Scarborough Nest site - Yellow Pages Report - April 1st / 2021
April 02, 2021 - Scarborough - Yellow Pages
Marion Nash Reports:
Just a quick update and some better news to report!
A resident adult pair is on-site and courtship has begun!
Today I had an opportunity to re-visit the Scarborough nest site at the old Yellow Pages building on Milner Ave in Scarborough. A huge thanks again to Petra and security for accommodating me for a second site visit to take a more detailed look at the situation and activities of the resident peregrines. As you know by my previous report last week, we responded to security’s call of a dead falcon laying on one of the upper elevations on the nest building and found a deceased sub-adult male peregrine. Given the evidence, it was quite clear that this sub-adult male had collided with the window and died on impact. The impact site on the window was clearly visible with the tell-tail sign of the bird’s preen oil power stain on the glass.
What made this particular death initially suspecious and concerning it that the bird was an urban produced and raised peregrine,, one that was produced in an urban environment, on a similar hi-rise glass building,, and one that already learned and experienced bumps with the glass,, and survived to the sub-adult hood age. Unlike many other smaller birds that never seem to understand the dangers of hitting the glass, peregrines do in fact learn as we documented over the years, and rarely make the same mistakes twice when it comes to hitting the glass..
We highly suspected that there were likely “other factors involved” that caused this urban savvy peregrine to make a mortal impact with the glass… as this is usually the case.
That said, our suspensions were confirmed today as a result of my second visit today a to the likely reason we have a deceased sub-adult male at the site.
After a very detailed walk around of the upper elevations of the nest building this afternoon and several hours of ground time observations, I can now confirm a number of things,,
1.- That there are no new eggs as yet on any of the usual/available nest ledges.
2. - That there is still an adult “pair” of peregrines that are still very active both on and around the nest building.
3. - the pair are very actively involved in courtship routines, and it appears that they have selected a nesting ledge spot on the building again this year as much of their focus and attention was concentrated on one particular ledge. The pair was observed in several rounds of copulation activities during my ground time observations.
While I can not confirm what actually caused the younger sub-adult to collide with the building’s glass windows as we have witnessed to the death, I highly suspect that a territorial dispute and conflict with the resident adult male had a lot to do with it.
Unfortunately, I was not armed with a spotting scope during this visit so I can not confirm the identity of the resident pair (or if they are even banded) due to the distances involved from the ground to the upper building elevations where most of the bird activities took place.
I will be back again next week to do another follow-up.
It is also worth noting that the roofing contractors are still working on the building’s roof areas, although still well below the actual nest ledge level.
Mark Nash
