Bird Cams Around the World

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why woul d they leave those eggs there. I think , when they can get them , they should have.

In nature , they would have rolled off cliff already.
they did say they had authority to remove eggs and there should not be a pressing matter right now.

Just my thought. Do they really think everyone want to watch Dan incubate, something that will not hatch

Here's a response Glenn sent to the Yahoo Group yesterday:

This has gone way past my expectations. We used to think falcons had an internal clock to tell them when they went beyond full term incubation but perhaps they do not. Everything I do (band birds, etc) is governed by permit and in this case my permit allows me to collect eggs "at the end of the nesting season." Collection of eggs during banding of young is allowed but removing eggs from sitting parents is a gray area. Think of it this way, peregrines fail at nesting every year and no one is there to remove their eggs so they can get on with their lives. I knew of two such nests last year. What is different about this nest is that it has a camera and many are watching. So I will not treat them any different then the others--just wait until they are done and go collect the eggs. Thanks for your interest in the falcons. --glenn

At the time he wanted to get the eggs, BEFORE Cher laid her clutch, he only had Federal permission, not State. He has to have both here.

And, from what I understand from other posts to the forum, certain agencies no longer see a need for any intervention with peregrines going forward, as the population has recovered enough out here.. So unless something changes between now and next season, he will not be able to relocate healthy peregrine chicks who will fatally fledge into the bay, or onto roadways, etc....

So, hopefully, Dan and Cher will give up on the eggs, or they will break down.

I would go on gray area and say nesting season done. It is for this pair and they have to wait till next season

no way they would have had another clutch. Even I know that

Hopefully they are not waiting to break a record. ( state officials that is)
I am still very disappointed in this

My thoughts (for what it's worth),

What is happening here is just nature. There is no interference from human activity that has caused these two clutches to fail. So I believe it is the right thing to do to let the falcons deal with this in their own way.
In Osaka (Japan) the pair is still sitting on their eggs, those should have hatched mid-April. Last year Pa (De Mortel) sat on his eggs for 110 days before they started to break and disintegrate.
Keep the cam running, watch and learn, and try to avoid "humanising" events unfolding.
Of course we humans care and feel sorry for the parents, that's perfectly okay.
Taking unhatched eggs out of the nest to entice the adults to re-clutch, somehow seems not right to me. It's a form of control over wild animals and I don't think we have that right.

Overlong” Incubation at SF PG&E Nest
by stewartfalcon
It is about one week past the 100 day mark for incubation of now-dead eggs by the male known as Dapper Dan at the downtown San Francisco peregrine nest on PG&E headquarters. As many know, Dan and Lil produced a clutch of eggs that were incubated to about half term when a new female invaded the territory and displaced Lil.

Dan continued incubation duties alone. But of course he had to eat. He left to hunt and the eggs went uncovered for extended periods almost every day. Camera watchers waited and hoped for the new female to assume incubation of the eggs that were not hers but to her, they were just obstructions to her own clutch. Once her first egg arrived her drive to incubate became strong and both adults kept the growing clutch (six in all) covered for a full term (33 additional days) but even the properly incubated eggs did not hatch and now it is just a nest watch while we all wait for the newly formed pair to give up for the year. The new female's eggs must not have been fertile.

I receive emails from people who plead with me to "help" the birds by saving them from further incubation duties. I ask: What if I trigger them to lay yet another clutch? What about other peregrines incubating non-viable eggs in other nests where there is no nest camera? It is one of the dilemmas of publishing a nest camera: it is not the Disney Channel and there will not necessarily be a happy ending. No medicare, no social security, no soup kitchen... But c'mon, why can't we DO something?

Permits to fiddle around with nature are carefully scrutinized. I have a permit to visit nests, band nestlings, and collect addled eggs (for study of contaminent analysis) but I do not have a permit that allows removal of eggs from sitting peregrines.

I watched two pairs of peregrines incubate for similar "overlong" periods last year. I just gave up on one pair and went to the nest to investigate at the other when the pair finally gave up. I found one egg that had recently rotted and broken open due to the build up of gas. I think the stink drove the birds away.

During the population recovery work we believed that peregrines had an internal clock that told them when they reached full term incubation. That belief drove field biologists to return to nests with live young to replace dummy eggs very close to the end of the 33 day incubation period. Perhaps we had much more time?

As the Bay Area peregrine population continues to swell it is likely that we will see more nest territory intruders--more resident pairs being challenged by breeding age adult who want a territory. Territorial intrusion could actually dampen overall productivity through events such as we observed this season in San Francisco. Indeed, it may be one of nature's mechanisms for limiting population to a level that habitat can support (its carrying capacity) and assuring that the strongest members of the population are breeding.

Such sad news...






Our Sophie
As it turned out, it was a bobcat that took her permanently from the sky.

Here was a bird unlike any I know of. She was a falconry bird who caught a few ducks. She flew vigorously to the lure and caught a few of my homing pigeons in tremendous flights. She perched before audiences (mostly kids) totaling 75,000 people over a period of 14 years–her first, school kids in the spring of 2000. She stood willingly for copulation, incubated eggs, and hatched her own babies that she raised to fledging. I have a son and daughter from her plus a third falcon that she served as a foster parent to this year.

Each year I moved her from falconry permit, to special purpose education permit, to propagation permit. She even spent a little time in the agricultural fields defending wine grapes against starlings. She led a full life.

On Monday morning (while on the falconry permit) I released her to the sky. She flew around a bit and landed on the tailgate of the Jeep to preen. I waited patiently in the middle of the field until she finished so that we could begin her daily exercise of stooping to the lure. But she left her perch suddenly and at full speed to stoop behind a fence row.

When she did not come back up I ran as fast as I could and found a bobcat standing on top of her. Apparently, she was trying to drive it from her “territory” by raking it with her talons. She picked on the wrong bobcat.

She has been in intensive care at Dr. Fern Van Sant’s “For the Birds” veterinary hospital since the incident and I spent hours there each day trying to get some food in to her. She was my first human-imprinted peregrine falcon and will be my last.

Over the past few weeks she has flown big above the hills and meadows near Davenport almost every morning. On one recent day she rode the strong wind diving and shooting up into the sky in what appeared to be joyful flight. It is how I will remember her.

Thanks mwplay--it is sad news. I hope by some miracle she recovers, but Glenn doesn't sound very hopeful...

She passed away.

Thanks for clarifying that, mwplay. I went back & read the article several times cause he didn't actually say, & he referred to her in both present tense & past tense.

just putting in my 2 cents here. I think they should have removed eggs after 2nd failure to let them get on with it. No way they will lay another clutch.

I respect everyone's opinion and this is mine.
and maybe found if eggs had been viable or what.
I know there are rules but there are gray lines also

From SF Yahoo Group:

Collecting PG&E Eggs

I will collect the eggs tomorrow morning. I would have preferred that they ceased incubation but we are now one week past Solstice and I think it is unlikely that I would stimulate the pair to recycle and begin another nesting cycle because of my actions. The eggs will be collected in sample jars, frozen, and sent via overnight transport to a lab that studies emerging contaminants among sentinel species. The lab process is very expensive so they do not run samples until they have a substantial backlog--it could take many months to receive results. Best, --glenn@scpbrg