By Andy Corbley -Jan 27, 2026

A study run by Michigan State University in the state’s upper peninsula has discovered that encouraging American kestrels to nest in cherry orchards also reduces the presence of food-borne illnesses that can be passed via the fruit to consumers.

By keeping rodents—but particularly small, fruit-eating birds out of the orchards, kestrels were found to be an effective means of pest control.

“Kestrels are not very expensive to bring into orchards, but they work pretty well,” said Olivia Smith, lead study author and assistant professor of horticulture at Michigan State University. “And people just like kestrels a lot, so I think it’s an attractive strategy.”

The hypothesis of Smith and her colleagues was that by keeping fruit-eating birds away, fewer avian pathogens would reach the shelves of the grocery store. This proved largely correct, as kestrel-guarded orchards showed an 81% decrease in instances of crop damage, including missing fruit and fruit with bite marks, and a 66% decrease in bird droppings on the fruit trees.

“I’ve noticed a difference having the kestrels around, hovering over the spring crops,” Brad Thatcher, a farmer based in Washington state who has housed kestrels in the fruit and vegetable areas on April Joy Farm for over 13 years, told Inside Climate News. “There’s very little fecal damage from small songbirds at that time of year versus the fall.”

There are no shortage of problems for cherry and fruit farmers these days, from wild weather swings to labor shortages. Perching birds are just one more issue to deal with, and they’re quite the issue, causing some $85 million in losses every year among major growing states like Michigan and California.

Growers attempt to prevent the fruit loss in a variety of ways, including chemical repellents, lethal shooting, trapping, hanging nets over their trees, visual and auditory scare tactics, and even deforesting the area surrounding the orchard.

Not only were the kestrels found to be more effective at keeping the birds away, but the detectable levels of Campylobacter, the most common foodborne pathogen spread by bird feces, were lower on branches in orchards with kestrel nest boxes (0.97% compared to around 10%).

There are no levels in knitting, there are no exams to pass or goals to achieve before you can continue.

The Handsome Chris is a perfect beginner project. It's all one color, it's knit flat, you get to learn lots of new techniques all at once, but most of all it's engaging and you're working towards a goal you really like.

I would have impaled myself on my needles if I'd been forced to complete a Sophie scarf before I got to advance to something more "challenging" like a washcloth, or God forbid a ribbed hat.

My very first project was a self-drafted 11-strand intarsia double sided cable scarf, because I didn't know I wasn't allowed and that was what I wanted to make.

This attitude of mystifying certain fabrics as advanced really twists my stitches. I cannot do simple stockinette colorwork to save my life, but I can 3-color brioche without looking.

There are no levels in knitting.

like, I know the feeling well, I myself don't think drawing is hard. you put a pencil to paper, and you are doing it. but my experience in teaching drawing does tell me that it's hard for people to get over the learned self-reflection of "am I doing it right?", it's hard to have an idea, put it onto paper and then analyze WHY the drawing on paper isn't the way you envizioned it, and it is hard to then plan accordingly and adjust your drawing based on that knowledge.

The whole problem is that these skils (knitting, crocheting, drawing, etc) have been developped over centuries if not millenia. These skills have width and depth.

it's true that there's no preset levels of "learn this first, and then learn that", but there's definitely skills that are more superficial, and ones that require a deeper settled understanding of the tools you are working with, so that you can actually use the thinking part of your brain to process what you are doing and how that affects the larger craft as a whole.

They're smart fuckin birds, I believe in them