Today was a great day for another visit to Selkirk! We had been half-convinced that our Selkirk pair might have hatched out chicks but today we got confirmation! Well, we didn’t actually see any chicks, they are still too small for us to see them over the edge of the raven’s nest on the lower catwalk where the peregrines decided to nest.
The male came by to drop off food and the female very quickly hopped off the nest, retrieved it and yelled at her mate to leave – typical mom-with-chicks behaviour.
He took the hint and barely landed on the catwalk edge to make his delivery and then immediately dropped off the edge and was on his way.
The female didn’t try to haul the food back to the nest, it would have been quite a slog over not one, but two old ravens’ nests. Good thing peregrines can fly. Just like the male, she dropped off the catwalk and circled back around to “her” nest and landed right on the edge. She then braced herself, tore off a bit of meat (sorry to the squeamish, there really is no other way to phrase it) and fed it to “something” inside the nest.
No way to tell how many chicks or how old, just that they are likely a week or younger in age. We’ll know in a couple/three weeks when they should be large enough and active enough to be visible (with some optical assistance) from our vantage point on the ground.
After the meal, the female returned to the chicks in the nest and her mate returned to his perch on the railing by his family.
As an added bonus, in the process of flying around to the nest, the female made a wide circle that brought her close(ish) to where Dennis had set up his camera – and with food tightly clutched in her talons, she gave Dennis a perfect view of her leg bands. A rapid series of high-speed photos later and Dennis had band numbers and then it only took a quick look in our records to find her. Our Selkirk resident female and new mom is Jennifer, one of Jolicoeur’s and Hart’s 2017 chicks from the Logan territory in Winnipeg. Jennifer had three siblings, two sisters (Jessie and June) and a brother (Jack). She also has a foster sister who was also her niece. Jennifer’s half-brother is Sundance who is from Joli’s first nest in 2013 with mate Cowboy. Before Marilyn, Sundance nested with Bristol, daughter of Beatrix, in 2017 and one of their chicks fell from the nest. The chick, Bridget, was uninjured but we couldn’t return her to her nest without endangering her siblings so we fostered her with her grandmother Joli at the Logan site. Worked out wonderfully. Joli and Hart accepted her immediately and though Jennifer and her siblings were a couple of weeks older than Bridget they hung around and played and slept with her until she was old enough to fly and follow them on their adventures. And they taught her well – Bridget survived her first summer and was spotted on migration on Padre Island, Texas a few months later. As for Jennifer, we had no reports about her from the time she left on migration until she returned this spring. Welcome Home Jennifer!