By Rochester Falcon Watcher MAK

After Beauty pulled a disappearing act yesterday afternoon eluding Joyce,Carol and myself I thought I’d better get downtown extra early before she had a chance to go to her secret place again.  When I left the house at 6:30am it was 21 degrees fahrenheit (-6 celsius)  and dark out as the sun was still working on rising.

I stopped on the Broad St. Bridge first as I always do and could see nothing on the buildings close by. I drove over to the east side next and found a pefa on the southeast corner of HSBC. Wasn’t sure at first who it was because it was still a bit dark out. Once I got some help from the rising sun I knew it was Beauty.

I parked on Chestnut St. to observe Beauty. It looked like she had  a semi-full crop and after 10 minutes she took off flying west past Xerox on the south side toward the river.

I drove to the Broad St. Bridge and spotted Beauty on the 3rd arm down south side of the jail communications tower. I continued on to Troup St. for closer viewing-it was 7:00am.

Beauty stooped down into the river immediately after I got there and returned empty taloned flying to the inner structure of the tower before leaving it without me seeing her go. The hunt was now on to find the Beautyful one. I checked downtown several times and the Lake Tower (LT) apartment building where a rogue falcon has been seen but no luck. It was now 8:00am and I was on my way to the Brighton Site when Dana tweeted that she had Pigott on the south side vent. I haven’t seen her up there in quite some time so I was excited to see.

10 minutes after I arrived a tweet came in that there was either a hawk or falcon on the well wall by the nest box on the Times Square building so I told Dana I was going to check it out and she said she would too. When I got back to downtown there was no raptor of any kind anywhere in the downtown area that I could find so I thought I’d go to Kodak Park (KP) and check out the power plant. I took St. Paul Blvd. to take a look at the Kodak Hawkeye plant but no birds of any kind around there so I crossed the Driving Park Bridge to continue on to KP. No pefa there but I hung out with a gorgeous Red Tailed Hawk that was on the hunt flying from tree to tree to get a better look at its prey.

click the pics for full version

It was a little past 9:30am when I departed KP for downtown once more. Again no sightings so I drove to BS for one more look there and ended my watch at 10:30am after being unsuccessful finding a falcon at the Brighton location. I was smiling after seeing both of our resident female Peregrine Falcons this morning-now all we need is a couple tiercels and we can get this season started! 🙂

Click the links below to view more pics and videos

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0AaN3DFm0ZMWrV1g

http://youtu.be/5ea6bXjEItk
http://youtu.be/IDwhkKqBhEY
http://youtu.be/VpKNn_atfFg
http://youtu.be/yyTdZL083rU

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2013 at 3:15 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.