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.)

Still Around

The peregrines are still around Derby Cathedral, but are hardly ever seen via the webcameras at the moment.

These two pictures by local photographer and bell-ringer, Roger Lawson, shows where they sometimes like to hang out, as well as giving us a flavour of the festive season just passed.

Just after Christmas I climbed all 188 stone steps to the very top of the Cathedral Tower to check out a cable run and to measure up for a possible third camera. Popping my head over the stonework I both surprised, and was surprised by, our two adult birds who must have been on what we call the "gargoyle ledge" immediately below the top. We were all of us startled, and I watched both birds fly gracefully outwards and downwards below me, calling in alarm as they glided and flapped around the tower. Of course, disturbance like this is not really ideal, but they aren't put off by it, nor is it an illegal act until the time they start nesting again. I should have been more careful, though.

Looking down over the edge of the stonework, I saw the decapitated body of a small duck (mostly likely a female teal), which added to the remains of a lapwing and a beautiful golden plover which had been there since before Christmas. Peregrines tend to make a cache of food which they eat later. It would be fantastic if we could watch some of this activity at the top of the tower, and we're working on seeing if this might be possible.




There are a number of other potentially exciting developments likely to happen in 2008, but forgive us if we hold off announcing them until everything is resolved.

One thing we do need to decide is whether we reset the "hit counter" to zero for 2008, or whether we leave it running. What do you think? We broke the 240,000 barrier a few days ago, and it's pleasing that so many of you are still returning to check out the platform. (We will resolve the slipped camera in the next couple of months).

Meanwhile, work to redevelop Cathedral Green continues, with the task scheduled for completion by April. Here's a rather murky shot down across the Green - but then this winter in Derby has been murky on most days!

Happy New Year from all of us in the Peregrine Project Team.

PS: Since posting this, we were emailed by Ed Drewitt from Bristol Museum & Art Gallery who is an expert on identifying peregrine prey remains. He points out that we missed a couple of other birdy-bits in the picture. In front of the Golden Plover, and to the right there is a leg of some species of small Grebe. Above the Plover there is a Woodcock leg. Thanks Ed!

Unusual Views of Derby Cathedral.

Here are some unusual views of Derby Cathedral we thought you might like to look at whilst some of us ponder the fact that today our 200,000th web hit will almost undoubtedly be reached. All of us - the Cathedral, The Wildlife Trust, the City Council and of course its Museum Service - have been awestruck by the incredible interest so many people around the world have shown in our city's peregrine falcons. It was a pleasure in June to be able to turn off moderation of comments and to read all the topical observations and remarks that so many different people were making as they watched these magnificent birds in action and reported on their actions.

So that you can see the Cathedral's interior, local photographer Andy Savage has provided us with a link to one of his 360 degree images taken inside Derby Cathedral. You can click and drag your mouse across the image to make it scroll around inside, or hit Shift or Control to zoom in and out. There's an alternate version available here for anyone have difficulties viewing it. For an exterior shots, see this blog entry for July 5th

Of course, there are plenty of other people's shots of Derby Cathedral online, such as those on flickr like this one, or this one, or this one or this one.

And finally, here's a time-lapse video from the top of the tower, also taken by Andy Savage. I understand that Nick Brown plans to post some general views from the top of the tower in the near future to give visitors an idea of what Derby's skyline actually looks like. Follow this link if you'd like to learn more about a sponsored abseil in September to raise funds for Derby Cathedral. (Please note: all Streamdays cameras will be off line for c 1hr on Thursday at 5pm local time. More info here)

Hitting the bigtime!

Earlier today we clocked up 100,000 hits since the cameras went live on 12th April.
This level of interest in our birds has surpassed our wildest expectations. Last week we featured in the top ten web cams worldwide as calculated by Earthcam - along with the Times Square web cam in New York - no mean achievement!
So, many thanks to everyone who has been logging on to watch the progress of our two chicks and special thanks to those of you who let us know where you are watching. Most of you are in the UK but as word spreads around the planet, we know we have many people logging on all over the USA, in Canada and Australia and in a few in other countries such as Hungary and France. If you are watching us somewhere else, do please let us know. A peregrine addict in Antarctica would be a first......
None of this would have happened without the tireless work of Nick Moyes at Derby Museum. Nick has been having a much needed (computer-free) break this week but he returns to receive a round of applause from everyone involved in the project - even if , for now, it is virtual and silent!

Graham Whitmore's photo shows the power and bulk of the female falcon taking off.
Ps. If you are new to this blog, scroll back to view YouTube video clips with audio of the 'early days' of nest scraping and 'e-chupping', egg laying and hatching....

Where are you watching from?

With hits now well over 60,000, and increasing by 3000 a day, we are aware that there are many folk watching the Derby peregrines from abroad, as well as the UK. It would be great if you would post a 'comment' letting us know where you are, what you think of our birds and also, perhaps, if you are watching at work, at school or at home......or elsewhere!
We hope to develop the educational side of this project as soon as we can. If you have ideas for linking the peregrine story and the web cam pictures to school curricular work in particular, please get in touch (enquiries@derbyshirewt.co.uk).
This half term the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust is running four pre-booked 'family' activity sessions on the peregrines at the cathedral, aimed at 7-11 year olds, accompanied by their parents. Those on Tuesday 29th May are full but there are still some places on Wednesday 30th, both am and pm. There is a small charge. For details and to book places, ring the Trust office on 01773 881188 anytime after 9am on Monday.
Details of a similar event run by Derby Museum in June will follow later.

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.

Almost Too Popular!

Over 7,000 visitors since last week - and we're now really feeling the strain. 800 users were logged on at one time on Thursday!

Please, please may we ask you not to keep the peregrine webcam open on your computer when you're not looking at it? So many people have been doing this (including me!) that it's causing an absolutely huge drain on the servers supplying these pictures. We might have to reduce the image size or limit connection time if we don't reduce data demand. It's like leaving a tap running all day just in case you get thirsty.

It's easy to get around this: Rather than go straight to the webcam page, go here first: www.derby.gov.uk/peregrine Then, click on the obvious link to the temporary webcam page to view the cameras. Afterwards simply click your "Back" button to return to the main peregrine page. (You can keep that page open for as long as you like) To view the cameras again, simply click the "Forwards" button on your browser, and so on.

Alternatively, bookmark the webcam page and close it after viewing.

Streamdays.com are providing an absolutely superb service, at very reasonable cost. It's proving so popular that, to quote their Managing Director, Frank Crouwel, "To be quite [honest] with you, we have never experienced anything like this in the seven years we have been involved with webcam hosting. "

It's great being popular, and we think of data as being free - but it costs these guys to supply data to each and every one of you. Not even the servers at Derby City Council could do what they are doing. So please help them to help us! Or we might have to scale down the service in some way.

Thank you for your co-operation
Nick Moyes
Derby Museum & Art Gallery

Follow this link to see more webcams hosted by Streamdays

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.