Université de Montréal falcon pair may have to evict their daughterWelcome to Montreal's newest Internet reality show, Mind Your Own Falcon Business, starring Spirit, Roger, Polly and Eve. Who needs soap operas when you've got the real thing on your computer?
I have studied and written about peregrine falcons for more than 30 years and I thought I had seen it all. But this year takes the cake.
It all started in 2007 when Eve Bélisle, a programmer in the chemical engineering department at École Polytechnique on the Université de Montréal campus, contacted me about a pair of peregrines hanging about the 26-storey tower there. The following winter, we installed a comfortable nesting box on the 23rd floor and, lo and behold, right around Mother's Day in 2009, the birds produced two young, a male and a female.
From reading her leg band number, Eve discovered that the mother's name is Spirit and she fledged from a bridge nest in Ohio in 2004. She gave the name Roger to the father in honour of Roger Gaudry, the man the tower is named after. The two nestlings were called Algo (after Alain Goulet, owner of the Centre de conservation de la faune ailée, a nature store in the east end, and the financial backer for both the nest box and the web cam) and Polly, a former name for Spirit. And Eve, of course, is now the official voyeur. So now you know all the players in this fascinating drama.
After the usual rescues of both nestlings from the ground when they made unsuccessful attempts to fly, both kids hung around Mom and Dad for quite a while.
Algo eventually disappeared and will hopefully show up as a breeder at around 3 years of age - a very natural thing for young fledged peregrines to do. But here is where our story gets quite interesting.
Polly became the child who wouldn't go away; she stayed with her parents through the entire winter. Eve had noticed that Polly had sustained some form of permanent leg injury, which, to a peregrine used to nailing their prey with their feet in the air, can be a handicap. Thus, it is conceivable that Polly remained with her parents throughout the winter with the thought that she could garner the odd food handout for old time's sake.
Spirit and Roger are now sitting on a clutch of four eggs in the nest box. The episode titled The Trouble with Polly started during egg-laying. Polly just couldn't keep her little beak out of Mom's business. Every time Mom or Dad would enter the nest box, Polly had to be there, too. You see, some bird species like crows and scrub-jays welcome assistance from helpers in the form of youngsters from previous years, but not falcons, at least not to my knowledge.
Having a teenager around the home is not necessarily a bad thing, but Polly became annoying to her parents. Often the eggs would sit uncovered due to her constant interference, and on some occasions Spirit has had to physically kick Polly out of the nest box. So I will be especially curious to see what happens if and when the chicks hatch. Does Polly's disruptive behaviour with incubation cause the death of some or all of the embryos? Will she help feed the babies? Or when they have new chicks to deal with, will the parents kick Polly out of their territory?
There is an intriguing sidebar to this peregrine drama: It is not unheard of for some bird species, including falcons, to engage in incest.
The very first pair of American kestrels, a small cousin to the peregrine, to return to a nest box on McGill's Macdonald campus in the '80s were a father and a daughter who raised five healthy babies. If Spirit were to perish in the next year or two and Polly and Roger were still around, would they perhaps hook up and raise kids together?
Eve has indeed observed Roger sneaking off with Polly out of camera range for long periods.
Want to become a peregrine voyeur too? Just click on
www.ornithologie.ca/faucons, and follow the links to BĂ©lisle's blog.
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Thanks to Eve, I can pass on other news of Montreal's peregrine falcon population.
Your other favourite peregrines, the ones on Place Victoria, suffered a setback in 2009 when the male killed himself flying into a window right after fledging the young.
As expected, a new male has shown up this year to court the female, but according to Jean Masson of Fasken Martineau Dumoulin, who has watched these falcons for more than a decade, they "come and go" but there are no eggs yet.
Eve visited some other Montreal sites. There is probably a pair on the Mercier Bridge, but she is not sure about the Champlain and Jacques Cartier bridges. The city of Laval has a pair nesting in a quarry for at least the second year in a row.
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David Bird is a professor of wildlife biology and director of the Avian Science and Conservation Centre on the Macdonald campus of McGill University.
This is a first....Polly stays with mom and dad. Hope more is published soon on this.
