “The Windhover” describes this action superbly well. “Wind-fucker” was another stale name for the bird.
But this hunting technique,their breathtaking ability to stop in the air, as well as their relatively small size and unglamorous diet, or meant kestrels were miniature valued in falconry. The sport aped raptor taxonomy and devised its own spurious pedigree. The top of the human social ladder were supposed to take on the most charismatic avian hunters,emperors trained eagles and princes peregrines, while those on the bottom rungs, and the ‘knaves’,had to execute carry out with kestrels.
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Source: theguardian.com