By Rochester Falcon Watcher MAK

Winter is slowly creeping back into Rochester with temps forecast to go down as the day progresses. This means it will be very important that our falcons eat and keep their feathers cleaned properly to keep warm. Me too! lol  At just about 7:30am from the Broad St. Bridge(BSB) I could barely see Beauty in the darkness over on the top ibeam southeast side of OCSR. I drove over to Aqueduct Park for closer viewing but the dark conditions made for poor quality pics today.

15 minutes went by and suddenly Beauty stooped down the front of OCSR. The Aqueduct pigeons had awakened and come out from their night time roost under the BSB and she was right on them chasing them up and over the bridge to the south. 4 of them escaped and landed on the Blue Cross Arena but only briefly as she flew back into the area scaring them off. She then circled above the Mercury statue and I thought she would land but instead she flew high above the river due east fling behind the Hyatt Hotel where I couldn’t see her. A couple minutes later she came back into view touch landing on the southwest corner of Bausch&Lomb(B&L) we call Archers corner and off again going behind Xerox this time. I waited a few minutes then drove over to the east side to find her. As I was stopped at the traffic light at Clinton and Court St. I spotted Beauty on another southwest corner of B&L so I drove into the B&L traffic circle to observe the Beautyful one.

She remained up there for 5 minutes and took off flying west back toward the river leaving my field of vision quickly as I was surrounded by buildings.

<I messed around with this pic as it was a bad photo and this is the result

I looked but couldn’t find her so I moved on to the Brighton site hoping I would break my bad luck string of 3 days with no sightings there. Hallelujah! Pigott was home perched on an east facing window ledge in the corner top row where the east extension connects to the building.

It was snowing down real fine snowflakes and I watched as they would land on my glove and instantly start to melt. I had to snap fast to get a pic before it melted.

I stayed with Miss Pigott for a little over an hour hoping BST would make an appearance but he did not so I left her with the snow coming down harder and the wind whipping it around. With my last check downtown I found Beauty on OCSR right where I first found her in the dark this morning on the top ibeam southeast side of OCSR.

I shared space with her for 15 minutes before ending my watch at 10:19am and drove home happy to have seen our 2 resident female Rochester Peregrine Falcons smiling all the way! 🙂

There are 2 video links below waiting for you to click on them to see our girls hanging out in the snow

http://youtu.be/MSaz10e4YPo
http://youtu.be/XfZsC9biJcA

Bonus video of a fast melting snowflake-http://youtu.be/yl6Z2aXNPYk

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2013 at 12:20 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.