By Rochester falcon watcher MAK

When I went to bed last night it was very windy and raining. As I looked out the window after waking up this morning it was still windy but there was now blowing snow and a couple inches of snow on the ground.  I thought what fun it will be to find a falcon in this stuff! I waited until about noon for Joyce to pick me up for a watch and then off we went to the snowy city of Rochester. We drove around looking for 45 minutes with no sighting and then picked up Brian. We returned to downtown and still had no luck finding a falcon. No doubt with the inclement weather Unity was hunkered down somewhere that we couldn’t find her. Probably saying to herself stupid humans! lol

We decided to check Charlotte for the Snowy Owl and struck out there too. Continuing on to Irondequoit and Seabreeze where we found a guy I referred to as surfer boy getting into the water at the bay outlet with yes you guessed a surf board and a paddle!

We then drove over to the other end of the Irondequoit Bay to look for the Bald Eagles that nest there. Again we didn’t see anything. At this point we wondering if the whole day would be a bust. We headed back to the city and checked all around-nothing! We dropped Brian off at his house and went back downtown for one more shot at it. We watchers just hate to get skunked! Joyce and I looked pretty much every where. We parked for quite a while on the Broad St. bridge when Joyce asked me where we should go next and I said lets try the Court St. bridge for a different angle on the east side buildings. Turns out that was a good decision for almost as soon as we stopped the car Joyce spotted Unity on the lower roof of Bausch and Lomb northeast corner which you can’t see from the Broad St. bridge.

I was only able to get the 3 photos before she was off and flying to the east behind the Xerox tower and out of view. We drove down to the east side of the HSBC building to see Unity flying above and disappearing headed north. That was the last time we saw this big girl. As we searched for her to no avail,we then went over to the Andrews St. bridge where Joyce spotted something on  a building ledge across  St. Paul St. on Andrews St. As we got closer we could see that it was a Red-tail Hawk and it flew off as we approached landing on a stockade fence across the street.

Just look at that red tail! He quickly flew down on the other side of the fence and came back up with a mouse or other rodent and flew out of sight with it in his talons.The sun was going down so we took one more look around downtown and called it quits.

May I just say how extremely happy I am to hear the good report on Beauty! It makes me smile as it should everyone! 🙂

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2012 at 9:13 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.