By Rochester Falcon Watcher Carol P.

Temps started at 27 degrees this morning, but it got up into the mid-40’s during the day.  The big difference?  Sun!  Glorious Sun!

Beauty was reported being seen first by Debbie H.  Here is her tweet sent at 8:20 am – “Good Morning. Beauty on Jail Tower. Saw her chasing pigeons!”

Here is Brian H’s report from 2:40 pm – “B is standing regally atop Mercury’s raised hand. Coop was chasing pigeons around Monroe and Alexander.”

I was able to start my Watch at 3:45 pm, first checking out the KP area, where I found no Peregrine Falcons.  But I did find a hunting juvenile Red-tailed Hawk.  I could tell it was a juvenile because the tail had not turned the beautiful red that they get when they are adults.  This young hawk was on top of one of the telephone poles near the road.  As I was texting, the RTH took off and dropped into the field in front of me.  It wasn’t long before he launched himself out of the field and flew right towards me holding a small rodent, mouse, mole vole?  I couldn’t believe it when the hawk landed on a light pole very close to where I was parked!  He very quickly ate his meal and then stood up straight and immediately went back into hunt mode. I zoomed way in on the last pic to check the hawks legs.   This one was not banded.  It was an adult I saw that had a band on one leg.  This may have been her kid.  🙂

I arrived downtown at around 4:15 pm.  I looked all over and finally found Beauty on the back side of the Jail Comm Tower.  I could not see her from the Broad St Bridge.  For some reason my tweet reporting this did not make it to the forum.  In this picture, she had her back to me.

While I was trying to find Beauty, I noticed that her friends the Starlings were back on the Widows Walk.  I couldn’t help but think how cool it would be if they were all different colors.  Like birdy Christmas lights decorating the WW.  lol   I watched her for awhile, but because I was quickly losing light, I decided to check on the BS location to see if Pigott was home.

The Crows were in full force, swarming in from the south and heading towards downtown Rochester.  I could not find Pigott, but I noticed that some of the Crows bee-lined for the BS building and kind of dove down towards the roof of the building at the west end.  Quite a few Crows repeated this little maneuver.  I think I had my answer when finally, on my 3rd trip around the building, I found Pigott up on a corner on the west side (5:10 pm).  Most of the Crows were gone and she finally felt secure enough to show herself.  Or she came in after they left.  I couldn’t be sure.

Here is a picture of a very small sliver of a moon, from the BS location.  The second picture is one from the Ford St Bridge, on my trip back downtown to check on Beauty one more time.  If you look carefully, you can see lots of Crows in the sky beyond the bridge.

By the time I arrived back downtown it was totally dark (5:30 pm).  Beauty was gone from the Jail Comm Tower.  I checked the best I could, but could not find her anywhere.  Had she gone up into the OCSR elevator shaft?  Way too dark to tell.  After checking the Rfalconcam pics, I discovered that after I left Beauty on the Jail Comm Tower, she went to the Mercury statue and landed on the money bag hand.  She was there from 4:39 to 5:07 pm.

Before I headed home, I took a few pics of Rochester at night that I’ll leave you with.  I was very happy to see both Beauty and Pigott doing well.

REMEMBER TO CLICK ON THE PICTURES IF YOU’D LIKE TO SEE A LARGER VERSION

Oh!  One more thing!  I finally got an ok video showing just a little bit of the Crows we are seeing going into the city.  Quite amazing!  Just click on this link.

http://youtu.be/H1qtw-8KgNA

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2012 at 11:26 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.