Watching paint dry!

After the excitements of egg laying, incubation is, by comparison, hardly riveting web cam material! But you have to be impressed by the birds' single mindedness don't you? It must get very tedious just sitting there on the eggs . . . though, come to think of it, peregrines are past masters at spending hours just sitting about . . . even when there are no eggs to give them a good excuse! So maybe incubating eggs comes more naturally to a falcon than say, to a warbler or a flycatcher, birds that are for ever flitting about!
Here are a couple more pictures of our adults, hard at work. First our male, with his slighter build, shorter body and slightly darker head. In close up you also see much brighter yellow around his bill and around his eyes than the female has. She is considerably bigger and rounder, taking up almost the entire width of the nest ledge.
Later on we'll post some more close-ups to show their faces in more detail.

Meanwhile, as April moves on towards May, the peregrine's closest relative, the hobby, is making its long migration back to the UK from southern
Africa.

Hobbies are smaller than peregrines. While they mainly eat birds caught on the wing, they are adept hunters of insects as you can see in the photograph. Dragonflies are a favourite food in summer and hobbies regularly eat them in mid-flight, discarding the wings which flutter to the ground beneath.

Unlike peregrines, hobbies nest in trees, using old nests of crows mainly. Like peregrines they don't do any nest building themselves, but lay their eggs in the cup of the existing corvid nest.

Hobbies are therefore not restricted in their breeding range to places with either cliffs or buildings. In Derbyshire, they utilise farmland, nesting often in isolated trees or small clumps of trees but rarely in woodland. Because hobby eggs are still collected by thieves, it is necessary to keep the whereabouts of these delightful little falcons secret....

Hobbies also breed much later than peregrines, the young hatching mainly in July and fledging in August, getting a little flying practice in before they have to start their first migration down to sub-Saharan Africa.

Nick B

Post-script: Sometime during today a fragment of peregrine prey blew off from the top of the cathedral tower, as often happens. Unfortunately it became caught on one of the anti-perching spikes placed on top of our subsidiary nest camera. Whether it will dislodge itself or move out of view remains to be seen -what we can't do is go down and remove it, at least not until our chicks are ready for ringing. Follow this link for more information on the camera installation

Nick M.