Most of our readers probably know by now that Mariah was released from her rehabilitation a couple of weeks ago. Before leaving the veterinary facility near Syracuse where she’d been recuperating the DEC’s Mike Allen took a few pictures to show just how completely she’d healed
Wildlife officials at the NY Dept. of Environmental Conservation took her to the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge about 40 miles (64km) east of Rochester. As she flew northward Mike Allen got this picture of her taking wing
Before letting her go, Mariah got a nice bit of new jewelry in the form of an aluminum US Fish and Wildlife band. To make her stand out from the falcon crowd, Mariah’s band was tricked out with blue tape and a yellow racing stripe
Since her release, she found her way back to Rochester. If you’ve been keeping up with the reports of our on-site watchers in the FalconWatch blog, you’ll know that she’s been spending a lot of time in the Genesee River gorge below the High Falls. Check back often for the latest updates!
Speaking of updates, the news on Archer and Beauty is that they’ve apparently moved from the narrow ledge on the Midtown Plaza Tower. It looks like they abandoned any eggs they may have laid. Our watchers haven’t witnessed any nesting-like behavior from the pair for the past several days now. Whether they did lay eggs that failed or didn’t lay any is something we may never learn. The ledge where they’d been spending their time is very narrow and without a bucket truck or some similar conveyance physical access to the ledge is nearly impossible.
So where’d they move to? As it turns out, Archer and Beauty headed a few blocks west and across the river, ending up at the Times Square Building. Astute readers will recall that this is the location where we installed one of our nest boxes this past winter, and outfitted it with a few cameras. We never turned them on because frankly there wasn’t much to be seen. At first watchers reported that the falcons were only landing on the corners of the building, but before too long we began to see them moving toward the nest box, and even going inside.
Yesterday evening Rochester Falconcam team member FalKenn Martinez was at the site working to get the cameras up and running. There are still some technical problems to solve, but now that we know there’s activity at the nest box we’re moving into high gear. While he was working on the high-resolution Main camera, both Archer and Beauty showed up at the nest box! Ken was able to grab a couple of pictures of them, which got stored on the camera controller’s hard disk. Since we’re not yet connected to the Internet there’s no way he could transmit the pictures, but he did the next best thing, snapping pictures right off the monitor screen with his cell phone camera!
The image quality leaves a little to be desired, but who cares!?! Archer looks an awful lot like Kaver, doesn’t he? It’s those good genes of his! And that second picture appears to show them bowing to each other. That could indicate that they’re pair bonding. It’s late in the season, but these two are young and healthy, and it’s just possible that they could go through another courtship and mating cycle, and even lay eggs!
Could we be looking at another clutch in the making? It may be that our fledge watchers will yet have an opportunity to practice their skills on the streets of downtown Rochester. We’ll keep working to get the Times Square cameras on-line so that we can all keep an eye on Archer and Beauty at their “new” home.
