By Rochester Falcon Watcher MAK

Twas a nice warm morning with a starting temperature at 6am of 53 (F) 12 (C) and heading to the 70s this afternoon with overcast skies

When I left for my watch Dot.Ca (DC) was incubating his eggs on livestream. Initially I didn’t find Beauty but as I checked from the Andrews St. bridge (ASB) I spotted her on the base of Mercury. I drove to the Broad St. bridge straight away and she left soon after I got there at 6:30am.

Beauty slipped off the back of the base where I couldn’t see her and that would be the last I saw of her for the next 2 hours. I noticed a duck on the east (river) side roof edge of the Thomson Reuters building-I can’t remember ever seeing a duck on a roof. Maybe there are eggs up there-oh boy, not a good place mama if there is a nest. A male, probably her mate showed up a long while later but I don’t know if he flew in or was up there because I wasn’t present t the time. I was driving around looking for Beauty.

I checked the Brighton site in between around 7:30am and found there to be no falcons. It’s a real concern having 2 females-1 adult and 1 juvenile hanging around north of the city only a couple miles away from downtown on Seneca Towers and Kodak Park on Lake Ave. They could challenge for Beauty and DCs nest and territory since it doesn’t appear that either one has a mate. So when I returned to downtown I started getting a little antsy over not seeing Beauty still-then a tweet came while I was checking Kodak Office (KO) from Larry saying he had a falcon flying above Xerox. I drove to Woodbury St. on the east side to check it out but saw no falcon. Larry then tweeted a falcon flying west so then I drove to the BSB and met up with him. We talked a bit then Larry left to walk Harold and I drove north to look for Beauty. As I was on my way both Donna and Larry reported a falcon on cam 1 so I went to the hole to see the Beautyful one on cam 1 at around 8:30am.

A teller from Keybank stopped to ask about the falcons-Beauty left cam 1 when I wasn’t looking and after the woman left for work I saw who looked like Beauty on the Mercury money bag.

The back lighting from the sun made it hard for a good view and I got a tweet from Larry that DC left and Beauty was now incubating, hmmm. I went up to the BSB for a better angle but Beauty left Mercury before I got there. Donna finally cleared it up for me-Beauty flew to Mercury from cam 1 then went to nest box and that was all done in less than a minute. Peregrines are very fast movers! I also received tweets from cam watchers Ei and Carly that Beauty was on the eggs as well around 9am. Thanks to all that helped me this morning!  So now I needed to find DC before I could end my watch and after checking the usual places surrounding the Times Square area I went north to find DC on the northeast corner of the Kodak Office launchpad. I stopped first on State St. south of KO, and DC gave me the signal to go forward. lol

So I parked north of KO to see the front of him-he flew off a minute later heading west before going into a stoop.

He returned less than a minute later, circled above KO a couple times then flew back to the launchpad. i think he was trying to flush prey out from the building.

I said my good byes and ended my watch at 9:15am. It was an unusual watch but successful without incident and surely worth smiling about! 🙂

Click on the links below to view todays videos

http://youtu.be/Q1XuRaUsCCw

http://youtu.be/T-kOg5HMX9Y

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2014 at 1:56 PM and is filed under Falcon Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.