Common Kestrel
Falco Tinnunculus / Common Kestrel / Turmfalke / Faucon crécerelle
The Common Kestrel is the Dutch bird of the year 2025. It still is one of the most frequently seen birds of prey in the Netherlands. But even the kestrel is finding it increasingly difficult to survive in a depleting landscape.
The kestrel is a mouse-eater par excellence. Its hunting method is its hallmark: some ten or fifteen meters above the ground, hovering in the air (in Dutch: praying), searching for prey.
Birds of prey have been my favorite birds from childhood. That fierce, built-in scowl, the mighty bright yellow talons, that almost armor-like yellow patch around the nostril (called cera, I just looked it up). And just imagine their view on things. High in the sky, slowly circling and gliding on wings of, important fact, a certain wingspan.
And so, birds of prey in LEGO letterpress had been on the wish list for some time already. There’s an early buzzard in the 50 Birds series, a hawk, and a little owl, but the focus there was primarily on the smaller songbirds. Those were simply better suited to the small format.
As characteristic as that mid-air hovering may be, I couldn’t quite manage to depict the kestrel in that pose! The wings are at odd angles, viewed from a very foreshortened perspective, and with the less intensely colored undersides visible. Difficult.
No, much better to show it in such a way that highlights the pattern of black spots on the male’s reddish-brown back. (The female is really beautiful too!)
That motif for those black spots became a printing form that itself yielded an interesting graphic image. So I printed it several times as a standalone print.
The Common Kestrel print
The print was made using eleven printing runs.
I printed two editions:
- 25 copies on white, 638-gram Saunders Waterford paper
- 25 copies on warm gray, 160-gram Canson Mi-Teintes paper
The dimensions are 30.5 by 23 centimeters.
Works well in a 30 by 40 cm frame, as you can see.
Price: €275. This includes the mat, but excludes the frame.
Buy a print, support the research
I will donate ten percent of the proceeds from selling this print to Sovon to support this important work. Read more about that here.
Want to buy one of the original prints? Contact me.
Design notes
The question was how different it would be to work on a larger scale. Would that offer more freedom? Would more be possible? Would something perhaps be lost?
In the last few prints of 50 birds, I had found a way to place elements at angles other than 0, 54, or 90 degrees. These extra possibilities quickly proved useful in designing the hobby and kestrel. They have larger wings that end at a pointy slant. The tail also needed to be angled differently for a balanced pose.
The larger dimensions, combined with those unusual angles, made the design process considerably more complex. Finding the right shapes and fine-tuning their proportions required numerous test prints. Even those initial test prints for the overall shape quickly required multiple printing plates, precisely because of those unusually angled elements in the types. Because, as always, where the shapes overlap, they can’t be printed simultaneously.
Bigger sizes also offer more room for detail. But those spaces weren’t necessarily easy to fill. I suddenly needed one and a half thicknesses, or circles in an intermediate size that wasn’t available.
The way I could stylize the designs in 50 Birds didn’t transfer directly to this larger format. Clearly, a matter of working at a different resolution.
