The American Kestrel, a small falcon species found throughout North America, was once regarded as a common sight in both agricultural and grassland habitats. Since the 1970’s, kestrel abundance has declined in Christmas Bird Counts, Breeding Bird Surveys, and migration counts. While this decline has attracted the attention of many researchers, the driver, or drivers, of this population trend still remains unknown. While much attention has been paid to reproduction, another key life history trait, survival, has received relatively little consideration. Proper survival estimation provides key population demographic information that is essential to understanding potential drivers of population trends. Additionally, survival estimation throughout the full annual cycle and across geographical regions allows researchers to pinpoint when and where mortality occurs and, therefore, where resources should be allocated for potential mitigation and conservation action. This project provides known-fate survival estimates throughout the full annual cycle and within geographically disparate regions, including data on both adult and juvenile American Kestrels. This data is a vast improvement upon our current knowledge of kestrel survival and can help orient future research and conservation efforts towards areas and stages of increased mortality. In the search for potential drivers of the population decline, some drivers have seemingly been “ruled out” due to assumptions about kestrels and their interactions with their environment. In multiple publications, predation of kestrels by Cooper’s hawks has been regarded as an unlikely cause of the kestrel’s population decline, despite Cooper’s hawks being known to predate kestrels and our knowledge of Cooper’s hawk’s increasing population trends that are concurrent with the kestrel’s declining population trends. As these studies focused on the impacts of direct predation by Cooper’s hawks on kestrels, effectively showing that predation events occur too scarcely to limit kestrel populations, they entirely overlooked the nonconsumptive impacts of these species interacting. This project employs an experimental playback framework to simulate the presence of a Cooper’s hawk within a kestrel’s breeding territory. This simulation allows for evaluation of nonconsumptive impacts of Cooper’s hawks on kestrel behavior, nestling development, and survival post-fledge, which this study suggests are all impacted by the Cooper’s hawk presence. Due to their adaptability, habitat change, particularly in the form of urbanization, has also been effectively excluded as a potential cause of the American Kestrel’s decline. Kestrels are currently considered suburban adaptable, suggesting that the species is able to adapt to urbanization and thrive in human-dominated landscapes. While some kestrels live in cities and suburban areas full-time, this title veils the impacts of increased human disturbance, collisions with man-made structures, alterations in prey abundance, and exposure to human-associated toxins on those individuals that are not adapted to these environments. Overwintering migratory individuals may be impacted even more severely by urbanization as they are not necessarily adapted to urban conditions at any other point in their annual cycle. This study investigated the effects of urbanization on American Kestrel abundance and sex ratios by surveying overwintering populations annually in a rapidly urbanized region. Using this long-term dataset provided insight into kestrel population demographics before, during, and after human development, which elucidated that kestrel populations decreased and became more male-dominated in response to urbanization.