All grown up

There have been no sightings of juveniles for a few weeks now.  I had a heart-stopping glimpse of a peregrine approaching the box on 20th February, but I’m not confident it was a juvenile as it was a very blurry image.

The box is in daily use, although absences of several hours are quite common at the moment (to the chagrin of a keen visitor from Maitland, who missed seeing our birds yesterday).  The female is usually in the box overnight, sometimes chasing Bula out late in the evening, but on 22/23 February Bula actually spent the night, which is a very rare occurrence.

Both birds are displaying courtship behaviour and preparing the scrape, albeit in a somewhat desultory fashion.  Bula is more active in this respect than Diamond.

The Aboriginal Nature and Bioscience park (to be named Girinyalanha, a Wiradjuri word meaning “talk together, communication, to engage in thought and feeling, and to share knowledge and culture”) that contains the roost trees is to be launched on 15th March and we will be doing some planting of shrubs and understorey next week.  These will provide habitat for small birds over time.  You might wonder how there are still so many birds in the copse opposite the nest box.  It is suspected, however, that the falcons prefer to forage away from home to ‘preserve’ their food source.  I might look into this a bit more as it is quite an interesting concept.

Unless something odd and interesting happens, I will be signing off for a week or two as I have a major landcare field day to organise for March 20th.   It’s been really dry here and we are getting desperate for rain, but I’m really hoping for a find day on that particular Sunday!  Happy to respond to comments, however.