Incubation yawn time

Now well into the first week of incubation, it's a rather a quiet time on Derby Cathedral tower. Webcam watchers will see one or other of our birds incubating their eggs. And lucky viewers may catch a moment of changeover when all four eggs are visible.
We do try to zoom the cameras in during these times, perhaps capturing moments like those shown below.

Meanwhile, despite the heavy showers and cool winds, summer migrants have been pouring into the country in the last few weeks, mostly unseen of course.

Chiffchaffs flooded in about 2-3 weeks ago and now a trickle of wheatears is appearing. If you are out and about in the county, try looking in any bare hilltop fields....you might just see one pausing after its night flight. Ring ouzels have also been moving north, one even appearing on The sanctuary Nature Reserve adjacent to Derby County's football stadium in Derby!

Migrant ospreys have been seen at several locations in Derbyshire including Carsington Reservoir (the biggest open water in the county) where nest platforms have been put up hoping to lure one or two to stay and nest.

Male Wheatear painting, copyright Darren Rees,
The Society of Wildlife Artists (SWLA)

Male wheatear: painting copyright of Darren Rees of The Society of Wildlife Artists (SWLA).

In the next few weeks hobbies, the peregrine's smaller relatives, will reappear. They've spent the winter in sub-Saharan Africa feeding mainly on insects, par

ticularly flying termites.

Like peregrines and indeed all other falcons, they don't build nests. Instead, hobbies take over unused crow nests high in isolated trees or small groups of trees on farmland.

One of the characteristic sounds of springs gone by was the unmistakeable song of the cuckoo, another bird that winters down in Africa. sadly, with cuckoo numbers well down these days, I don't expect to hear a cuckoo unless I travel up onto the moors where there last stronghold is.

The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) satellite tagged five male cuckoos last summer in an attempt to find out exactly where they spend the winter and whether habitat changes in Africa could explain part of this bird's decline. All five cuckoos safely arrived in their winter

winter quarters but now at least one (Clement) has died and won't be returning to the UK.
Two are in mainland Europe, one in Algeria and the fifth is still in the Ivory Coast. Many people have been following these males and you can do likewise by going to:

http://www.bto.org/science/migration/tracking-studies/cuckoo-tracking

To see what birds are about in Derbyshire go to the Derbyshire Ornithological Society's excellent website and find the 'Latest Sightings' page:

http://www.derbyshireos.org.uk/news.asp

Nick B (DWT)

The cuckoo shown is a juvenile just out of the nest. It was taken by Richard Pittam at DWT's Willington Nature Reserve, south west of Derby last summer.

Our clutch is complete and a possible sighting update

Update 14th April: a bird watcher in North Derbyshire has seen a peregrine with an orange/red colour ring on its leg but he was unable to see the ring number. Could this be one of our cathedral birds? We await further sightings.......
We now have a full clutch of four eggs (video below). This last egg surprised some of us as we thought this year there would only be three. The reason for that is because we thought that incubation had begun in earnest after the second egg, though it may have been the cooler weather which encouraged them to warm the eggs more than normal. (Full incubation begins just before the last egg is due to be laid)
Our thanks to RJ who reported all four eggs visible at 09.19 on April 5th. On checking our recorded footage, it's clear the egg appeared sometime between 10pm on 4th April and 3am the next day. Surprisingly, we could not see the exact moment; it all happened so quickly and under cover of lots of feathers.

The video below shows a moment on 5th April when the female was relieved from incubating the eggs by the male. We see how much larger she is than the male. Notice, too, the somewhat darker shade of grey around his head than she has. The angle they are at does make it hard even for the Project Team members to tell them apart sometimes.

The female will do most of the incubating, now. Occasionally she will leave the eggs to feed and preen herself. The male will cover the eggs as best he can while she's off but, being smaller, he's really not as good at this as the female and she will return as soon as she can, pushing the male out of the way!

His main task is to feed his mate. She will not hunt again until the chicks are quite big....and that's at least six or seven weeks away.

Meanwhile, we're sure you'll keep an eye on our birds from time to time to ensure everything is going to plan.

One day some years ago, it rained very hard from the East and drenched the incubating female. We were sure the nest would flood. Fortunately the drainage holes worked and the eggs survived but she certainly had a very testing time of it. Let's hope that doesn't happen this year.

Today it is very cold in Derby following yesterday's snow. The wind is from the north and it feels more like January!

We also hope you manage to get out to see some wildlife 'for real' once the weather warms up a bit. Migrant birds are coming back and the first influx of swallows can't be far away (though if they have any sense they will be lingering further south for the time being!).

Already a few migrating ospreys have been seen in Derbyshire. Beatrice, one of Roy Dennis' satellite tagged ospreys roosted one night near Fernilee Reservoir in the north of the county and an osprey of unknown origin flew north over the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust's nature reserve at Wyver Lane, just outside Belper a couple of days ago. And a third bird was seen at Carsington Reservoir.

To follow the progress of Roy's tagged birds just put 'roy dennis' or 'highland foundation for wildlife' into a search engine and his fascinating website will come up.

Meanwhile, here in Derby, we have time to 'chill'...in both senses of the word!

We'll do our best to answer any questions you may have so do please keep on sending in comments.


Nick M and Nick B (DWT)

Ps. The faulty power supply to our Cisco wireless internet connection was changed on Saturday. This devise was overheating and cutting out and, thanks to Gavin from SERCO, we have been supplied with a replacement which we hope will give as equally long service.

Pps. Double click on the Clustrmap world map on the blog to see exactly where in the UK and in the world people have been watching our birds from. Countries (some 47 of them) include Lybia, Mongolia and the Cook Islands!

We have a Fourth Egg

Clutch sizes of three or four are normal in peregrines. But, because egg-laying was as late this year as it was in 2007, it seemed more likely that we would only have a clutch of three in 2011. However, reports of a fourth egg began coming in on Saturday morning (9th April) around 7am, which were confirmed later by this lovely screen capture posted to our Flickr Group by HelenSara. Your Peregrine Project Team maintain a table of dates for key events over the last few breeding seasons. Normally, as the female gets more experienced, the dates of laying get progressively earlier. Here are the dates for first egg, last egg and date of hatching over the last few years: 2007 3 April 9 April, 9 May Incubation: 30 days 2008 28 March 4 April, 4 May Incubation: 30 days 2009 23 March 31 March 29 April Incubation: 30 days 2010 24 March 31 March 1 May Incubation: 31 days 2011 4 April 9 April So we see incubation takes around thirty days, giving us an expected hatching date of 9th May. Quite why she was later this year is not known. Do we still have the original female as last year (we're 99.9% sure that we do)? Has the colder weather this year delayed things? The answer is we simply don't know. These next few weeks will be rather quiet times on the webcams, with the female doing most of the incubation. Sometimes the male will come in and take over while she feeds and preens, but she soon returns to oust him from his paternal duties.

A rosy glow

After the news of our first peregrine egg being laid yesterday evening, there was a flurry of excited comments left from around the world, and quite a bit of local interest here in Derby City, too. Local radio, TV and newspapers have already picked up on the story, and Cathedral Green saw a small posse of bird watchers gathered to see what was going on this morning. It's a pleasure to see old friends from last year, even if it wasn't possible to talk to them whilst in the middle of a live outside broadcast interview with Radio Derby halfway down Amen Alley (yes, this is a genuine Derby street name!) But we are hoping for a few pleasant lunchtime gatherings this summer to "talk peregrines" with everyone on the newly refurbished Green.



Just to allay any fears, don't be surprised if you see the egg(s) lying abandoned in the nest for an hour or more at a time. This is quite normal, and intensive incubation only really gets underway once all the eggs are laid. Then the clock starts ticking, and all the eggs should hatch around the same time.


Thanks to one viewer (Karen Anne in the US) who left a comment and link to a photo of the egg seen early this morning in daylight when their true colour becomes obvious. Having hyperlinks to your uploaded images is the best way that viewers can make webcam snapshots available to us without crashing our email Inboxes. Whenever possible, jpegs are best. Here then is our latest video clip, hot from the DVD recorders that churn away continuously inside Derby Cathedral's ancient tower. It was captured just after first light this morning, hence the rosy glow on the bird and the overall image graininess.

Nick B. of Derbyshire Wildluife Trust added the folliwng comment to this blog entry, but it's really worth repeating here for those visitors who aren't interested in looking at the comments some of us leave:
Just to confirm what Nick M said - the birds need to stop the egg getting too cold (and there is a cold wind in the city today). . . but not start the incubation properly until all four (we hope) eggs are laid.Otherwise there could be up to a 6-8 day gap between the first and the last hatching. That would mean the younger chicks would get a raw deal when it came to feeding time. Now some other birds (eg the barn owl) adopt a different strategy, linked to their much more uncertain food supply. They incubate the first egg immediately so there is a big gap between the first and last hatching. If food is short (and mice and vole numbers do fluctuate widely from year to year) then the younger chicks die - or get eaten by their older siblings (charming stuff!). With peregrines, where food is usually abundant, the strategy is the opposite. Hope that helps to explain their ecology a bit more!

Proud Parents

One of our viewers, Andrea, kindly emailed in a photo she captured yesterday evening, when Mum came back to take over incubating her eggs. We've not seen much sign of the eggs since incubation started in earnest, but it should soon be over. Nothing is guaranteed in the world of wildlife, and we could be unlucky. But we're all hoping that at least half the eggs hatch out sometime next week, just as they did in 2007.

There's nothing guaranteed with our webcameras, either. Last week something appeared, dangling down over our second nest cam. Some of you kindly emailed in to alert us. Clearly this was a bone fragment of some sort and, whilst outside the Cathedral checking it out, I bumped into local photographer, John Salloway with his mighty camera. He kindly sent me the picture below. Evidently quite a large piece of prey remains had fallen from the tower and got caught on the anti-perching spikes atop the camera. We can't abseil down to remove it as it's illegal to disturb any bird on its nest, let alone a peregrine falcon. But assuming the eggs are viable, we'll be able to get it removed when the licenced ringers go down to put numbered and coloured bands on their legs of the new chicks, just as they did last season about three weeks after they hatched. This may eventually reveal scientific evidence as to where our young birds eventually end up.

Astute viewers may have noticed that the small world map on the bottom left of our blog has lost its cluster of big red dots. These showed where in the world you, our readers, hail from. (Or, to be more exact, where your ISP is located). Just click on the map to zoom in for a clearer view of each continent's viewers. We decided to changed the settings so that the map refreshes weekly, rather than yearly, so giving us a more up-to-date image of where blog readers are located. We may alter this to monthly if this doesn't work out. Let us know what you think.

Once again, we can reassure you there's an awful lot happening behind the scenes. Rather mundane was the replacement under warranty today of one of our DVD/HDD recorders which has been faulty for some time. We decided to pay for an upgrade, so both machines are now Philips DVDR3460H with 250Gb of disk storage for capturing some of those moments you tell us you've witnessed live on the webcams.

As well watching and waiting for the fairly imminent hatching (sometime next week), there is other exciting news that all of us in the Project Team have been working on recently, and are looking forward to bringing you in the next day or two.

Meanwhile, please keep returning and making those little red dots grow on our map of the world!

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

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.

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.)

Egg No. 3

We have three eggs now. This photo was taken at 10:30 local time (now BST, as our clocks moved forward an hour last weekend from GMT).

Last year four egs were laid, but only two hatched. Despite this, the parents tried to keep the two new chicks warm whilst at the same time incubating the non-viable eggs for a considerable number of days. Eventually one got broken on the nest and - if I remember rightly - the shell was consumed by the female. The fourth got broken during the short struggle by our ringers (or banders, as they're called in the US) to safely capture the eyass (young chick) for ringing.

In answer to a number of recent questions left in "Comments", Nick Brown (DWT) recently wrote the following. His answers are well-worth repeating here:

"Loads of questions! Here's a few quick answers: By starting incubation right away, owls produce young of different ages. This is an adaptation to a fluctuating food supply (vole and mice numbers are well known to cycle from abundant one year to scarce the next). Often the smaller chicks die (or are eaten by their bigger siblings) and the brood size is reduced to match the food supply. Peregrines by comparison have a much more reliable food supply and usually rear all their 4 (even occasionally 5) young. So synchronised hatching makes sense.The reason the peregrines are covering the first and second eggs is to keep them warm (during what has been a cold snap of weather). Serious incubation - when she gets right down and opens up her hot 'brood patch' on the eggs -won't happen until at least the third and probably the fourth egg is laid.The last egg is often a bit smaller than the first three, so probably is slightly less likely to produce a strong youngster than the others. Some birds sit on addled or infertile eggs for weeks after the 'expected' hatching date. However, if say two of the four eggs hatch, the parents will start feeding these immediately while continuing to brood the other two eggs (and the small chicks). This happened last year on the cathedral. Gradually they just ignore the unhatched/dud eggs and focus their attentions on the two chicks."

No Change: - still just the two chicks

By late Saturday evening we still had just the two chicks. They had a good feed around 8pm, possibly from a thrush, though most of the time the chicks remain out of sight under Mum, who is still sitting on both them and the eggs. According to the books, it's rarely more than 48 hours between the first and last eggs hatching, so it seems increasingly likely that the remaining eggs may not be viable.
In Columbus, Ohio none of their four eggs have hatched this year, so now they've all been removed in the hope this may trigger the adults to try again. But it does seem rather late in the season. Do visit their blog, if only to see the stunning photo of their female, Scout, taken as she was defending her nest site as the addled eggs were removed.

Signs of hatching...what to watch for

It's hard to believe it's been nearly a month since our peregrines laid their first egg in the nest, and just three weeks since we went online.

And now our eggs are about to hatch. In fact, we thought yesterday that they had already done so, as we've received feedback from a peregrine expert that our female was sitting differently on the nest. We watched the cameras all afternoon, but spotted four eggs on a changeover at 3pm. We thought the strong winds were causing the larger female to brace herself by spreading out her wings, but today she still has an outspread posture, even in calm weather. At 11am her four eggs were still visible to us.

So what are the signs to watch out for? Donna Daniel at the Columbus Peregrine Falcon Project in Ohio has just published some wonderful notes about what signs we might see. She's kindly let me reproduce them here, with a few modifications of our own.

When will they hatch?
Firstly, incubation takes about 33 days, but it's difficult to say when the birds actually start. Counting from the date of the 4th egg, which appeared on 10th April, 33 days is 13th May, so that is when we predicted hatching to occur. However, it's not an exact science, and if we count from when the 3rd egg was laid on 8th April, this gives us a hatching date of 11th May. But all along we've been saying somewhere between 8th -13th May to be safe!!

Don't be surprised if hatch begins earlier and don't panic if they are late! And, remember that the eggs won't all hatch at once - they will hatch over a couple of days.

Given that, here are some signs to help tell when hatching is close:
A day or so prior to hatching the chicks will begin vocalizing from inside the egg and pecking to work their way out. The adult birds can hear the chirping and feel the vibration, so their behavior will change. While throughout the majority of incubation they have sat tight on the eggs, they will now become very restless. They will get up and look down at the eggs more often, settle back down, and be up looking again within a short time. We have a microphone above the nest scrape, but it's not online yet. Sound will still be captured on film, and we will be monitoring it from our office inside Derby Museum.

After hatching the chicks need to be kept warm, so our female will brood the hatchlings. This may look similar to incubation but she will actually be sitting up higher and may hold her wings out from her body more than we see during incubation. Finally, keep in mind that some or all of the eggs may not even hatch. We have no plans to intervene in any way with this natural process.

Our female is now showing increasing interest in the eggs beneath her. At 5pm yesterday the male arrived carrying a small prey item, ready plucked, which suggests his instinct to bring food to the chicks was prematurely kicking in.

So let's hope for good weather, and enjoy watching the eggs hatch live on camera. And if you want a sneak preview of what's to come here, why not visit the live streaming video webcams in Ohio, where recent talk has been of a small hole appearing in one of their eggs.

The Calm Before The Storm

It's a deceptively quiet time now.

We're now settling in to a routine of around 500 new visitors, plus another 500 returning visitors to our webcams every day. We welcome you all, and thank you for heeding the call to close your browsers after watching. It's done the trick, and drastically lightened the load on the Streamdays servers.

The Derby Cathedral peregrines have now settled into an incubation routine, too. It's clear that the female sits on the eggs for most of the night, getting relieved either an hour or two before dawn, or shortly afterwards. There are usually a couple of changeovers during the day before she resumes again for the night shift. Only once so far has the male spent most of the night on the eggs.


These changeovers nornally takes less than a minute, but once or twice the eggs have been left exposed for six or seven minutes.

Sometimes the sitting bird simply doesn't want to move. More than once the larger female has seemed to stand bemused by her failure to rouse her partner, or vice versa. But she's bigger, and when she waddles slowly in from the right side of the platform he invariably gets up and flies off. If you see a changeover online you're quite lucky. Had we managed to get our audio channel up and running in time this would have been a useful early-warning of a changeover, as the birds call to each other with a gentle chirrupping or ee-chupping sound when one of them arrives on the ledge.

So how do you tell which is the male and which is the female?

The answer is it's not always easy when there's only one bird there. But look firstly for size. The female (top picture) is considerably bulkier than the male (lower picture). Because of her bulk, her wing tips usually stick upwards much more than those of the male. She is a lighter grey tone than him. If you look at the male in the lower picture, you'll see he is smaller and slightly neater in size, with a darker tone to his head and back. Note, too, the tiny white dot on his right moustache-like stripe on his head. The female doesn't have this, and it's visible too through a telescope from Cathedral Green. When they are side by side, there's no problem. She is so much bigger then he is, and he acts quite submissively to her.

We've pulled back on the zoom a little bit as the night-time focussing wasn't very sharp when the camera was really close up. At night it's nearly always the bulkier female who incubates the eggs. hatching won't be too far away, and our next blog entry will give you some clues to watch out for when it becomes imminent.

Behind the scenes it's anything but a quiet time. The DWT are busy gathering volunteers together to organise various Watch events on Cathedral Green, whilst the Museum is in talks with Streamdays about a possible full-speed streaming video service.. We've had a BBC wildlife photographer down to film at The Sanctuary and at Derby Cathedral this week for a new series on the Nature of Britain with Alan Titchmarsh. We're working on ways to remotely focus and zoom the peregrine camera in time for hatching, and we're trying to get an audio stream and a still image archive set up. That, plus the rest of our duties, it's far from a quiet time. Someone once asked whether we did this for the money. Most certainly not; it's for the love of the work that we do.

Meanwhile, enjoy watching.

Take a Closer Look

Since launching the internet webcam four days ago we've had nearly 3000 visits to our webpages. We've increased the size of both camera images and, for a short time only, we've zoomed in Camera 1 to give you an even closer look into the private life of Derby's peregrines. (Note: we sorry that the night-time picture was out of focus on Wednesday night. We didn't realise there would be such a difference in image quality under infra-red. We'll zoom back out a bit more just as soon as we can.) After the excitement of Easter's egg-laying, which didn't quite make it live on-line, we now have a quieter time as both parents incubate their eggs around the clock. For us the work continues to develop the website, bring you an audio channel and, of course to plan the various events and peregrine watches which the Wildlife Trust, in particular, will be leading on. Thanks to the guys at Capita and Streamdays for connecting us up to the web last week, and for presenting our video stream so effectively, as this saved image shows. If you can't load the images on your computer, you may need to install an up-to-date version of Flash player. It needs version 7 or above. You can get an update at this link: Flash Player update You will probably need adminstrator rights on your PC to install some software.