Exciting News

As we begin to approach the 2008 breeding season, we have some great news items to announce.

Firstly, work started today on the filming of a DVD on "The Peregrines of Derby Cathedral". We were approached by a commercial company, Delta Echo Media, to help them produce a documentary on Derby Cathedral's peregrine falcons. This fitted in perfectly with our aim to promote awareness of these incredible urban predators, as well as raising funds for the partners to put towards our conservation efforts. The DVD should be available for purchase by April and, for the moment, forgive us if we hold back on the news of the major BBC TV presenter we hope is agreeable to contributing to our film.

Also today we had BBC TV's East Midlands Today coming to Derby to film. (So we ended up filming the filmers!) BBC TV had picked up on the national news story that peregrine falcons around the world are now beginning to use the lights of our big cities to help them see their prey when they hunt at night. Follow this link to read more on this story. Here's a clip we captured in summer 2007 of what we thought at the time was a Snipe, but opinion is now mixed, and it could conceivably be a Green Sandpiper. Notice the light underbelly in the infra-red illumination, which would make it stand out at night against a dark sky, making it easy prey for a fast-flying falcon. It was brought to the platform at 1am, but of course it could have been brought from a cache elsewhere on the tower. What we really need is a thermal-imaging camera!



Ed Drewitt from Bristol Museum & Art Gallery is one of the pair who published the article on peregrines hunting at night in "British Birds". We're looking forward to welcoming Ed to Derby later in the week when he comes to have a closer look at our webcam set-up.

"Pudding-cam" has now been ordered for the top of the tower from Acam Technology, and we hope to be able to quickly run a cable up the 400 year-old spiral stone staircase to do a short test before making a proper install in the next month or so. We're all looking forward to seeing how well we can view the peregrines on top of the Cathedral's gargoyles, and perhaps capture more intimate footage from a really close vantage point.

And finally, the weather stayed fine to allow us to abseil down the side of the Cathedral today to re-adjust our cameras and check and clean the platform. We forgot to take the camera feed offline whilst we did this, so our apologies for any weird pictures or close-ups of dangling legs you may have seen around noon (GMT). We were pleased to have had Nick Evans helping us again, as he's the man who built the peregrine ledge for us, and he report that it's still in perfect condition. (Our thanks to Mary, a Museum volunteer, who also helped us out on the day)

Tony, Nick & Nick
Derby Cathedral Peregrine Project