18th July

Peregrine Falcon:

On Tuesday morning while do some early morning monitoring of the birds it became evident that that something wasn’t right. We, that is Paul and I from our vantage point could only see the adult female and she was tucking into a feral pigeon. She was chupping away as if she was hoping that at least one of the 3 juvs would come in for some food. This didn’t happen in the 40 or so minutes that we watched her, twice she made to short flights taking the prey item with her and returning to the same building. Not long after arriving on site I thought I heard the sound of Peregrines calling but it sounded slightly mechanical and only lasted for a few seconds. It wasn’t until we were just about to leave that we heard the call again, it wasn’t far off. In fact we new exactly where it was coming from. We rushed over to the building and made our way up several flights of stairs.

We opened up the door on the top floor and were stunned to see the juv male and female sat there. They were startled by our presence and began flying along the narrow roof space, luckily avoiding girders as they went. It was or so I thought going to be very tricky catching them, but within a couple of minutes I had caught the young male. He possibly recognised me from our meeting a few weeks back as he promptly stuck his talon in the palm of my hand. It took a few seconds for Paul to get to me having captured the capture on his camera. This we are unfortunately unable to show you for the birds benefit, not to save me from any embarrassment movements that I carried out. We were really worried that the female being so much larger was going to come to some harm. However her flying skills were quite remarkable as she ducked a dived over the girders. I again caught her within a couple of minutes, my years of catching ducks by hand came in very useful. By the time she was free the flow of blood from my flesh wounds had stopped, though there was a little on her feathers.