A quiet month begins

So, with her clutch complete, our female falcon has begun the long period of incubation.
This will last some 30 days or just over before the first egg begins to hatch. 
So we expect and hope for our first chick to appear around or just after Easter.

Meanwhile, Dave Farmer has been taking some great photos of our pair from the ground below the tower and these show the features which allow us to distinguish the male from the female.
The male, as in all peregrines, is smaller and lighter in weight than the female who is the dominant of the pair. However, size is not easy to determine - unless the pair are together.
The male's upper chest is an off-white colour but, most importantly has NO vertical streaks on it. He also has a dark metal ring on his left leg though this doesn't always show in photos or on the web cams.

                                  The male - photo by Dave Farmer (gdfotos.co.uk )

And here is the female - those upper breast stripes show really clearly!

          The female shows here stripy upper breast feathers - photo Dave Farmer (gdfotos.co.uk)

And here is a composite photos showing the male and the female together - you should now be able to tell the one from t'other!

                                         Photo: Dave Farmer  (gdfotos.co.uk) 

The Project Team

Egg Number Three (and now No. Four)

UPDATE THURSDAY 17th MARCH
A fourth egg was spotted early this morning!  Screengrab by Kate to whom many thanks:

Kate, our intrepid web cam watcher in Devon, spotted the third egg between 5 and 6pm today (14th March) and took this screenshot:

Quite some variety in colouration there.....we wonder what egg number four will look like!
It can be expected sometime during Wednesday night or during Thursday.
Incubation will then become a serious matter for our female who will do the bulk of the work.
Being a bigger bird than the male, her brood patch, where the feathers have fallen out to allow direct contact between the eggs and her bare skin, does a much better job at keeping them all warm than that of the male.
He will do all the hunting and bring food back for her.
She will leave her eggs briefly to feed and preen and the male will do his best to keep the eggs covered while she is away.
Then, often within the hour, she will return and bully the male off the eggs and take over again herself.

The Project Team

Second egg

A second egg is visible this morning - thanks to Jean and Angela N for the heads up! 

It looks to be a lot paler than the first egg and we recall that last year, the first egg was also very pale and failed to hatch. We hope this one is OK. It will be interesting to see how they develop.

First egg and a close shave! Update 12th March

Update Saturday 12 March: a second egg is visible this morning - thanks to Jean and Angela N for the heads up! It looks to be a lot paler than the first egg and we recall that last year, the first egg was also very pale and failed to hatch. We hope this one is OK!

After days of delays due to weather, and having to keep away whilst an essential survey of the stonework after a small piece of stone had fallen off a few days ago, we finally managed to get access to the tower today to clean the platform and cameras. Nick M abseiled down to do the work, whilst Nick B monitored from inside, and gave feedback from our monitors via walkie-talkie.
We finished around 2:30pm and, to our great surprise, the female returned to the nest platform very soon after we left and promptly laid her first egg of 2022, fully eight days earlier than last year (17th)!
These screenshots were captured by Kate in Devon just before 5pm:

The clean up went well. As you can see the gravel was cleared of prey remains and some new gravel was added. The scratched camera cover on the Axis camera (Nestcam 1) was replaced, and the camera itself being slightly lowered and angled so the whole of the gravel side of the nest platform is now in view.

We feel very lucky to have achieved this 'cleanup'. Once nesting (i.e. egg-laying) has started, we would have been breaking the law had we then disturbed a nesting 'Schedule 1' bird. That would never have been our intention, and so we're pleased things worked out just right. 

Checking the online cameras prior to readjustment

Camera cover replacement and adjustment

Our thanks to Kate and Phoebe for being so alert!!

The Project Team