D & C article.....already!!!
Elbowed by her bossy brother out of the nest, falling through the air before she was quite ready to handle the drop, landing on a ledge 15 feet off the ground – this was not the way Tesh envisioned her first flight.
But that's what happened. One of four 40-day-old peregrine falcons nesting high atop the Times Square building in downtown Rochester, Tesh was the last to fledge. Her brothers, Mercury and Nor'eastern, and her sister, Nettie, had already sailed off the tower under the watchful eyes of volunteers from the Genesee Valley Audobon Society.
Tesh was next, but the moment came prematurely when Nor'eastern apparently knocked her from the nest with the swipe of a wing. Bird-watchers saw her half-tumble, half-glide through the air, wavering over busy traffic on State Street before landing on the ledge of the Telesca Center for Justice, just over the heads of pedestrians and certainly closer to the ground than she would have preferred.
"She's very lucky," said Carol Phillips, who's been watching the falcons for about 12 years. "She would have been ready to fly tomorrow, but she just got caught off guard."
The lucky bird stood poised on the edge of the ledge for about 45 minutes; volunteers manned every corner, shooing away pedestrians who stood too close to watch. In case Tesh fell, they had rescue kits with lightweight blankets and water spritzers.
"No one's going to jump in front of a car if she falls," Phillips said. "We're trained not to do that, anyway."
Luckily, it didn't come to that. After getting acclimated to the new altitude, Tesh paced along the ledge to Main Street, then back again. It took an hour to work up the courage for her second flight – this one on her own terms, more or less – but when she took off, it was a thing of beauty.
She winged it east on Main Street and was spotted by a Rochester police officer landing on the Canandaigua National Bank building, then gathered her strength and traveled up the river to higher ground.
"She did good," Phillips said.
The hope is that she'll rejoin the family on the Times Square building by tonight.
To see what the falcons are up to, go to
http://rfalconcam.com/rfc-main/.http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2014/07/01/young-peregrine-falcon-tesh-stuck-ledge/11921337/Just to clarify, Tesh was not pushed by Nor'Easter. She was blown sideways by a gust of wind and fell backwards off the wall. We have it on video from 2 camera angles:
Tesh get blown off the wallTesh and Nor'easterMove the slider on the bottom of the videos until the time at the top is 14:27:20.
On the second camera angle, Nor'E appears at 14:30:49 from the right, crashes into the wall on the left, and falls into the well. He climbs up the ramp to the the nest box at 14:35:20.
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