I'm bringing home a baby peregrine

April 28, 2016 4:05 PM

Watch live: falcon eggs about to hatch in downtown NYC! "Adele and Frank, two Peregrine falcons that call 55 Water Street their home, are expecting five baby falcons. Falcons have been nesting at the building on and off since the 1990s."
posted by moonmilk (31 comments total)

Birbs! Baby birbs!

Well, not yet. Just a momma birb right now.
posted by SansPoint at 4:51 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

A momma, some eggs, and a PILE OF BONES
posted by moonmilk at 5:01 PM on April 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

Wait this is my building?

How had I not heard about this? What floor are they on?
posted by thecaddy at 5:06 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

oh hello! there was at least one animate pile of white floof visible for a moment there, when mama bird got up and changed position.
posted by karayel at 5:08 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Looks like 14th floor, according to this page on 55 Water's web site.

They also have their own falcon cam page, showing the same stream as WNYC's.
posted by moonmilk at 5:09 PM on April 28, 2016

My favorite New York birds this year are the red-tailed hawk pair that picked a lawn chair on a fire escape for their nest.
posted by tavella at 5:09 PM on April 28, 2016 [9 favorites]

The Harrisburg falcons have already hatched out, and spend their time huddling together and sometimes awkwardly flopping around. It's great! Plus everyone assumes I'm talking about sports when I announce I'm going to check how the falcons are doing.
posted by blnkfrnk at 5:09 PM on April 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

I just learned a new word from that 55 Water site: eyas or eyass: a young hawk.
posted by moonmilk at 5:11 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

TINY BIRB WATCH
posted by poffin boffin at 5:20 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

🐣
posted by moonmilk at 5:21 PM on April 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

god i thought that was a chicken nugget and was torn between utter outrage and delighted admiration
posted by poffin boffin at 5:27 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

You can also watch the San Jose falcons, which have hatched and even been banded already.
posted by gingerbeer at 5:59 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

The San Francisco peregrines on the PG&E building are currently a sleeping pile of fluff.
posted by rtha at 6:22 PM on April 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

There is a family of eagles in Pennsylvania causing internet chaos because they ate a cat on livestream. See here..
posted by Fig at 7:06 PM on April 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

We have a pair of peregrines in Chicago - Steve and Linda Perry.
posted by bibliogrrl at 8:42 PM on April 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Video of the fluffy San Jose peregrine eyasses getting banded.
posted by gingerbeer at 10:16 PM on April 28, 2016

Americans are really not letting raptors have any privacy at all, are we?
posted by ardgedee at 2:21 AM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Mama got up - I see two chicks and three eggs now.
posted by Gordafarin at 2:32 AM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

There is a family of eagles in Pennsylvania causing internet chaos because they ate a cat on livestream.

Looking at the Harrisburg peregrines right now, and they're huddled by themselves.

My husband thinks the falcons heard about what the neighbors did for their kids, and are now out looking for a deer to one-up them.
posted by gnomeloaf at 6:09 AM on April 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

U. Pitt's peregrines just hatched the first of their four eggs. Which is extra-exciting since it wasn't clear that the first three were going to hatch at all. (Laid quite a bit earlier than the fourth, then our falcon lost her mate, re-mated, and laid the fourth. It was unclear if the earlier clutch had been incubated sufficiently to hatch.) It's a dramatic year for Pennsylvania birds, apparently.
posted by Stacey at 6:18 AM on April 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Americans are really not letting raptors have any privacy at all, are we?

Nope! We almost killed them off with DDT, you see, so we feel very smug that we managed not to and very proprietary towards their existence. What a miracle they are!
posted by epanalepsis at 6:53 AM on April 29, 2016

Looking at the Harrisburg peregrines right now, and they're huddled by themselves.

They're currently devouring a pigeon.

Around Pitt and CMU's campuses we have a few raptors (glad to hear the Cathedral falcons hatched at least one!) and I used to regularly watch them nail pigeons outside my window in Baker Hall. fffffOOOOOMMMMM *feathers*
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:55 AM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

All the Pittsburgh-area nestcams can be found here: http://www.aviary.org/nestcams

Two sets of peregrines and two sets of bald eagles (but one of the peregrine nest sites seems to have been abandoned this year).
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:57 AM on April 29, 2016

I've been hooked on the Pitt Cathedral of Learning falcons all spring - there's been a lot of drama, as Stacey noted (even more if you consider that last year our former 16-year old falcon matriarch hatched only one egg, who sadly died of developmental defects). After everything that's happened it's so exciting to see that the first chick has hatched! Go, Hope and Terzo!

Throughout all the excitement, I've also learned a lot about falcons from the blog of our resident Pitt falcon watcher, Kate St. John; she does bird monthly bird walks, too, that I keep wanting to get out to. The other day I caught myself browsing binoculars on Amazon - I think these falcons are sloooowly edging me into birding ...
posted by DingoMutt at 8:20 AM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

My favorite thing about the lawn-chair hawks is how gloriously half-assed their nest is. Red-tails in cities will often use human, pre-made items as a base for their nests, but they'll usually build a proper nest on top. Those two, they basically chucked a few twigs on top and called it good. It's peregrine falcon levels of half-assing a nest. A little dirt or gravel, peregrines will plunk their eggs down and call it good.

I figure they are either very young and inexperienced, or they are the next level of red-tail evolution. Pale Male was the pioneer in realizing that in cities, you don't need trees for a nest, but he and his descendants still faithfully built the same solid structures that you need to make a stable platform for your eggs and nestlings when propped among branches. The kind of structure peregrines have given up because you don't actually need it in a cave or on a cliff.
posted by tavella at 8:28 AM on April 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I used to regularly watch them nail pigeons outside my window in Baker Hall. fffffOOOOOMMMMM *feathers*

I would like to go back in time to my years in various offices in Baker Hall and lodge a complaint that I never got a window with a view of Raptor Lunchtime.
posted by Stacey at 8:58 AM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

The university I went to had a koi-filled reflecting pond that one can only assume looked like a giant plate of sushi to the raptors who come diving down from on high to feast.
posted by looli at 9:40 AM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

The mother falcon at our Pitt nest killed her second chick as soon as it hatched this afternoon =( Nobody seems to be sure why (though I keep seeing speculation that something must have been wrong with the chick).

The drama at the Cathedral continues! These webcams are such wonderful looks into wild creatures' lives, but sometimes it's hard to watch ...
posted by DingoMutt at 5:45 PM on April 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Oh, the raptor drama! I think it was last season that there was a cam on an osprey nest in I think Florida where the female or maybe one of the other hatchlings killed a nestling - on camera - and oh my did viewers set fire to the comment thread with demands to DO SONETHING and insults to people who were like uh, maybe we shouldn't do something.
posted by rtha at 6:21 PM on April 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

The university I went to had a koi-filled reflecting pond that one can only assume looked like a giant plate of sushi to the raptors who come diving down from on high to feast.

A friend of mine grew up in Los Gatos and she tells the story better, but her parents were determined to have a fish pond in their yard and took great measures to fend off the egrets that showed up for the buffet.
posted by blnkfrnk at 1:02 PM on April 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

oh my did viewers set fire to the comment thread with demands to DO SONETHING

Ha, the Pitt falcon posts and FB have been blowing up, too - people keep commenting that the previous Cathedral female would NEVER have done such a thing because she was a "REAL MOM", or that the male is totally to blame because he didn't bring a meal right away, etc ... people are outraged at these falcons!

Throughout it all, the person who runs that blog I'd mentioned earlier has done a great job of trying to bring everyone back to earth. I have to think it would be hard not to speculate, but she just keeps repeating that what happened was indeed unusual, that not even the experts know why it occurred, and that all we can do is watch (or turn off the camera if it's upsetting) ... I'm continuing to watch because it is amazing to realize how little we actually know about the creatures that are right here in our space with us, and I feel lucky to live in a time when we can see what happens in a nest (though I am hoping for happier outcomes for the rest of the chicks :)
posted by DingoMutt at 3:40 PM on April 30, 2016