By Rochester Falcon Watcher MAK

It was calm,cold and overcast with no sun this morning. With a moderate sized storm coming tomorrow I’m not sure that I’ll go downtown in the morning. The forecast calls for 6-12 inches of snow by the end of it all on Saturday. I’ll have to wait and see what develops to determine if it’s worth going on a watch or not. If it’s snowing too hard to see a falcon there isn’t much point in risking the drive.

I arrived downtown at about 7:05am and as I drove up Broad St. I spotted Beauty on the money bag of Mercury straight away.

Whoa,where’s her head? Oh yeah, click the pic to see the full version LOL

I first drove down to the hole and decided with the sunrise behind Beauty all the pics would be silhouetted so I went up to the Broad St. Bridge to view her. Right after I got situated the Aqueduct pigeons came flying up and as they flew across the bridge I looked at Beauty to see if she would take a shot at them but she just watched them go land on the Blue Cross Arena. She stayed up on her statue looking to and fro until until 7:30am and then she was off.

Remember to click the pics

The Beautyful one flew across the river, above the Radisson Hotel and then she turned right flying southward behind Chase ending up in front of Bausch&Lomb where she took a left and headed east where I lost sight of her behind Xerox. I gave it a few minutes and when she didn’t return I drove to the east side finding her on the west side of HSBC smack dab in the middle on the edge of the roof.

I was in a busy rush hour spot on Court St. by Xerox so I drove to Chestnut St. to park which wasn’t a good angle but definitely safer.

Unfortunately her back was to me as is the case most of the time when you are falcon watching -but it makes it that much more special when you can observe them facing you. Pigeons were scattered all over the immediate area flying in panic mode and again Beauty didn’t go after any of them. Hmm. I stayed there with Beauty for about an hour before she flew off heading north at just before 8:30am. I took off for the Brighton Site at that point but nobody was home over there. I stayed 45 minutes waiting for a pefa to visit but it didn’t happen. I would have stayed longer but I had a ten o’clock appointment so off I went to make one last check of downtown. As I pulled up to the light at Court St. and Exchange Blvd. I spotted a dark bump on the northwest corner of the Crossroads building.

I pulled over on Exchange St. in front of the Philipone building directly across from the Times Square building and took a couple pics. It looked like she had a full crop.

I ended my watch at 9:50am.  For some places in the New England states tomorrows N’oreaster could be a historical event. For us here in Western New York it will not be too big of a deal but being a snow lover I will be smiling! 🙂

Click the links below for videos from todays watch

http://youtu.be/0B0eFIeM3dQ
http://youtu.be/Bd4KhpNH0pc
http://youtu.be/PWTeq-7veGY
http://youtu.be/TEzx_CA5WFU

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2013 at 4:46 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.