I never dreamed it would be so easy. It was as if I was granted a great seat from which to spy a hyper-real world that my relative leisure cheats me out of sensing. You can know, as a science fact, that birds spend all their waking time on survival and still not know. Kestrels are a type of falcon. It was mottled, a little larger than a mourning dove, and its sharp glass eyes focused in perpetual alarm.
European kestrels are larger.
It's hard to tell how large because, from the camera's point of view, the two stars of this movie are larger than people, seen through the eyes of Mikael Kristersson, the producer, director, cinematographer and editor who studied and documented this pair over several years. The perspective, from atop an old church, also shows us ourselves, the beneficiaries of idle time. From the kestrel perches, we are tiny Swedish villagers jogging by, walking dogs, vacuuming hedge clippings and painstakingly raking designs in the gravel around tomb stones. The vista from atop the church is of tablelands of grazing horses and cows that stretch a short distance to the sea. Above the fields, the kestrels stalk and dive-bomb their prey, mantling rodents and lizards in their talons before flying home, ripping at the meat, laying eggs, and clucking at each other.