Courtship present

Standing outside Derby Cathedral after a pleasant lunch in their newly refurbished restaurant, I might have been forgiven for thinking there had been little peregrine activity going on at all today. Before leaving home this morning I had noticed the adult female was tucked onto a ledge below the nest platform, and the male was out of sight. The situation hadn't changed an hour later when I stood below the tower in Derby's city centre at 10.30am, except to note that our male was visible on the guttering, just beside our tower cam. Both seemed content there, and were still in exactly the same position after lunch, some three hours later.

But comments left on this blog from Froona, Karen Anne and many others tell a different story. There has been a lot of nest scraping and courtship activity seen in the webcams recently (see top photo) though in between things always do seem pretty calm. We know that elsewhere in Europe peregrines are already on their eggs, and soon we expect it to be our turn again. (See blog entry for 1st March for a calendar of past breeding activity.)

At 17:30 local time today we caught a short exchange of food with the female perched on the side of the nest platform and with the male suddenly arriving with the gift, but then just as quickly returning to the tower cam. Click the play icon to watch the sequence of images which were taken at 30 second intervals. Blink and you'll miss him. (Even the tower cam catches a bit of the action. )