By Rochester falcon watcher MAK

Todays temperatures were much more comfortable than the last few days with clouds to begin my watch. As the bus made it’s way down Main St. I checked the jail tower,Frontier Communications tower,Widows Walk and the back of the Times Square building. No pefa bumps so when I got off the bus just before 8:00am I walked straight to the Broad St. bridge. Nothing on the Wilder building,Mercury,OCSR,Xerox or Bausch & Lomb. As I looked down river to the north toward the High Falls area I spotted a bump on a brick stack that is located further down river from High Falls.

After zooming the pic on my camera I still couldn’t be sure if it was a falcon or a hawk but it did seem to be perched like a pefa to me. I thought perhaps it was Beauty and I had found her hiding place when I can’t find her as I knew Dot.Ca(DC) was on the eggs since Donna helped me out with that info. Thank you! About 20 minutes passed when DC flew out of the nest box and another 20 minutes went by before he returned and landed on cam 4.  I couldn’t tell at the time but he had prey with him.

DC flew off a few minutes later, circled above the Philipone building and landed under the northeast wing only to take off again behind the Times Square building out of view.

Less than 5 minutes later DC came flying in from the west and landed next to the main cam. I was so hoping he would get back on the eggs as it had been a half hour since he was on them.

Well he didn’t do that, instead he flew back out again and went behind the building out of view once more before returning to land on the other side of the main cam.

I was right below the nest box at this point and my view of things was very limited so I walked back up to the bridge to better keep track of things. I was really wishing the Beautyful one would show up and get on those eggs to rid me of my anxiety about them not being covered for close to an hour at that point. I thought maybe DC was trying to lure Beauty to the nest box by flying around the area cuz he wanted to take a break to eat since he was carrying prey around with him. Next he flew in the nest box with his small bloody morsel and plopped himself near the eggs with it. He soon flew out landed on the roof of the nest box and quickly went back into the scrape and back out again and came to rest under the southwest wing. I blinked and he was gone from there and next thing I knew Donna was texting me that he was back on the eggs! We were both relieved to have him back on incubation duty. Boy he sure had me hopping for an hour. I walked further east on the Broad St. bridge to check that stack which had the bird on it earlier to find it was not there anymore.

I went down by the Rundell library at the east end of the bridge and sat down at one of the picnic tables. After an hour I texted Donna to see when DC relieved Beauty this morning and she said at 5:43am, so it had been a 4 hour break for her at this point. I noticed the Powers building was getting it’s windows washed as I peered in that direction and then I stretched my legs out and checked down in the river to see a Great Blue Heron looking to catch some breakfast. Around an hour later as I looked up toward the scrape I caught DC flying out from the nest box and disappearing behind the Times Square building. I kept my eyes on the nest box area hoping to see Beauty fly in to take over when I got a tweet from Ei that my favorite female falcon was on the eggs. Oy, she had snuck in there on me again! lol I figured she would be in there for a while and DC probably went to see Pigott over at the Brighton site so I decided to end my watch and head down to the bus stop. I was thankful to see DC do some flying as my last few watches didn’t produce any action to speak of and so I left downtown smiling. 🙂

Click on the link below for a few more pics from my watch

http://pix.kg/p/230162195213%3A975905425/scl

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 at 3:46 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.