When Missouri Department of Conservation agent Ricky Dawson found a trio of kestrels at the Montgomery County High School campus on May 18, he didn’t waste time figuring out what to do.

“Honestly, I didn’t know what kind of hawks they were,” Dawson said. “I knew they had to be saved. So I did my conservation deed and got them saved.”

Dawson took the small birds to the Raptor Rehabilitation Project in Columbia so they could be rehabilitated. On the afternoon of June 19 under hot conditions, Dawson and Raptor Rehabilitation manager Lizette Somer released the kestrels back into the wild in an open field at MCHS.

A kestrel is the smallest and most common falcon in North America. Somer said kestrels are mistaken for songbirds because they are big and they hover in the air.

“They can lay anywhere from three to five eggs,” Somer said. “Typically, they are small birds, so they can get picked off very easily. If the parents can’t feed them or if something happens to them, then it’s common to lose them. The fact that we saw three in a nest is a good outcome for them.”

At first, there were five kestrels hanging around the MCHS campus before that number was cut down to three when Dawson arrived. Somer said two of the birds probably died.

“With the age of the kestrels at the time he (Dawson) brought them to us, they would not have been able to survive on their own,” Somer said. “They haven’t fledged yet. They weren’t out of the nest. They shouldn’t be out of the nest. So they still needed parents taking care of them. Ideally, you would keep them with parents because that’s the best opportunity they’ll have. With two babies being lost already, the other ones needed to come into rehab.”

Dawson said it was the first time since he became Montgomery County agent for the MDC in October that he saved some animals.

“Everything that we take in and that we can rehabilitate, we try to get it to the rehabilitation center as quickly as possible,” Dawson said. “The more human contact a wild animal has, the less chance it will stay wild.”

Dawson put the kestrels in a crate and put them in a truck to be taken to Raptor Rehab. Somer applauded Dawson’s efforts of saving the birds.

“They weren’t flighted yet, which is why they definitely needed human intervention because they would not have survived,” Somer said. “They had a fear of humans, which is what we wanted. But without Agent Dawson bringing them in, the birds would not have survived. They would have died.”

Founded in 1973, Raptor Rehab is a service and education organization of the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Somer said the organization works with conservation agents, biologists and veterinarians to help birds get back into the wild.

“Our main focus is rehabilitation and getting the birds out,” Somer said. “Then, we have a few birds that we keep for presentations that are not allowed. They have injuries such that they can’t survive in the wild, so they are education birds.”