Walking to the parking lot from work yesteday, I heard an incredibly loud screeching noise coming from the roof of a building across the street. Several people were looking up, and there was a peregrin falcon hopping around, quite upset about something or other. “Falcons are cool,” I thought.
Walking to work from the parking lot this morning, I run across a member of the “Peregrin Patrol” right where I was standing yesterday evening. She was looking up at the perch the falcon was at. I asked her what the deal was. Apparently, there’s a nest box on that perch, and the peregrin family in town had 3 or 4 baby falcons, who are just this week learning to fly. That’s what the commotion was about yesterday. She then pointed at the building I work in, and mentioned that that’s their favorite hangout. “Falcons are cool,” I said.
Walking to the desk from the copying room this afternoon, I heard an incredibly loud screeching noise coming from someone’s office down the hall. Several people peeked out their doors to see what the commotion was about, and there was a peregrin falcon hopping around outside the person’s window. It keep jumping into the glass, as if he saw some filing that needed to be done, and it was his mission to do that filing. He was quite vocal about it, and it looked like he thought that displaying his wingspan would aid him in his quest to get through the window. “Falcons are cool,” everyone said.
I was kayaking the Chattooga of Deliverance fame when I took a break to have a snack. I picked a boulder in the river in a rapid for my picnic table. So as I’m sitting in the bottom of this huge gorge on a rock in a river on a perfect day by myself and I spot a peregrine falcon about 100 yards away who proceeds to fly 3 feet over my head and down the river.
There are falcons that next on the ledge outside where one of my relatives works in Baltimore–he’s always entertaining us with stories about how they have to put up sheets of paper in the windows when the hatchlings are learning to fly (so they don’t fly straight into them) and about how lovely it is to watch them having snacks outside the window while he’s trying to work…
Try this site as well. It’s a webcam set up on the Kodak building in Rochester New York. The pictures are supposed to refresh once a minute. There’s a main camera, and a place to click on to get four other views. The young falcons are fledging, and have already been banded. Kodak set the whole thing up, and this is the sixth year. And yes, falcons are cool.
More screetching by one of the adults. It was lunch time a few hours ago, and there’s what’s left of a sparrow sitting on the paralegal’s window sill. Nice. But very cool.
I saw a peregrine at Bosque Del Apache wildlife refuge 20 years ago. As it flew by a bunch of shorebirds became very agitated, though it didn’t stoop on them.
I wonder how often they actually catch their prey when they go after it. I’ve seen plenty of hawks, falcons, and eagles hunting and almost every time I’ve watched the prey escaped. I saw a kestrel catch a mouse a long time ago and I may have seen ospreys grabbing fish when I was a kid, but that’s about it. I’ve heard that predatory animals may have to go after their prey species a dozen times before they encounter something that doesn’t move fast enough and thus becomes their dinner, and that the ones who are incompetent hunters or who just plain have bad luck simply starve.