Gyrfalcon around Winnipeg
Not all the falcons have headed south this winter. Besides the merlin reports in Winnipeg (and Fisher Branch, Hodgson, Selkirk, Stonewall, etc), it looks as though there has also been a gyrfalcon around Winnipeg. Gyrs usually head down to South Dakota for the winter and given how cold it has been here this year, it is interesting there is at least one hanging around Winnipeg. Plenty of food here of course.
The bird was first spotted December 14th south-east of Winnipeg near Landmark, then again a bit further east near Ste Anne on January 9th. Today (January 25th), a gyr was spotted flying south toward Selkirk along Highway 8. Even though not likely I had to check the Radisson cam in case we might have had a visitor, but nothing.
Not unusual to have a gyr in downtown Winnipeg, for a number of years a gyr regularly visited an unused nestbox on the old Royal Bank building (now part of Assiniboine Community College's downtown campus). Don't know if the gyr was there in the winter because this was before the cams but I used to see it during spring migration and a couple of times late in the fall. The building was on our regular route because the peregrines used to use this same perch when hunting over the Exchange District.
