Valentine's Day Videos

Head-bowing courtship behaviour - see video below

A climb up Derby Cathedral’s tower this afternoon yielded two lovely video clips, clearly marking the start of the breeding season.

First, we see the falcon (female bird) on the nest ledge where she had just arrived. It’s 8th February, 7:30am local time (GMT) and dawn is breaking, and the cameras are still in night-mode. She spends a considerable amount of time moving slowly around the nest scrape, picking at debris and possibly consuming small pieces of grit. It seems unlikely that she was picking at insects as it was far too cold and early in the season for that.


Next we see the typical courtship routine of head-bowing and eee-chupp calls from the female. We expect to see the pair mating on the tower during March, and as a precursor to this, we will see a lot of courtship activity. Typical of this is the head-down eee-chupp sequence that follows. It was 11th February, and our male has just arrived at the nest ledge and the female flies in, landing just off camera. They face each other, heads bowed, with the female making an “eee-chup, eee-chup “ call, with the male also calling in the same way. During this display the male may remain absolutely motionless for many minutes. But eventually it seems that his nerve gives in and he suddenly flees the nest, leaving the female behind. Though not seen on this occasion, she often then moves slowly forward and stands inside the nest scrape.


We ask that any webcam viewers seeing interesting activity to make a note of the date and time and to post a comment on this blog. We won't be able to retrieve every one of them, but we can use your feedback to quickly obtain and post as many interesting clips as we are able, given our resources.

Courtship Activity

Welcome. If you're a first time visitor to this blog you may wish to read an overview of the peregrine project, or add your name to our mailing list (see below)

The courtship phase has now begun, although it does seem to involve a lot of standing around. Our peregrine falcons were quite unmoved by our recent abseil to prepare their nest ledge for 2008. Within a day they were back on the platform, bowing intently at one another. We should see more and more of this activity in the weeks ahead.
Courtship in most birds is triggered by increasing day-length, and peregrines are no exception. It usually begins with the male standing in the nest scrape that he (mostly) has made. The female arrives with loud and repeated "ee-chupp" calls. With his head down, the male remains static for four or five minutes, stared at by the larger female on the far side of the nest ledge. Almost looking as if his nerve suddenly gives out, he flies off, leaving the female alone. A minute or two may pass before she plods over and stands in the empty nest scrape. Turning a few times, she may also give a few scrapes at the gravel herself, before eventually moving to the edge of the ledge where she may remain for some time.

You may be lucky enough to see head-bowing or nest-scraping activity in the freeze-frame of our webcams. You may also witness the male pass food to the female - another important part of their courtship.

The webcams have now been readjusted, with camera 1 set to the centre of the scrape. We hope to upgrade the webcam service for 2008 so as to give a much faster image refresh, plus a photo archive facility. We'll keep you informed of all these developments in the months ahead.

Mailing List
Would you like to receive a direct mail-shot of any key events? If so, please send an email to peregrines@derby.gov.uk with your name, nearest town and your country, and we'll add you to a new mailing-list. Please tell us if you're a teacher who uses (or would like to use) the webcams in class , as we may be able to send you more specific information to meet your needs. (We may share the list between the project partners to inform you of related events, and you can request removal at any time.)

Note: We've now moved the overview of our Peregrine Project to be the first entry for January 2008.

Derby "De-Lights" Tonight

The lights in Derby go out for an hour tonight between 9pm-10pm local time (Monday 26th), as part of a city-wide campaign to raise awareness of the impact we all make on global energy consumption and climate change emissions. Businesses and home users are all being urged to demonstrate the impact we can all make on the environment by switching off lights and other equipment. You can read more here.

You may therefore notice of one of three things with our webcams:

a) no change at all - everything works fine

b) the picture freezes as the power to the tower is cut for an hour

c) background street illumination is dimmed as all Christmas lights, cathedral floodlights and other lights are turned off (except street lighting, of course)

I hope readers will forgive us if we don't specially go in to turn off the webcamera power for this period; it would use more energy in petrol for us to drive in than it would save. But rest assured that this blog-writer's home will have all un-needed power consumption turned off. Nothing new there, then.

Meanwhile, do enjoy the image below of our male peregrine keeping up appearances on the nest scrape at the weekend. He was actively pushing back the gravel layer with his feet for quite some time. It's looking good for next season!

Questions and Answers

One of our regular viewers, Jennie in Hong Kong, recently posted some very pertinent questions in this blog's comments. We've put these and a few others we've received in bold, and have tried to answer them as best as we can.

Where would the birds be if the box were removed? - well, they would still be on the Cathedral, it's as simple as that. They chose the Cathedral as their favourite site in Derby, England, from which to hunt and on which to roost - just as other peregrines have probably done on and off here for hundreds of years.

Why do they return to the nest platform each day? Probably to assure themselves that it's still OK, and to reinforce their possession of it against any competition that might come through. We know that they have been undertaking occasional nest-scraping actions at least since mid-October, and in certain light the depression in the gravel on the left side of the platform is very clear to see. The picture on the left was taken on November 13th at 8.30GMT, just about 1.5hrs after dawn broke. The male on the right remained static, with head bowed, for about five minutes, and the female on the left didn't move much either. The picture below was taken on 18th November after the first snowfall of winter in Derby - the nest scrape is highlighted well under the infra-red light.

I didn't see them nest-scraping whenever I watched. Do the birds do this at a particular time, say in the morning or at night? Is this the job for the male or female?
I'm not sure there's a particular time that they do this. It's quite a rare event to see this time of year, and with the 15 second change of images it could easily be missed. You can see a video clip here As stated above, the most reliable time to see the birds is shortly after dawn, so try watching around 7am-8am local time. From our experience in 2007, we'd say that it's the adult male who does most of the nest-scraping.

Would the parents recognise the juveniles from this season if they returned? Well, based on the evidence we saw earlier in the year, we think they would. Visit our blog entries for March 21st and 6th April and you'll see two of our YouTube videos showing one of the previous year's chicks on the nest platform. Not only were the parents not bothered by their offspring's presence, at one point the adult male seemed quite intimidated by the young bird. I'm sure the juveniles were only tolerated because they were recognised as being the young of these particular birds. Elsewhere the young of other peregrines have been known to stay around and help feed the new season's chicks.

Now that the babes are ringed and fledged..have there been any sightings? And if so is there a place where they are logged and can be viewed?
The last known sighting of one of the peregrine chicks from 2007 was about 10 miles away, where a colour-ringed peregrine was seen in early October. It wasn't possible to tell if it was oo1 or 002. We will, of course bring you news of the juveniles as soon as we hear it. As far as I'm aware though, it's not currently possible to look up bird ringing results online - but I'll amend this if I'm proved wrong.

Nadine in Australia emailed us to say that the night-light on the left hand side is not working and hoped that we would get it fixed as our night time is her daytime, and is the only period when she can watch for the peregrines. The problem is partly due to the fact that this camera has sagged slightly over the last few months. It now points down and "sees" more of the floodlighting on the cathedral tower, and is fooled into thinking that it's still daytime, so it turns off the infra-red illumination. When we next abseil down we'll try and make all the necessary adjustments, but in the meantime we've remotely fiddled with the camera iris, and it seems to have done the trick. The night-time IR illuminator now works more often than not.

Why does the camera picture freeze up ocassionally? This is usually a problem with the video server inside Derby Cathedral, or our link to Streamdays. Once we're aware of a problem we can normally re-boot our equipment remotely, but sometimes we have to climb the spiral staircase and start the equipment manually. A break in signal in mid-November was caused by the accidental disconection of the pwoer supply to some receiving equipment inside The Silk Mill Museum, through which our signals pass. Thanks to the guys from Capita IT Services for remedying that one.

Even more eggs-sighted! - video clips

We now have two eggs! The Cathedral's Head Verger rang this evening to announce that a second egg had been laid. We'll know exactly when once we review our 24hr video recording after Easter.
Meanwhile after the excitement of our first egg, here are some key video moments captured on Tuesday morning. Double-click the image to play this YouTube video.

At 5:46am the egg is laid, and we get our first glimpse of it just moments later. Just before dawn the male arrives to take his first look at the new arrival in the nest before flying off again. Under our infra-red light the egg looks white, but then we see the egg in daylight for the first time. The male does his bit at keeping the egg warm, although we've already seen periods of many hours this week when the egg is left exposed. This is normal. Incubation of peregrine eggs only starts in earnest when the last egg in the clutch is ready to be laid.

But we've included one final surprise. We were stunned to see one of last year's juveniles turn up on the nest platform to inspect and touch the egg. Note the amazing moment when (she?) lays over the egg and does some nest scraping actions before the adult male arrives and, rather timidly, takes back the egg and sits down on it. We were really surprised to capture these moments, but we#ve since learnt that it is not an unknown occurrence for juveniles from a previous year to get involved in a nest, even to the point of feeding a chick. (If you can't see the video when you double-click the image, there are some stills in the blog entry below. )

Thanks to Philip for updating our peregrine information leaflet. You can download this by going to "Key Links" on the left side of this page.

Finally, we have now been assured by Capita that they will get us connected to the internet by Monday 16th April, if not before. So watch this space for news.

Some cold wind

Visiting the cathedral early yesterday morning, the bitingly cold NW wind had forced the peregrine pair to huddle against the stonework on the top ledge on the South side of the tower, as far out of the weather as they could get. Meanwhile, blown down by the wind, an old woodcock carcase and the leg of a little grebe were found below.
The previous day they had been nest scraping again soon after the series of tower tours during a cathedral open day had finished. These tours have no significant effect on our resolute birds.
Whether we get an egg before Easter remains to be seen....it begins to look like we might have to wait until the week after....but only the falcons know!
Meanwhile, enjoy the nest scraping and courtship displays seen on the video clips included in earlier posts!

A Tasty Morsel

There were still no signs of egg-laying when the Cathedral cameras were checked on Friday. However, reviewing the previous three days of recording revealed lots of nest scraping and head bowing activities. Whenever mutual bowing occurs it's amazing to see how still the male can remain - sometimes up to ten minutes at a time. (See video clip for March 14th for an example of this activity) At other times he stares intently for some minutes at the female who is usually off-camera on the other side of the ledge. Here are more details of courtship behaviour in American peregrines, and it mirrors exactly what we're seeing in Derby. The only difference is that we are seeing a lot of food being brought to the nest platform for consumption. But as yet there's no evidence of copulation occurring on the platform, although mating was witnessed on one of the gargoyles at the top of Derby Cathedral's tower on Wednesday 21st March.)

On Thursday 22nd March we recorded the male bringing food to the nest and passing it to the much larger female. Watch this by clicking on the YouTube image below.

(Note the better quality recording; for some reason this clip could be processed directly by computer, rather than having to use a video camera pointing at a TV screen for previous clips!)

We'd like to build a questions and answers page about our peregrine falcons. If you'd like to send us any suggestions for things you'd like to see answered, please complete the "Contact Us" form at the bottom of the main peregrine page on Derby City Council's website.

At last there's progress with our internet connection! Next week Capita (the Council's external IT agents) will be arranging the dismantling and transfer of the radio equipment necessary to give us our internet connection. How long it then takes to configure us to the City council's servers is still anyone's guess, but our ICT Unit are now building the necessary page ready to receive the webcam images. Fingers crossed!

A meeting with Derby Cityscape on Friday afternoon was fruitful, and we should soon be able to reveal how much access we're likely to get on Cathedral Green during the summer. (You may be aware that the whole Green is to be landscaped later this year, and access to the site has been of great concern to many people)

A Bit of a Scrape

Though we're still a couple of weeks away (at least) from being live on the internet, the BBC supplied us with a DVD recorder last week to help us capture round-the-clock footage of Derby Cathedral's peregrine falcons. After various teething problems we've managed to capture some stunning moments. We've uploaded a 6 minute clip to YouTube which you can view here by clicking the play icon. It was recorded on 8th March at 1pm. Beware the loud bells!


First you'll see the male bird lying prostrate, pushing with both feet to make a suitable nest scrape for her to lay her eggs in. Then, less than half an hour later, we get amazing scenes of both birds together. Our male seems to be showing off the nest site to her. Watch how he stands stock still for over two minutes, head bowed down towards the centre of the scrape, whilst she ee-chupps away at him. On both arrival and departure he seems to be very wary of her, or perhaps he's cautious not to tread in the scrape. You decide. She remained on the platform for another hour after he'd flown off. We're now seeing this same activity on many days -a good sign indeed of things to come.

This clip appeared on BBC "East Midlands Today" on Tuesday 13th March - the first in a series of reports on the peregrines' progress. Once our webcam pictures go live online, you'll find them from the peregrine page within Derby Museums website. Despite the implication in the article and in the BBC news release, our peregrine project is actually a partnership between Derby Cathedral, the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and Derby Museum & Art Gallery.

I'm afraid we're getting into a bit of a scrape ourselves when it comes to editing our captured DVD. Just like the ones posted here last month, this sequence still had to be filmed off a TV screen! If anyone can suggest the best package to convert VOB files to AVI for editing in Adobe Premiere, do please get in touch by sending a comment to this post. DVDShrink doesn't seem to like our DVDs, whilst iSofterDVDtoAVI either crashes, or Premiere takes hours and hours to conform the AVI files.

early morning visit

0730 am Sunday 25th February: remains of teal, redwing and lapwing under the tower. No birds above but the pair spotted on the very top of the police mast in Chester Green, a regular perching spot only maybe half a mile from the cathedral. Just as the scope was on the birds, they flew off one after the other, heading Eastwards.
Seeing and hearing the latest (excellent) video sequences, suggest it shows the female. Certainly getting 'in the mood' alright!