![]() So why all the fuss about falcons? Dan Brauning, the state game commission’s wildlife diversity chief, gives me a quick rundown based on his four decades of work with them. One metal band is color-coded by region, and another has a unique nine-digit code. And you can see, since they’re on a bridge, that can be a disaster.” McMorris, often with the help of specialized PennDOT equipment, sneaks up on a nest, tries to ID the parents, counts the chicks, gives them a quick health checkup (“There’s a parasite, trichomoniasis, that’s almost always fatal I have an antibiotic I can give them in the nest”), and performs the banding. After 30 days, they scramble to get away. “It takes about an hour,” McMorris tells me, “and you have to time it exactly right.” The eyases have to be big enough to wear the bands but not yet big enough to evade McMorris: “Up until about 30 days, they just cower when you approach. It’s the banding part of all this that requires the hard hat. She wasn’t bothered by the work that was going on.” (The Route 422 male, McMorris notes, is quite different: “When I approach, he just leaves. ![]() From her upbringing, she saw commotion going on around her. I think it was the 15th or 20th floor - it was pretty high up. And that’s how he knew a beam beneath the Betzwood Bridge wasn’t an unlikely spot for this female to call home: “Her parents nested in a flowerpot on the balcony of a high-rise in New York City. That put him in charge of the state’s contributions to the federal falcon registry, a sort of for peregrines that involves banding and tracking them with the help of an army of staff and volunteers. (Peregrines like high places, and McMorris was a rock climber at the time.) Before he knew it, he’d morphed into the commission’s peregrine falcon coordinator (“It’s not a full-time position, but between you and me, I put in full-time hours”), managing the program statewide. McMorris, who lives in Bala Cynwyd, is a wiry retired neuroscientist whose idea of a good time is crawling along bridges hundreds of feet above rivers and highways while irate peregrine falcons dive-bomb his hard-hatted head.Ī couple decades ago, McMorris, who was “looking for something to do with the natural world” in retirement from his research on cellular neuroscience, offered to keep an eye on a couple of falcon nests in the Philadelphia area for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. The common conception of a bird-watcher - and that’s what the Falcon Folk are, albeit on steroids - is an elderly white woman in exceedingly sturdy shoes and a sensible cardigan, with a pair of binoculars strung around her neck. And the people who track these falcons and chart their daily comings and goings? Peregrine falcons are fast, fierce, territorial, and utterly cold-blooded - they take their prey by kicking them and snapping their spines. If you’re wondering who in God’s name would blow the whistle on a couple of birds dumb enough to nest under one of the most congested highways in America and bring a $97 million construction project to its knees - well, you haven’t met the Falcon Folk, as I like to call them. While some facets of the bridge project could continue, other “primary work items,” as PennDOT put it, were prohibited until August 1st, when the eyases, as young falcons are known, would have hatched and flown away from the nest. And because peregrines are a threatened species protected by the state Game and Wildlife Code, not to mention the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, an entire protocol involving the Pennsylvania Game Commission, PennDOT and the construction firm kicked into gear. This particular pair of falcons was nesting on a bridge beam beneath what has to be one of the most heavily traveled stretches of road in the entire nation - maybe in the world. The birds were peregrine falcons - Falco peregrinus, fierce raptors who, with stoop speeds of up to 200 mph, are the fastest animals on earth. Then, just days before the original end date of the construction, the double whammy hit, in the form of two crow-size birds. For six weeks, work on the bridge was halted to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Then the first whammy struck: COVID-19 abruptly shut down the nation, and construction companies weren’t exempt. The $97 million project that had started in 2016 and had entangled traffic in Jersey barriers, hair-raising on-ramps and PLEASE SLOW DOWN signs for four long years was slated to end in May. In the spring of 2020, frustrated commuters (including me) thought they could finally glimpse the end of the construction morass that was the Betzwood Bridge on Route 422 near Valley Forge. Philly’s peregrine falcons are literally stopping traffic.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |