(Ed. Friday to add this link, with thanks to Eric for the picture.)
I loved the moment where an eyas stopped screaming, looked way up straight at the face of the human holding him and suddenly stopped in wonderment, a scene straight out of the children’s book, “Are You My Mother?” And the classic recoil, “You are not my mother! You are a Snort!”
Three males, one female. The baby falcons at San Jose City Hall were banded today by Glenn Stewart, the biologist from UCSC behind the peregrine recovery effort. The video is here, with the parents swooping and circling and then at the very end standing guard together, almost touching, side-by-side above their babies in the nestbox.
What it doesn’t show is that all four eyases learned that the world really is bigger than inside there. All four of them tumbled or landed somehow onto the runway area later in the day and all of them figured out how to jump/flap/somehow lift just enough to get safely back home again.
Just wait till they stand on one of the ledges of that HVAC unit for the first time and look 18 stories down!