Let’s just hope celebrity doesn’t go to its feathery head.
A peregrine falcon — Red Deer’s newest TV star — has been spending its time preening and primping and otherwise playing to the camera in its perch atop the Telus tower in Highland Green. A live video feed has been set up to put viewers right into the falcon’s nest box. A link to the video has been set up on the Advocate home page, reddeeradvocate.com.
So far, the falcon cam seems to be creating a steady following. Tuesday afternoon there were more than a dozen people watching the falcon do its thing at any one time. About 1,357 people had checked the bird out by mid-afternoon Tuesday.
“We are ecstatic,” said Red Deer River Naturalists treasurer Bill Heinsen. The project is a joint effort of the naturalist group, Telus and Alberta Fish and Game.
A Telus crew installed the camera on the 111-metre tower on Hermary Street last month.
But it has been a “trying process,” said Heinsen. “Nothing has absolutely not worked. There has been some major tweaking that had to be done along the way just to get the thing running.” All the glitches were worked out by Saturday and the first images were available online.
Naturalists secretary Judy Boyd said Telus has helped out a lot.
Its technicians went up the tower a second time after installing the camera to do some work on the power supply and they also checked the camera’s focus.
The naturalist group picked up the $700 cost of the webcam and other equipment and Telus did the installation and will pay for the power. Alberta Fish and Wildlife pitched in by providing a new and improved nest box with bars designed to keep owls and ravens out. The old box was placed about 10 years ago.
It’s anticipated the falcon will lay her eggs in early to mid-May, with babies hatching in mid- to late June. The babies will begin to fly in late July to early August.
Boyd said a falcon society from Ontario has asked for a link for their website so soon the falcon’s fame could spread.
Peregrine falcons are considered a threatened species in Alberta, where a recovery program is in place. These large falcons migrate south, with some heading as far away as Argentina.
Two nesting pairs exist in Red Deer — one on the Telus tower, the other on top of the 14-storey Capri Hotel and Convention Centre on Gaetz Avenue. Several other pairs have homes in high places around Alberta.
For more information on the naturalist group and the falcon family, visit the Red Deer River Naturalists website at
www.rdrn.fanweb.ca 
A snippet from their page: During migration, they have been known to fly up to 500 kilometres in a day. A female Peregrine that nested in Edmonton flew to Mazatlan, Mexico, in less than eight days and returned in six days. Peregrines banded in the Northwest Territories have been recovered in Argentina; most arctic nesters apparently “leapfrog” more southern North American falcons to winter farther south in South America. In fact, the Peregrine Falcon was named for the lengthy migrations of some populations: “peregrine,” from the Latin adjective peregrinus, means “coming from foreign parts” or “wanderer.”
