Luckily for one of the peregrine falcon chicks on the Madison-Milton bridge, after it got blown off the bridge in high wind Monday night it landed on water.
And just as luckily, every morning Walsh Construction engineering superintendent Tom Swert goes out on the gravel causeway that juts into the Ohio River on the Madison side.
"Every morning at 7 o'clock I have to drive out on that causeway," Swert said Thursday. "I take a stick ruler and measure the elevation of the water."
Tuesday morning was no different as he prepared for his day-starting task. He measures the elevation because Walsh's contract for replacement of the bridge penalizes the company financially for every day the replacement is not finished by a date in September 2012. But any day the surface elevation is above 432.2 feet does not count against the company.
"I was getting my gear on," Swert said. "Right by the south end of the causeway was one of the baby falcons floating on the water on top of a piece of driftwood."
Swert recognized the bird as being a peregrine falcon because he had just recently seen one of this chick's siblings when she was removed from the nesting box for medical treatment.
"Lucky for him, the water was up that day," Swert said. "It was right even with the top of that causeway. He was on the causeway. Above or below it, he would have drowned," Swert said.
"I took my shirt off. I walked up to him real slow and threw it over him. He didn't offer any resistance. I wrapped my shirt around him and took him to our office, and we put him in a box," Swert said.
The baby falcon, resting on Swert's blue denim work shirt inside a cardboard box, soon had a visitor. Avian biologist Kate Heyden of the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources came to Madison to pick up the bird.
"He survived quite a fall," she said Thursday after she put the rescued falcon back on the bridge with his mother. "He was actually totally fine. He had no injuries at all."
The chicks will flap their wings the next few days, getting ready to fly for the first time, probably early next week, Heyden said.
When Heyden returned the chick to the bridge, she also returned one of his sisters, Edie, whom Heyden had taken from the nesting box for treatment for trichomonas, a disease she said chicks get from their parents feeding them diseased pigeons.
All four of the peregrine falcon chicks have names. The rescued falcon got his name from his ordeal. His name is Lucky.
Lucky
Madison Courier
