Quiet time?

It may seem a quiet time on the webcams right now, but there's much happening behind the scenes. Most importantly the four peregrine eggs are developing under the warmth of their parents. We're only getting rare glimpses as the adults change shifts after a few hours of incubation each, and we're looking forward to them hatching early in May. The female is a much larger bird than the male, and you get a real sense of size difference during one of these change overs. Here we see our male peregrine. Notice the small white "beauty spot" on the right side of his face; when size is hard to judge, this is a good feature to look for if the camera is zoomed in. (Because of comments left about how hard it is to see it, I've added an arrow to the picture to show where to look. Sorry if I gave the impression it was huge)

The ravens returned briefly this morning after an absence of five or six weeks! 2008 was the first time that ravens have ever been reported in Derby, apart from the odd bird flying over. Full story here. I spotted them whilst outside the Derby Museum shop - just small dots against the skyline. But from that distance a small dot had to be a huge bird. So, dashing back in to get a pair of binoculars, it was a pleasure to see both birds on the top ledge of Derby Cathedral's tower, although a little worrying lest they decide to stay and possibly affect the nest success of our peregrines. But they didn't stay long - perhaps they were just passing through, on the lookout for a free meal from one of the prey items our peregrines like to cache on the tower. I'm sure it's too late for them to still be trying to find a nest site. Either way, they weren't buzzed by the peregrine falcons this time. Perhaps they felt that simply sitting tight on their eggs was the best plan.

Other plans are afoot, too. There are still more new developments to the Derby Cathedral Peregrine Project this year. Thanks to Acam Technology Ltd, we already have our third webcam working away on top of the tower, but behind the scenes we have engineers from Capita purchasng and configuring some more equipment for us. Capita are Derby City Council's IT Support company, and last year they generously offered to sponsor our project with free IT support and £1000 of equipment. Unfortunately the financial offer came a bit too late in the season to be realised, but now with their support again we're pressing ahead with plans to install a new networked computer and a wall-mounted display screen into the Nature Gallery at Derby Museum & Art Gallery. The chance to have live video and audio close to our peregrine on display is just too good to miss! It's important that our visitors and funders understand that we use our museum collections to tell a story of local wildlife, but that it can sometimes be equally valid for our staff to become involved in active conservation and interpretation of living things out in the wild, beyond our four walls.

We're very grateful to Capita for their support, as we are to all those who have given us support of one kind or another. There are some more exciting developments happening in the next few weeks that everyone will see, but we'll bring you news of this when work behind the scenes is complete.

Speaking of which, work on the DVD of The Peregrines of Derby Cathedral is now very nearly complete. Last week saw us throwing handfuls of feathers from the top of the cathedral tower in order to bring a degree of continuity to the video sequences of our peregrines plucking a pigeon on top of the tower. (We were lucky to find a dropped prey item that we could pluck and use.) Once again, more news of this soon.

And we've had strong media interest recently, bringing many new visitors to our webcamera following pieces on ITV Central and BBC. We're also supplying video clips of last year's young chicks for use in a "Heart of the Country" TV programme about falconry. We're gently pushing our peregrine site towards schools in Derby with a note going out tomorrow to all schools in the region. We know that many schools restrict access to blogging sites and YouTube and we've been able to unblock the former from Derby's educational establishments, but not the latter. Perhaps the new DVD will fill that gap. So now the Museum and the Wildlife Trust project team members are starting to find a few spare moments to turn their attention towards preparing some simple educational resource notes for classroom use of our webcams - we feel there are many opportunities for schools to use the presence of a celebrity species on their doorstep as a springboard to a wide range of subjects, ranging all the way from conservation right through to maths, geography and even issues of third world poverty. (More on that later, perhaps).

(Meanwhile new visitors to this blog may wish to read an overview of the peregrine project, or add their names to our mailing list.)