Birds
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 1993:
Trying to find out why a pair of peregrine falcons have been
unable to produce eggs in five years of nesting atop Terminal Tower in
downtown Cleveland, raptor expert Harvey Webster of the Cleveland
Museum of Natural History captured the female on April 30––and learned
she was a sterile hybrid of a peregrine and a prairie falcon, illegally bred
by a falconer whose leather tethers remained on her legs. The falcon was
sent to the University of Minnesota aviary for live study. Her mate, who
in 1988 was the first captive-bred peregrine released in Ohio, is expected
to find another female soon, as several others have recently been seen in
the area.
The discovery of a peregrine falcon nest on a ledge overlook-
ing I-91 near Morey Mountain, Vermont, has delayed maintenance to
prevent rock slides until after August 1. Once the young falcons fly away,
the ledge will be covered with a $280,000 steel net. Previous slides in the
area closed I-91 for a time in 1990, and one lane in each direction has
remained closed ever since.
New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., jointly owned by
General Motors and Toyota, is building artificial nesting sites for endan-
gered burrowing owls in exchange for state permission to build a new
bumper-making plant in Fremont, California. The artificial nesting sites
are in lieu of setting aside a 6.5-acre owl preserve that might have cost
$1.5 million.
Tearing down an old transmission tower in Metairie
Louisiana, Louisiana Power and Light in April displaced about 500 feder-
ally protected purple martins at the height of their nesting season. LP&L
set up 40 martin houses by way of replacement, but that wasn’t nearly
enough, martin expert Debra Voth told the New Orleans Times-Picayune,
and in any case they were installed months too late. Voth estimated that
the project prevented the birth of as many as 2,500 martins.
The New York Department of Environmental Conservation
is providing bird feeders, a starter feeding kit, and various accessories to
nursing homes at $120 per kit, through a program called “A Bird’s Eye
View.” Some participating nursing homes also receive regular visits from
animal shelter staff, who bring cats to be petted, but the programs are
complimentary, as the birds stay outside and the cats stay in.
The controversy over protection measures for the endan-
gered spotted owl has spilled over into British Columbia from the north-
western United States. The B.C. environment ministry is drafting a spot-
ted owl recovery plan to safeguard 46 of the owls who have been located
at 27 sites since 1990. The population includes only five nesting pairs,
and 17 of the owl sites are imminently threatened by logging. Already
about 40% of the land in the Fraser Valley, where the owls have been
found, is off limits to logging, and owl protection is expected to claim
10% of the remainder.
