By Rochester Falcon Watcher MAK

Well on this first day of November which is usually the dreariest month of the year around here, it certainly lived up to that statement as dark,dismal and rainy conditions were the story this morning. Add to that the fact that I never found Beauty until the 4th hour of my watch and you have the makings of a dark,dismal mood for this watcher! I gave up on finding our Beautyful girl after searching for an hour thus trying my luck over at the Brighton site. It turned out to work in my favor as I found Dot.Ca on the west end of the vent in the back of the building.

He spent a lot of the time I observed him looking up. I don’t know if he was scanning the sky for Pigott or prey for I didn’t see anything above him with my mere human eyes! Less than 5 minutes after I found him Dot.Ca dove off the vent and in a flash flew as fast as I’ve ever seen a falcon fly to the south and quickly left my field of vision. I had gotten a take off shot but he was so amazingly fast that it was nothing but a blur and impossible to determine that it was a falcon! 5 minutes later he returned and came to rest on a south east corner.

He was  looking up from this perch as well! He graced me with his presence for about 20 minutes and then he left again. I waited for a few minutes to see if he would come back but he did not, so I returned to downtown to try and find Beauty. She sure was messing with old MAK today as I drove around the city many times searching for her. After an hour I went over to the Pont de Rennes pedestrian bridge at high falls to check out the falls and see if  by chance Beauty was hunting in the gorge. No pefa but I found the high falls to be rushing down with more force than I have ever seen there. The island was completely under water and the stack at Beebee Station had a lot of the plastic put on it by demolition crews torn away by the winds of super storm Sandy.

I checked downtown again with no luck and drove myself over to KP where I was no more successful at finding a falcon there as I was in our fair city. This of course meant more trips around the streets of Rochester looking for the elusive bird of prey we call Beauty. Finally while stopped on the Broad St. bridge just shy of 4 hours after I began my watch I spotted her on the top ibeam near the south corner of OCSR. Yahooooo!! I went to the hole on Aqueduct St. for a closer look.

It started to rain as she sat perched up there with her back to me and she kept looking over her shoulder. Hmmm, looking for Dot.Ca or prey. Maybe, just maybe she was looking for MAK because as I got ready to end my watch the last pic shows her head cranked all the way over to my direction. Stay safe my feathered friends for I won’t see you for a while.  Keep smiling everybody!  🙂

Click the links below for a couple videos from my watch

http://youtu.be/RrQ0OffLOK0
http://youtu.be/iMoaQGdL-8U

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2012 at 2:26 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.