Thick and Fast

Following on from 3 of the same brood back ( The whole brood down – May 30th) Paul and myself returned 3 more back on Thursday June 20th. A massive thanks again goes to the South Essex Wildlife Hospital team for getting them fit to go back and of course Paul, his help is invaluable.

One of the juveniles has quite a story that some of you may be familiar with, if you follow Kingston College Peregrines, you will know what happened.
Basically with 3 juveniles, the resident adult Falcon sadly died, and a new Falcon immediately took over, she then systematically attacked each juvenile, all as I understand it were either hit or forced down to the ground where they were rescued.

Courtesy of Paul from Kingston Peregrines, 2 ended up in SEWH with the 3rd taken elsewhere, in regard to SEWH, 1 has a fracture of the wing and will be long term and 50/50 , but the female from Kingston was the 3rd bird and declared fit by Sue/Tom and ready to go.

Obviously, she couldn’t go back to Kingston, so I decided to foster her with another family of 3 at a very similar stage. Additionally, this new family of 3 had recently lost one of its siblings, I would presume Fox predation, so the family unit was perfect.

The release couldn’t have gone better, the adult Tiercel was present, circled watching me, at the same time I released ABJ, she flew and joined him calling, circled again with him before returning and alighting near another sibling.
Obviously, all this is done under licence, a lot depends on making the connection with an adult/sibling, at or very near the nest site, additionally you have to take in what stage ‘ natural’ siblings are at, these were spot on.

Paul’s release also went very well, with another sibling heard close by at the nest site, he had a very tight long set of spiral stairs to contend with, dark, winding, a very tight fit and claustrophobic, its hard work, carrying a complaining bird up in a carrier makes it even harder.

My 2nd release at the nest site, went ok although the juvenile flew straight into a Balcony covered with Pigeon netting, I hate this stuff, it’s the standard 0.5mm strands - 50mm squares, it is deadly for them. It was covering the balcony, top to bottom to stop pigeon access, the juvenile had grabbed it and was hanging.
However, by the time I had got back down to ground level, it had thankfully extracted itself and was on a ledge on an adjacent building.
Lost a few birds over the years to this type of netting, thankfully he wasn’t one of them.

So, 3 released back, we ringed them also and Paul white ringed them as follows -

ABJ – ABK – ABL.


They now have another bite of the cherry.