A rainy fledge (less) watch- July 31, 2012, 6:30-8:30 PM
By Rochester Falcon Watcher Jeanne
I arrived to a still rainy downtown at 6:30. I met up with Joyce and MAK who were watching from the car. I joined them. I saw Beauty fly off and we found her beneath the Widows walk. She appeared to be eating. Back on the bridge, we got a tweet from Dana saying Orion was perched on the nestbox. The watchers had felt he was ready to fledge earlier in the day but the storms and his parents put an end to that! Beauty brought in food but made 3 passes in front of Orion. We weren’t sure if she was carrying something heavy causing her to not get lift or if she was trying to entice Orion to fly. It looked, at that time, like the prey was heavy. She flew off. She returned again making 4 passes in front of Orion (that looked like an enticement) and finally went to the platform to feed him. DC arrived at that time also and went to his spot on the rings of the Times Square building. Beauty went beneath the wing. He moved around quite a bit and at one point went toward camera 4 but went back from it. It looked like the wind pushed him back. We were joined by Carrie, Shaky and Diana R. Dotca went to Mercury, the statue across from the building, after eating some of the leftovers on the platform. Orion did a lot of pacing back and forth on the wall. And lots of screeching! Beauty kept an eye on him from above. (Every now and then we could see Orion look up at her and she would look down at him). Her tail feathers were quite wet and straggly.
Finally he went into the nestbox and we left!
