Peregrine Monitoring Status
The Peregrines are in very high, frantic, and ballistic courtship mode right now with at least one male consistently courting two females on Tuesday. At one point there were four Peregrines [biefly] interacting NW of Beacon - two courting, one nearby, and one to the NW looking interested in the activity. Most of the action is taking place on the near-Westside of Beacon in a narrow North-South band running from the island to the South and ranging quite far to the North. On their repeated returns to Beacon they often end up right above it soaring and gaining lift on the ridge of air Beacon creates. Overall they are generally staying in very close proximity to each other and to Beacon.
My total poser guess is they are very close to pair-bonding / mating with nesting and eggs very soon thereafter. Eggs are incubated for about 33 days and the fledge cycle from hatching to fledging is somewhere between 30 and 58 days with the middle being average. So realistically if they settle down to nest this week or next we're most likely looking at a fairly normal opening date. I would suspect from what I'm seeing it might open a week or two early, but probably no more than that if they nest on the South Face. If they nest elsewhere and we can confirm the location than an earlier opening is certainly possible.
David Anderson of the WDFW has monitoring staffed up with a small number of non-climbers this year after a training session that was run at the Audobon Society around the new year. He normally only wants a very few committed folks monitoring so as to keep the monitoring notes consistent. Bill Coe and I have a good relationship with David and while contributing to that overall monitoring effort we will be more focusing our monitoring effort on confirming the nest site so we can all have a better understanding of a likely opening date. Again, biologically speaking, things are looking fairly normal at the moment and we are determined to identify the nesting site this year. We'll keep you posted and will probably give a shout to a couple of you who expressed and interest in monitoring, though there is still no immediate rush as they are not nesting as yet.
And for those that venture out on your own, it's easy to confuse the Red Tailed Hawks and Peregrines. In general, if the bird is doing a lot of flat flying / soaring without a lot of wing movement, doing wide lazy turns with broader wings, and a fairly decent sized "triangular" or "fan" tail - then it's a Red Tailed. Also note the leading and trailing wing edge profiles are basically reversed between the Red Tailed and the Peregrine. The Red Taileds nest up under the roofs where the big East face roofs start turning downward hard up from the SE corner (by the sign post on the trail) - You can see it either from the upper picnic area or from a spot between the men and women's bathrooms facing South. The nest is, coincidentally, very reddish, fairly large / tall and looks sort of "Tibetan" in its perch and construction. Because of the nest location and type of prey they hang out flying a lot to the East, Southeast, and South, steadily soaring along in order to spot game on the ground.
Red Tailed Hawk
The Peregrines are a bit smaller, darker, compact and burly. Their tail and wings are narrower, wings more articulated back at the "elbow", and more pointed at the tips. They don't do a lot of flat, slow soaring because they don't hunt for things on the ground but rather are after birds in the sky. They will do the Redtail type soaring but usually only in very close to the rock or directly above Beacon. Otherwise they're generally either chilling on a SE or SW corner ledge somewhere or they have their mojo on and are cutting up the sky swooping about climbing, diving, and booking out in some direction. Again, they often come back to the ridge lift right above Beacon. Some times they do head out to the North a ways or across the river so you have to be patient. The best place to see them right now is from down by the boat launch while looking at Beacon, the ridge lift above it, and in the sky to the N-NW. Once you catch them in a wing-tucked dive a couple of times they become a lot easier to identify on a consistent basis. Again, the key is really more in their flight behavior than their visual appearance; once you have that behavior down you can tell it's them even at a great distance.
Peregrine Falcon
Worth a trip out as they are really lighting things off right now if you catch them while they're out and about. I caught them on Tuesday, which was a beautiful day, in the afternoon around 3pm. They were out solid for two hours and then disappeared like Cinderella...
Joseph Healy
Bill Coe
Beacon Rock Climbers' Association
