Beachville peregrines on territory, very visible and very territorial indeed,, suspected to be involved in full time incubation!
May 29, 2015 - International, National and Local News
Mark Nash Reports:
Friday May 29th - 2015
Beachville Carmeuse Lime and Stone Quarries
Again, sorry for the lack of updates, but it has already been a very busy season and we are always stressed for resources and manpower at the best of times, and this time of year has us doing 14 plus hour days with or field activities and on-going banding events. Please remember that we are limited and subject to available funding and resources at hand, as we are not government funded and depend on contributions and donations along with allot of volunteer support availability to do many of the things we are involved in throughout the year.
Having being able to combine this visit with the London City Centre site visit, I was finally able to get back down to the Beachville nest site and the Carmeuse Lime and Stone Quarry to get an update on their resident peregrines. A big thank you to Lucie who also met me down there to do a pre-site inspection and gather some observations while I was meeting with the folks at the Quarry administrative offices.
With the support of the Regional Environmental manager and support staff at the Carmeuse Quarries, we were able to conduct our investigation and quickly found both of the resident peregrines on one of the large towers. During out site visit, both adult peregrines were quite aggressive and protective while we were at elevation around the suspected nesting cavity. Upon our initial arrival, the adult female was observed roosting on the upper ledge of the sister building with a large kill, and was in the middle of eating.
The adult male alerted to her screams, quickly appeared in our view and they both joined in their efforts to encourage us to leave!!
After we left our elevated observation position with the Quarry staff, the resident adult female peregrine quickly returned back to the covered nest location and disappeared from our view, where she spend the balance of the day light hours concealed and out of our view. She never appeared back in our view. The resident adult male landed and roosted on a spot of the adjacent building at elevation with a direct line of site into the nest cavity where his female mate had disappeared into hours ago.
At no time did we see another shift change and no food ever when into the nest cavity during the balance of our observation period, so we can be reasonably assured that there are no hatchlings being fed at this point.
It was quite obvious after Lucie and I departed the site much later in the evening around 9pm, based on our 8 plus hours of observations that the pair are currently involved in full time incubation of an undisclosed amount of eggs.
We will be back within the next two weeks to do a another check on the pairs activities.
A big thank you to Lucie for her support and for some of her attached photos!
Stay tuned……….
