!!! Mason appears to be getting it!
May 16, 2014 - Mississauga - Executive Centre
Mark Nash Reports:
Friday May 16th - 2014
While I don’t have allot of the details, I do have some of the highlights of little Masons activities today as reported by Grace and Bruce from todays fledge watch.
While he was really not very active for the most parts of the day with Grace reporting that he spent all day on the top of MEC #3, he certainly made up for it this evening and had Bruce running around to keep his eye on him, as he made at least four separate flights that included several prolonged short flights with altitude gains and decent landings, most of which had him landing and ending up on the upper roof top retaining walls.
And the best part, no more window bonking as he did two days ago when poor Tracy reported that she watched in horror as he flew into the windows of all three buildings before finally coming to the ground and in need of rescue. It might appear the Mason might have learned about the dangers of windows. Unlike many other birds, peregrines do learn from their mistakes, and the urban produced peregrines have a slight advantage when it comes to urban living.
We actually hope that the young fledglings do some “window bonking” when they take their first flights, as they are usually still pretty slow and don’t usually collide with the windows that they run into at any great speed. If they don’t hurt or kill themselves during their first few run-ins with windows, they do in fact remember the negative experience and don’t usually fly into them again.
Sadly, if they don’t hit any windows when they are much slower in their first few flights, and end up hitting them later in their flights when they are far more confident (but still not really skilled especially with that of putting on the breaks), their air speed is much greater, and they get careless and very over confident. Collisions with windows at this stage usually ends up in serious injuries and mortality.
Think of the young teenager, just having got their driver licence and the first time with the keys to the family car,,, only this time, the family car is a Ferrari.
Speed does kill as we have seen only tooo often with the young fledgling peregrines during their first dozen flights before they develop the flight skills and other valuable experience!
While Mason is far from being out of harms way, it does appear the he had already learned some valuable lesions thus far, increasing his chances of survival.
- So what has he learned so far:
- Being on/at the ground level is dangerous, foreign and a very scary place, its no wonder why I’ve never seen mom and dad go there,, in addition, they won’t come my rescue at ground level,
- Humans are at ground level and very scary indeed, they keep grabbing and man handling him - (even mom and dad doesn’t do that), and I really HATE to be man handled!!!
- Windows on the sides of buildings are very hard and cause a great deal of pain when I fly into these things, stay the heck away from these terrible things,
- ending up behind glass balconies are also impregnable, and you get trapped,,, stay away from these places.
And the lessons will continue….