Buckeye, a male peregrine falcon sits near his 12th-floor nest outside the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland in May 2007. He died 2½ years later after having patrolled the urban canyons of Cleveland for 12 years, terrorizing pigeons and migrating songbirds and after having sired 34 chicks during his life on the Terminal Tower.
Whatever happened to . . .
. . . the peregrine falcon family nesting at the Terminal Tower?So whatever happened to the peregrine falcon family nesting at the Terminal Tower?
The cruel urban canyons of downtown Cleveland have downed two of the falcons.
The first casualty came June 10, when Ranger, the male of the pair of falcons nesting on the tower's 12th-floor window ledge, was discovered bloody and groggy on the sidewalk at 600 Superior Ave.
Harvey Webster, director of wildlife resources at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, suspects the falcon either collided with a building or engaged in a territorial duel with a falcon nesting on the Bohn Tower seven blocks east.
Ranger is being treated at the Medina Raptor Center. He suffered no broken bones but continues to experience balance and vision problems.
Just two weeks after Ranger's accident, one of his newly fledged youngsters, a female named Arrow, was found lying on the 16th-floor roof at the Terminal Tower. Webster took the raptor to the Medina rehab center, but she died of head injuries four days later.
Ranger's mate, SW, and her two remaining fledglings, Dart and Spike, remain in the downtown area hunting pigeons and songbirds in spectacular fashion with 200 mph dives.
The once-endangered falcons were introduced in Ohio in the 1980s and began nesting on the Terminal Tower in 1988. With the growth of the peregrine population has come increased competition for a limited amount of territory.
Deaths or injuries resulting from collisions and aerial fights are to be expected.
"It's a tough world out there," Webster said. "These birds are doing things that border on the unbelievable, flying so fast that if they make one bad move, going left instead of right, they're going to be in trouble and smash into a building."
The occasional casualties are harder to accept for the legions of downtown falcon-watchers who know the birds by name, follow their antics on a 24-hour falcon camera trained on the Terminal Tower nest, and post their comments and photographs on a falcon forum: falconcam-cmnh.org/news.php.
