Yes, yes indeed! It’s definitely spring, now. Days can be counted upon to be over 40 and even 50 more often than not, skirts are getting shorter and the falcons are laying eggs. Apparently, somewhere over the course of the night, when I wasn’t looking, Mariah laid the first arrival of the season.

Aaaahh! Spring. I feel like getting some brews and cooking out tonight. It’s just a shame that I don’t own a working grill at the moment. Well, there’s some impulse shopping for the weekend, eh?

. . .  What are the falcons doing?  That’s all I really care about, right now.  Certainly, that’s all my wife cares about.  We’re waiting for eggs to hatch and maybe catch them in the act like we did last year.  This year, we’re going to have some competition in terms of being the first to publish pictures of the new arrivals: the Rochester Audubon Society has a new, highly-informative blog dedicated to our favourite Peregrines (Took, not withstanding), Caver and Mariah:

Rfalconcam - Imprints » Blog Archive » Courtship, Mating, & Nest Preparation

Peregrines are creatures of habit. Like tony jet-setters with expensive apartments and high-rise condos scattered through midtown Manhattan, wild Peregrines typically select two or three nest sites within a given territory, and move among them from year to year. Mariah bucks this trend, as do many of her urban-dwelling cousins. It turns out that the nest boxes set up by their human benefactors on the tops of buildings, smokestacks and other lofty structures are so ideally placed that there’s little need to wander around– a bit of a contradiction for a bird whose name means “wanderer”.

If you have a chance to do some reading, check out this post. It’s fascinating.  Peregrine Falcons are really interesting birds!  I did manage to snap off a good screen grab this morning, but I’m not sure if it’s Mariah or Caver that I’ve got, here.

Technorati Tags: Mariah, Caver, Peregrin Falcon, Kodak, Falcon Cam, Nature, Environment

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It’s always nice when the more precocious one’s in the family pass on thier expertise to the rest, just so long as they don’t start showing off.

Here we see the young ones, feathers blosoming and getting ready to take flight, observing how the flapping of the wings is done. Won’t be long now, and they’ll be out and flying. Geeze. Sarah’s gonna be bummed when there’s no more birdcam to look at!

Nothing spoils the mood of a baby falcon, especially one whose already molting his or her first feathers, quite like getting banded. Just ask these grumpy ones!

I just got home from doing laundry and decided that since Sarah had left the FalconCam open, I’d hit refresh and see what I came up with. Apparently, mother falcon has decided that the chicks are old enough and the weather warm enough that she could go run some errands and leave the little ones home alone for a time:

The nest must look a whole lot bigger and maybe even scarrier without mom or dad to fill it up. Here we see all the little ones crammed in together, sharing body heat as chicks will do. I couldn’t believe my good fortune at having captured this moment, because you so rarely see the chicks by themselves in a way where you can really get a good look at them.

The chick in this photo seems to say, “Where ever mom is, I hope she brings back food!”

Ah ha! Mom has returned, but if the little one was looking for a fresh meal, he’s going to be disappointed. Whatever errand took mom away from the nest, it wasn’t shopping.

Here’s a great picture of mom. What a nice profile!

Here’s what must be the hard part: getting all the little squirming buggers in the same pile so you can sit on them. Mom seems to have the situation well in hand, though.

Another great grab by my fiancee!

In our ever-increasingly interesting search for alternative energy sources, this one ranks up there as one of the weirdest:

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Microbes Convert Wastewater into Useable Electricity

Millions of tiny microbes infest the water that carries the detritus of human life and society. Some of them steadily break down the organic material in waste streams and produce electrons in the process. By harvesting these electrons, scientists have created microbial fuel cells. New research shows how such biological power plants can be stacked to create usable current.

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How cool! At approximately 10:30am this morning, a new life was born on top of the Kodak Tower!

My fiancee was extra exited to have happened upon a very special moment in the Falcon Cam season: the first of the baby falcons has hatched this morning and we caught it on the web. Without further ado, here are the pictures we managed to capture:
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