The fastest animal on the planet has been checking out a possible new home in Victoria.
A nesting pair of peregrine falcons, along with a juvenile born this year, have been landing on the rooftop of the Promontory residential tower in the Songhees, where the owner of the penthouse has built the falcons a penthouse suite of their own.
Fred Welter is hoping the beautiful birds of prey will come to nest and raise some more young.
Welter has placed a router on the rooftop and installed cameras with hopes that if the falcons return to lay eggs in February it can all be streamed to the public via a YouTube channel. Fashioned from mahogany with solar panels, openings front and back, a pea-gravel bed and a turf-lined ledge, the box on the Promontory provides a commanding view of downtown and the waterfront from 21st floor.
Experts say it’s a prime spot for the peregrines — known to dive at more than 300 kilometres per hour — where they’ve been observed hunting pigeons downtown and European starlings at the Ogden Point terminal.
“This is a Promontory initiative in that the owners embraced and approved the suggestion [from bird experts],” said Welter. “I simply provided the box and the access.”
The peregrine falcon pair have been in Victoria for some time — by some accounts since 2014 — but it’s a mystery where the now-juvenile falcon was hatched. The location of their nesting site isn’t known. Peregrine nests are called scrapes and are really just shallow dugouts, usually in rooftop gravel, so the eggs don’t roll around.
Peregrines nest in high places such as cliff ledges, but are known to live on high buildings and bridges in cities around the world. The pairs have site affinity for nesting, but can move when sites have been compromised.
For months, David Bird, one of Canada’s foremost raptor scholars, and Jacques Sirois of the Victoria Migratory Bird Sanctuary have been visiting the tallest rooftops in Victoria in attempts to document a potential nest. The falcons have been spotted flying to the Sussex Building, Hudson One and others downtown, but no nesting sites have yet been found.
Darrell Pfeifer, who lives on the 19th floor of the Promontory building, has been regularly watching the peregrines via a motion-sensor camera. He’s enjoyed watching the parents teach the juvenile to hunt.
Although the peregrines have not entered the new nesting box on the rooftop, Pfeifer said they’ve been curious.
“They are aware of it,” he said in an interview. “My take, in fishing terms, is we’ve cast our line and now we wait. We’ll see in February if they come back to lay eggs.”
Bird, emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University and expert ornithologist who specializes in raptors, said Victoria is lucky to attract “such magnificent birds” to the urban environment.
He said peregrines usually lay up to four eggs, but the Victoria pair had just one fledgling this year, leading him to believe the nest was disturbed in some way or the others didn’t survive.
Bird said the bridges are too low in Victoria to support a falcon nest, so he’s hoping the nesting box on the Promontory will be their permanent site.
He describes the peregrines as “the fastest organisms on the planet” and the perfect hunters.
The peregrine stoop, their diving-bombing technique, sees the birds reach a high altitude and then dive down at lightning speed to kill their prey — usually unaware pigeons and starlings — in a mid-air lethal impact using talons and sharp beak.
A recent kill at the Victoria International Marina on the Inner Harbour left only the head of a belted kingfisher.
Sirois said the marina has multiple cameras, which captured the falcon killing the kingfisher in mid air.
He said the peregrines use a high light standard with a raptor platform installed by the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority to “launch attacks” on starlings.
Bird said the fastest stoop ever recorded was nearly 300 kilometres per hour. A pet peregrine raised from an egg was clocked by his owner at that speed in 2021 while skydiving with the bird.
Gordon Propp, who has been observing peregrines in the Lower Mainland for years, said he’s witnessed peregrine stoops about a dozen times over the past couple of years.
“One of the very first times I was driving over a bridge coming home from work and I saw something coming down very fast from the sky and then an explosion of feathers,” Propp said. “I wheeled around and got down under the bridge and found [a peregrine] eating a pigeon.”
Propp said he knows of nine nesting pairs in the Lower Mainland and all are nesting on the pier caps and girders of the big bridges there.
Propp said when bridge workers do maintenance, the falcons have moved to other areas of the bridge. However, others have abandoned sites completely, either disturbed by human activity or by other birds such as ravens.
Although migratory birds are capable of flying long distances, Propp believes peregrines in the Lower Mainland stay all year because the food is plentiful,
The falcons on the coast are a blue-listed species, meaning their status is vulnerable due to human activities and natural events. The populations are considered stable, according to the province. However, Bird suspects some peregrine populations may be declining due to avian influenza, the lethal virus associated with migrating birds.
Propp said he’s aware of several established nesting pairs in Haida Gwaii and on Gabriola Island, and cliff-dwelling pairs in the Harrison Hot Springs and Hope areas.
Peregrines are not a common sight. A provincial fact sheet said in winter, coastal estuaries are a good place to see them in B.C. In summer, look for them around large cliffs beside major rivers and wetlands in the Interior, and beside the ocean.
Sirois said Greater Victoria is fortunate to attract another apex predator to the urban environment. As chair of the Friends of the Victoria Harbour Migratory Nature Sanctuary, the naturalist, photographer and noted birder said the goal of the 100-year-old organization is to connect urban dwellers to nature where they live.
He said the peregrines now join the orca, black bear, cougar, wolf and bald eagles as top-of-the-food-chain species living in and around the city.
Peregrine falcon facts
• Peregrine comes from peregrin, meaning traveller in Latin. They are found all over the world with the exception of Antarctica.
• The female peregrine is known as the falcon while the male is called the tiercel. Males tend to be a third smaller than the females, which is common in birds of prey.
• Pairs mate for life and will usually return to the same nesting site.
• Peregrine falcons do not build stick nests, but instead, scrape out depressions on high cliffs. However, they will use deserted stick nests of other species. Their nesting sites are called aeries or eyries.
• Many nesting sites are on high-rise buildings and other tall structures such as bridges.
• Falcons have a system of baffles in the nostrils to enable them to breathe during incredibly fast dives.
• Plumage is dark blue-grey, with a black moustache mark, black bars on the chest, long pointed wings.
• Falcons are carnivorous, eating other birds like songbirds and waterfowl, and sometimes bats and small mammals.
• The coastal subspecies, Peale’s peregrine falcon (F.p.pealei) is generally darker and larger than the rarer American peregrine falcon (F.p.anatum) of the interior, which often has a salmon colour on its chest. The third subspecies, the tundra peregrine, breeds along the Arctic coast and is rarely seen in B.C.
• Peregrine falcons average about 42 centimetres long, with a wingspan of 105 cm. They weigh from 450 to 950 grams.
• The sound peregrines use for calling to each other sounds like “we-chew.” When defending their nest, they make a loud, rapid “kek-kek-kek.”
— The Nature Conservancy and the Province of B.C.
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