Yesterday (the 16th), Dan Cozza sent Mary and I email saying he’d seen a peregrine chick on the jail ledge on his way into work at 7am! I’d spent a large amount of time on the ‘el platform beneath the ledges over the weekend and had some suspicion we’d be seeing the chicks soon. They were very, very noisy and active in the nest.

I hustled over after work to take a look and ‘lo! A chick! So, this morning, I got up extra early so I could go check them out before work. As I rounded the corner on Clark, I immediately saw not one chick, but three!

I watched them for quite some time. One of the chicks is huge - so, a female who takes after her mother. One of the chicks is pretty small and has almost no puffs of baby down left - so, a male! The other one is sort of in between. I’ve been vacillating back and forth between a large male and a small female.

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Hi all! Here’s a quick update on bandings.

5821 N Broadway - Three chicks, two females and one male, were banded on May 28th.

Evanston Library - Four chicks, three females and one male, were banded on May 30th.

Waukegan - Five chicks, three females and two males, were banded on June 2nd.

125 S. Wacker - Banding to take place this week.

Uptown Theater - Banding to take place next week.

University of Illinois at Chicago - Banding to take place next week.

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Hi all! Just a quick note to say that Matt and Mary have successfully banded the four Evanston Library chicks! Since Mary and I were able to get the adult IDs in an earlier trip, I decided not to go up this year for the banding. I am going to save my extra hours to attend some bandings where we don’t have both adult IDs. Here’s a short VIDEO. As usual, it was VERY well attended.

The library folks have come up with great names for their three girls and one boy:

• Neal - for Neal Ney, semi-professional bird and nature lover, former Evanston Public Library Director.
• Brigid - for Brigid O’Shaughnessy the main female character in the Maltese Falcon.
• Mistress Hussey - for Mistress Margaret Hussey who was compared to a falcon by poet John Skelton.
• Rebecca - for Rebecca West the author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia.

Congratulations Evanston!

Oh man, did I get behind! My life has been so busy of late, I haven’t had time to keep up with anything, but I am terribly sorry for the lack of updates! I’ll go back and fill in some of the blanks over the weekend, but let me start with a quick recap of this month’s events. I’ve written some more detailed entries, but haven’t posted them. I’ll try to backdate and post them over the long weekend. Anywho! Without further ado:

125 S. Wacker Falcons - The male at Wacker has been confirmed as Joe (b/g 59/H). Joe replaced last year’s male Etienne, as Etienne died over the winter. The female has yet to be confirmed, but is most likely Rahn, the female from last year. We were all very pleased to see that Rahn found a mate in time for this nesting season after the loss of Etienne in January. Joe and probably-Rahn are currently busy taking care of four chicks and we should be banding them shortly after Evanston.

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Today, Mary and I went up to Evanston for our annual “Pub Outing and Peregrine Watch”. Yay!

We arrived in Evanston at around 10:30am. Immediately, we spotted an adult sitting on the crossbeam above the nest, so we hustled into the library to see if we could get a good look at its bands from the second floor window.

As I’ve mentioned here and there, the faithful little Panasonic camera that had been my constant companion throughout peregrine seasons past died over the winter. We replaced it with a Canon 40d and added a very nice 70-200mm lens to the package. I am forever grateful for the Panasonic, as it was the perfect tool on which to learn the ins and outs of digital photography. However, the Canon is light years better, though it requires much more skill to operate effectively and is MUCH less low profile.

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I wish we had nest cameras at ALL of our sites. It is such a very cool thing to be able to take a bit of time out of your work day and click in to watch wild peregrines doing their breeding thang!

Today, I had a busy day here in the Insect department, as we are preparing our collection for a new databasing system at the museum. It’s all very cool and I can’t wait until we have our stuff perfectly cataloged and such.

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Here is Mary’s final report! Sorry it’s a bit late posting, but I’ve been a busy girl! This year, I’ve decided to help the Chicago Bird and Collision Monitors and Flint Creek Wildlife Rehab by transporting the DOA birds from Flint Creek to the Field Museum. As well, I’ve been out there with my camera, trying to get pictures of some of the migrants to add to my Chicago Bird Field Guide project. I’ve had a very successful Palm Warbler and Ovenbird year, but haven’t gotten many other good pictures. Oh, well, it’s a work in progress!

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Another banding day!

Yesterday, Mary offered me a ride up to Evanston for banding, but I decided to forgo the offer. Instead, I took the purple line ‘el because it allowed me time on the VanBuren platform, by far the best monitoring perch for the MCC nest this year.

I left home at 7:45am, figuring that would leave plenty of time to get to Evanston by 9am. Riiiight. Maybe the purple line has only been allotted two trains or something, but it took a good half hour for a train to show up - silver lining, though, plenty of time to monitor the MCC without risking getting kicked off the platform! While I didn’t see any chicks, I did hear them. Over the traffic noise below, I could distinctly hear chick cheeps from the nest and noted at least one of the adults in the area at all times. Good!

I finally got on the train at 8:20am and boy, was that ride up to Evanston slow. The CTA is currently doing major renovations to some of the stations and the construction delays were pretty severe. The delays did allow me to get a nice long look at both the Broadway and Uptown nesting locations, where I got to see both pairs cruising around above the nesting sites.

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ACTIVE SITES, NESTING VERIFIED

5821 N. Broadway
Adult female Auntie Em (b/g 5/*P, 1999, Milwaukee, WI) and adult male Tracy (b/g *P/M, 1997 Broadway, Chicago, IL) had five eggs. The first chick was sighted on May 9th.

Belmont & LSD
In the fall of 2006, a pair of peregrines began using the ledges of a building near Belmont and Lake Shore Drive. On November 21, 2006 the female was identified as Ballistic (b/g 69/C, 2005, Cleveland, OH) and the male was identified only as far as having a b/g band. We received no new reports regarding this pair again until then end of April 2007. Apparently, two eggs were laid in a gutter and lost during a rainstorm on 4/2/07. Ballistic was reported at the end of March over at St. Michael’s, paired with adult male Hops (see St. Michael’s below).

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I met Mary at the museum at 8am. We had a fairly big mission for the day, which would require us to travel all over the Chicago metro area. A number of adult birds remained unidentified, so we planned to start at Evanston and work our way down through the city to Hyde Park, identifying as we went.

We arrived at the Evanston Library at 8:45pm and quickly scanned the sky and known perches. Neither of us saw any sign of the adults, so we decided to go inside and wait. As I might have mentioned, the Evanston nest has a web camera and we set up shop at a table near the base of that. It isn’t possible to see the actual nest from inside the library (a good thing for the birds), but the adults tend to land on the beam above the nest and that is visible. In fact, that’s where Mary and I got the female’s leg band number last year.

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