By Larry O’Heron

Headed downtown with Cleo, the Catahoula Leopard dog for watching before the weather turns rainy and freezing.
Beauty was at the scrape and Archer nowhere to be found.
After a couple of minutes, Carol P pulled up and we began to chat. She noticed Archer had arrived and landed on Mercury’s base.
Suddenly Archer ripped across Broad St, over our heads and stooped on an intruding redtail. I thought Archer was going to fly into the bridge; he came so close to the railing in order to get to the redtail. There was a man walking down the bridge and Archer went right past him. I don’t know if the man was aware of what had just happened.
Archer stooped and stooped on the red tail who landed in a tree near the bridge and library. In between stoops Archer kited on the winds over the Broad St bridge, presenting a spectacular view of his flying abilities.
Eventually Archer returned to Mercury but kept a sharp-eyed lookout on the hawk.
Carol and I headed to the east end where we were about 30 ft from the hawk. The view of the bird was magnificent.
We stayed there about 15 minutes when the red tail took off to the south. Archer immediately came off Mercury but with the red tail heading away, Archer kited briefly and returned to Mercury where he spent the rest of the watch hunting.

From Rochester Falcon Watcher ~ Joyce

Here is a KGallery album with pictures of Mariah, Archer, and other urban wildlife taken on Saturday 6/27/09 (10:30 am – 8:30 pm)

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=tq6stye.a927h8ye&x=0&y=-13t00v&localeid=en_US

Enjoy!

I was down this afternoon from about 3pm until 5:30 – what a beautiful day with wonderful flying!

Not too much different to report, I wasn’t planning on filing a watch report since I wasn’t signed up for the day, but right before I left we finally had all 5 eyases identified so I want to let people know –

• Zephyr on the ‘dolphins’ (20th floor) ledge on the south side towards the east end
  
• SusanB on the ‘scallops’ (19th floor) top of the railing on the south side, also toward the east end
• Quest in the playpen (big wings!)
• Seneca in the nest box (of course)
• and finally (!) Diamante on the ledge next to the nest box, where I bet he’s been close to all day but he finally showed himself to the watchers when Kaver came flying in with food.

[edit: we now know that it was Diamante on the 20th floor, and Zephyr on the ledge  -sc ]

Yay! All are accounted for, I was glad to see Diamante – even though Mariah and Kaver were calm, it’s still nice to be able to identify all 5.

As for the time that I was down there, Zephyr flew out to the High Falls stack once, walked around the edge a bit and just as I was going to walk out to the bridge to check on him (since he had walked around to the east side of the stack) he flew back to the tower. At that point SusanB had flown a bit and ended up on the ball at the SW corner of the 19th floor (after trying a number of unsuccessful landings – at least she’s practicing on the tower and is smart enough to do a touch-n-go when she can’t land) so Zephyr flew up to the same point one level above her.

SusanB eventually walked her way over to the SE side of the tower along the scalloped railing, while Zephyr eventually ended up above her in about the same place on the 20th floor. With both parents taking short flights around the tower and landing at various points throughout.

Toward 5:30 Mariah came off her perch – Kaver had been gone for a while – and started flying west to meet Kaver as he returned, presumably with food. He was not going to give it to her, however, despite the fact that she chased him around the tower a few times…! I’m not sure if she ever got it, I think that it was Kaver that went in with food but it might have been her – and at that point we saw the wings flapping in the playpen, knew where Z and SB and Seneca were, and finally saw an eyas next to the nest box. Hooray! All accounted for.

Down watching today were (and I hope I don’t leave anyone out): Carrie, Lisa McK, Linda (of the tattoos ), Kat from GVAS, a first time watcher who was very nice and I should remember her name – I think Diane (sorry!), Dawn, Brian, Joyce, and finally Carol P. We were visited by Tom the Kodak guard and Karen and Doc (Roch Mounted Patrol) along with many folks who just stopped by to either ask what we were looking at or knew about the falcons and wondered how they were doing.

Such a great time of the year!!! It was even sunny and sort of warm today, can’t beat it.

susan c