Woodpecker Feedings and a Mariah Flyby

After a long absence it's good to get back to blogging. Birding around the Kodak tower hasn't been very rewarding lately. If you've been following the story over at Imprints, you'll know that after Mariah was driven out of her territory and nearly killed, she spent a few weeks rehabbing at a veterinary center outside of Syracuse, NY. If you missed all of the Imprints posts, you can click this link to get a list of articles referencing Mariah. Scroll back several pages (use the "previous entries" link at the top & bottom of each page) until you get to April 13, 2009. There you can read the first of several entries that tell the story of Mariah's fall and her phoenix-like return.

In the meantime her grandson Archer and his new mate Beauty have made themselves right at home in downtown Rochester. First they staked out a spot on the Midtown Plaza tower, where it appeared they might be nesting. But a couple of weeks ago they abandoned that position and moved, conveniently enough, to the nest box we'd placed on the Times Square building at 45 Exchange Blvd. earlier this year. It took a bit of doing, but there are now 2 cameras running at Times Square including the Rochester Falconcam's high-res Main Camera. The new pair have made themselves right at home and the camera often catches them bowing to each other and displaying other courtship/pair bond behavior. We're not yet sure what that means. It's most likely too late for them to start a family this year, and besides, we haven't seen them mating for many weeks.

Following Mariah's release from rehab, it took her less than a day to find her way back home to the Kodak tower. Since then there's been a kind of detente between Mariah and the new territorial pair here. Mariah has tended to stay north of Main Street, spending most of her time on the wall of the gorge near the High Falls, or on the Kodak tower.

Actually, it hasn't been all that easy for Mariah to find a perching spot on the tower. The repair work there is in full swing:
     

Often she waits until the evening to go to the tower. During the day she's been making use of some of the other buildings in the Kodak Office complex when she's not in the gorge.

One interesting thing that's been noted by watchers is that Archer sometimes comes to the gorge for a visit. He's perched as close as 20-30 feet away from Mariah, and occasionally flies near her. In a strange twist, the two don't act aggressively toward each other. But then, Mariah has been exercising a lot of discretion, staying well away from Beauty and the Times Square nest box. I imagine it'll be that way for the rest of the summer. What next year will bring is anyone's guess. It seems likely that Mariah will be able to attract a mate in 2010. After all, she got two of them this year. If she does band together with another tiercel, there could be another territory battle, or, just maybe, she'll find another place to make a nest nearby. There's more than enough prey to sustain two Peregrine families in Rochester; she only needs to find a suitable location for a scrape.

But that's all complete and utter speculation, nothing more. We won't know how things will turn out until next year.

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At home we've had the good fortune of playing host to a coterie of woodpeckers bringing their young to our back yard suet feeder. Watching the adults take the bits of peanut suet and feed them to their young fledglings is a real treat. Here are a pair of Downys (Picoides pubescens) enjoying the repast:
     

The male takes the food from the suet cage and feeds it to his offspring sitting above him. They've been coming for a few days now and they're delightful to see.

Even better is my favorite, the Pileated WP (Dryocopus pileatus). She grabs the food while her son waits on a nearby tree:
          

Then she flies over to feed him...
          

...then back to the suet block for more:
     

They're really remarkable and a pleasure to watch, especially becuase we'd gone for a few months without seeing much activity at all at the feeder.

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Anyway, I said that I hadn't gotten to do much falcon watching in a while. Watching from the Pont de Rennes pedestrian bridge provides a good vantage but Mariah is pretty far away on the gorge wall:


Archer and Beauty are even harder to see on their downtown perches. Yesterday I walked downtown on my lunch hour to see if I could catch them at the Times Square building. I didn't find any falcons there, but it's not hard to see why they chose the site to nest at, given its cliff-like facade:


At the gorge today we got a little luckier. Mariah sat on the wall near the falls for most of the lunch hour. As it got near 1PM though, she took to the air, allowing me to snap this somewhat blurry image:


I thought she'd landed in a tree on the wall, but she circled around and ended up flying low over the bridge not too far away:


On she went to the Kodak tower where she circled before landing on the southeast corner of the stairwell in Building 10:


It was a nice exciting note on which to end my lunchtime watch. Watching the falcons this year will be a different experience for all of us, but after an absence of several weeks for both her and me, it's good to see Mariah back in the air. I'm looking forward to more.