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.
A quick update.
It seems as if the museum pair has finally stopped laying eggs! They are still around, but we are seeing less of them as time goes on. It’s been a week since the last egg was lost and no one has seen any copulation since. Hopefully, Helen and Mr. M. will be back next year.
The huge roof renovation here at the museum should be done sometime this fall. At that point, we’ll install a nest box. Hopefully Helen and Mr. M. will actually use the box in lieu of laying their eggs in such precarious spots!
Anyway, the final tally. Helen and Mr. M. lost a whopping NINE eggs this season. Now, that is persistence. Here’s the timing:
4/7: 1st egg lost (museum)
4/8: 2nd egg lost (museum)
4/12: 3rd egg lost (museum)
4/18: 4th egg abandoned (museum)
4/22: 5th egg lost (museum)
5/9: 6th and 7th eggs abandoned (construction site)
5/21: 8th and 9th eggs lost (museum)
We will all keep our fingers crossed for next year. As for now, the pair looks very healthy and continue to hunt the area.
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.
Wow, Helen and Mr. M. sure are persistent! After losing now SIX eggs here at the museum, they’ve gone on to lay yet MORE eggs at another site!
Last week, Mary got a call from the foreman working on construction of a nearby skyscraper. It seems as though a pair of peregrines had decided to nest at the construction site. Since we’d lost track of Helen and Mr. M. and the site was SO close to the museum, all of us had our suspicions regarding who the pair might be, but today we went to find out for sure.
Helen seems to be a most determined bird. Today, we had a fifth egg broken on the museum steps. I really feel bad for the museum pair and dearly hope that they return next year. Two of the display guys have agreed to build a/the box/boxes, so we know they will be phenomenal. Mary takes this all in stride. After 20+ years doing this, she has seen it all. I am having a bit of a harder time not feeling just terrible about the whole thing, but that’s life in this sort of program!
Jeez, I almost wonder when Helen, the museum female, will quit trying to lay eggs in her lop-sided home. Today, we found another egg splat on the north steps. Mary and I picked up what remained of the shell and stored the shards with the remains of the other 3 eggs.
I asked Mary if she thought Helen would become calcium deficient and she said that she thought not. Four eggs is not any big feat for peregrines and Helen will likely realize that the nest has failed soon and either move to another spot or come back to try again next year.
We take comfort in the idea that the museum pair seems determined to nest on our beautiful building and hope to have some swanky accommodations for them in time for next season.
After several days of not seeing the Museum pair, Mary and I felt sure that they’d moved on for the season. But, this morning as I came into work, I saw the familiar silhouette atop the museum roof, just not in the familiar place.
It seems Mr. M. and Helen have changed venues. They sat near one another on the southwestern side of the building, Mr. M. on the tip of the curly ornament and Helen on the ledge beneath.
I settled on a picnic table beneath them to watch for a bit. After about five minutes, Mr. M. hopped from his perch, arced around in the air and landed atop Helen. So, they were still trying!
After that short episode (sorry, Mr. M.!), he returned to his previous perch and called down to Helen. She disappeared from view into the gutter. Oh dear. From a slanted floor to a gutter - not the right move, guys!
Three Eeee-ggs Lost!
Two Le-eg Bands!
AND SOME PERE-GRI- iiiNES IN OUR CIiiii-TY!
*ahem*
An exciting day today!
First, an update on the museum pair. We’ve been checking the stairs outside the north entrance diligently and haven’t seen any more egg splats. On the sad side, we’ve seen very little of Helen and Mr. M as well. I will hope that they’ve gone to another site to lay eggs in a less precarious place, but time will tell. This follows the same cycle as last year, so I suspect we may not see them again until next season.
Helen and her unbanded mate at the Field Museum lost another egg today (a grand total now of three). Boooo!! It seems that the ledge is tilted outward, so the eggs roll off shortly after Helen lays them.
While we would love to go fix the problem immediately, as always, challenges exist. I am not going to go into specifics, but I can say that putting nest boxes on buildings, especially historic sorts of buildings, isn’t an easy process. It requires a lot of planning and discussion with many folks. As well, as Mary has pointed out time and again - putting a nest box up does not, in any way, insure the birds will use it. There are several sites where nest boxes were installed DIRECTLY on the exact spot the peregrines tried to nest during the season and the following season, Mary and company would find the birds sitting at the opposite end of the building from the box.
At about 11am yesterday morning, my boss Carl came into my office.
“Hey,” he said. “I was just outside on the north side of the building and I noticed a broken egg right under the peregrine nest. Maybe you want to go check it out?”
Indeed. I grabbed my things and hurried over to the bird department to let Mary know. About five minutes later, we stood outside on the stairway, looking down at a big egg splat. The egg had basically disintegrated on impact, but we managed to find enough shell to verify that it belonged to a peregrine.
After collecting as much debris as we could and taking a number of photos for documentation, we backed off to search the building for a perched peregrine. I got my camera out and pumped it up to full zoom, managing to capture a photo of the very top of a peregrine head back in the shadows of the nest area. The other one wasn’t around.