Peregrine Pairs Make Downtown Portland Home - Oregonian [View All]

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"From a perch hundreds of feet up on the St. Johns Bridge, a peregrine falcon rockets into the calm, early morning sky then steers into a steep dive. The strike is a blur. The prey, a passing swallow, tumbles like a broken kite.

Soon the hunter resumes its sentry post on the bridge, displaying its broad, barred chest and distinctive helmet of dark feathers. Nearby, hidden in the crossing of two giant steel girders, its female mate sits on a clutch of eggs. The pair pay no heed to the constant racket of cars and trucks crossing the bridge or the intermittent rumbling and clanging of freight trains passing below.

Peregrine falcons, back from near extinction in the 1960s, have found life good in Portland and many other cities. They showed up 10 years ago to nest at the Fremont Bridge, and now Portland bridges have become some of the most productive falcon nesting sites in Oregon. Despite some new threats, biologists say cities are expanding -- if only by accident -- the range available for these dive-bombing carnivores.

"Buildings and bridges are ecologically equivalent to cliffs, and in some ways better," said Brian Walton, coordinator of the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group in California. "In the San Francisco Bay Area, we have them nesting on cranes, buildings, bridges and cliffs," Walton said. The menu for urban falcons -- including the unsuppressable starling and bread-crumb chubby pigeon -- is abundant. More important, Walton said, the prey become "incredibly vulnerable" to aerial falcon attack against a backdrop of parking lots, skyscrapers and warehouses. Artificial lighting also allows peregrines to hunt beyond the normal daylight hours into dusk, Walton said."

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Very cool article!