Treys dad's mate overwintered!!!!actually stayed here?
How could this be?
Madame was from Cedar Rapids, Iowa and she was a mix of peregrine subspecies, including 1 or 2 European non-migratory subspecies - Scots and Spanish I believe. And she overwintered from the time we first spotted her in November/December 1990 (she hatched in 1989) until I last saw her in 2005, a year after she was forced off the Radisson territory by Princess. She was the mate of all four of our resident Radisson males - Pop, T-Rex, Simba and Trey. She is/was also Trey's Mom.
Something that I've been thinking about and hoping you can answer. Do Peregrine's go through menopause, so to speak. Is there an age where the reproduction instinct fades away because of dwindling hormones and don't have the instinct to return to mate?
I'm afraid I don't know Stormy, if there is, could be that menopausal females my just decide to turn left instead of right on their way home, releasing the territory to whomever is there to take over. I'd be surprised if that was the case though, since they generally don't live that long <10 years I suspect that their wiring to reproduce doesn't have an offswitch though the biology may not be as fecund as time goes along ...
So "they " just refers to females? I did think there was a posting about living to 15 years - or was that just males or my faulty memory?
Sorry, should have been clearer - the key word in the sentence is "generally". Most peregrine don't live into their teens, heck half don't make it to their first year. Most that do make it to year 2 don't make it past 10 years old. That applies for males and females. Oldest bird in the wild is I believe a male who made it to 19 years plus some months I believe. Survivorship for Falcon peregrinus anatum is about 80% per year after second year. That means that at year 10, 11% of all the birds hatched that same year are still alive, at year 20, only 1% are still alive. Median age is 4.5 years for both genders. Most of our breeding birds last a wee bit longer than that.
All of our Manitoba-hatched birds breeding outside the province are female. Our Manitoba-hatched males have only been found nesting in Manitoba, none outside the province. We have had some captive-bred males released from Manitoba that have gone on to nest elsewhere, but not males hatched in Manitoba, or none that we have had reported to us.
