In response to Pat's question as to whether kestrels stash their food, the
European Kestrel certainly does, and I'd be surprised in the American
Kestrel didn't. I had unusually direct experience of this with a European
Kestrel that I found injured on a road, and kept and tamed because it
couldn't hunt for itself any more. I noticed that sometimes at feeding
time, when it had had enough, it would hold a food item in one talon and
start looking around from its screen-perch. The first time I let it off to
see what it would do, it made a bee-line for another room of the house (not
the room in lived in, but one that it "visited" once in a while), and
stashed the morsel behind a large chunk of ornamental glass that sat on the
mantelpiece there. Subsequent "experiments" showed it to be faithful to
that one cache, selected, it would appear, in the abstract, before its
first chance to use it. If taken into that room, it would always want to
check the cache, and could never understand why it didn't find well-ripened
bits of flesh behind the glass ornament. Its diet, by the way, was mice
when I could get them, and when I couldn't, the falconer's stand-by: cubes
of beef dipped in feathers. It never bothered to stash mice, only those
particularly choice items from the butcher.

James West