A Bit of a Scrape

Though we're still a couple of weeks away (at least) from being live on the internet, the BBC supplied us with a DVD recorder last week to help us capture round-the-clock footage of Derby Cathedral's peregrine falcons. After various teething problems we've managed to capture some stunning moments. We've uploaded a 6 minute clip to YouTube which you can view here by clicking the play icon. It was recorded on 8th March at 1pm. Beware the loud bells!


First you'll see the male bird lying prostrate, pushing with both feet to make a suitable nest scrape for her to lay her eggs in. Then, less than half an hour later, we get amazing scenes of both birds together. Our male seems to be showing off the nest site to her. Watch how he stands stock still for over two minutes, head bowed down towards the centre of the scrape, whilst she ee-chupps away at him. On both arrival and departure he seems to be very wary of her, or perhaps he's cautious not to tread in the scrape. You decide. She remained on the platform for another hour after he'd flown off. We're now seeing this same activity on many days -a good sign indeed of things to come.

This clip appeared on BBC "East Midlands Today" on Tuesday 13th March - the first in a series of reports on the peregrines' progress. Once our webcam pictures go live online, you'll find them from the peregrine page within Derby Museums website. Despite the implication in the article and in the BBC news release, our peregrine project is actually a partnership between Derby Cathedral, the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and Derby Museum & Art Gallery.

I'm afraid we're getting into a bit of a scrape ourselves when it comes to editing our captured DVD. Just like the ones posted here last month, this sequence still had to be filmed off a TV screen! If anyone can suggest the best package to convert VOB files to AVI for editing in Adobe Premiere, do please get in touch by sending a comment to this post. DVDShrink doesn't seem to like our DVDs, whilst iSofterDVDtoAVI either crashes, or Premiere takes hours and hours to conform the AVI files.