Peregrine Nest Brings a Community Together

By Julie O’Connor

Northern Minnesota’s most-watched female Peregrine Falcon guards her nest box, as seen from the rooftop above.

Laura Erickson

For the past two summers, I’ve spent my days in downtown Duluth, Minnesota, keeping track of a pair of Peregrine Falcons and their chicks, and sharing news and views of the birds with more than 7,500 people.

Duluth’s Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory, a raptor migration education and research organization, established Peregrine Watch in 2006. We developed an educational program around the peregrine family nesting atop a downtown building.

Now every summer starting on Memorial Day weekend, we Hawk Ridge naturalists station ourselves in a busy city park two blocks from the nest with educational handouts and telescopes. While the female is incubating and when the babies are tiny, a video monitor set up by the Raptor Resource Project, the organization that provided and maintains the nest box, gives everyone an intimate glimpse into what’s happening inside the box. We follow the development of the nestlings and keep track of where they are through their first tentative flights until about mid-July, when the young birds have become expert flyers.

Avid peregrine watchers include business owners, city leaders, tourists, schoolchildren, teenagers, employees of the neighboring Fond-du-Luth Casino, and senior residents of the building that hosts the nest box. The birds grab the interest of almost everyone who happens by, and many become “regulars.”

Several people from the local homeless population have taken a shine to the peregrine family, watching and reporting the birds’ activities when we aren’t on site. Like so many others, they’ve become attached to the birds, learning to differentiate adults from young by sight and sound, and coming by on a daily basis to find out how the family is doing.

It’s not uncommon to see groups of strangers sharing peregrine stories and enjoying the birds’ daily lives. Peregrines belong to no one, so they act as a unifying agent among the people who frequent downtown Duluth—inspiring communication and a shared interest between unlikely groups of bird watchers.

Julie O’Connor is a naturalist at Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory. Visit Peregrine Watch online for photos and updates at www.hawkridge.org/education/pw.html.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu