Roofs & Rambles

Now I spend most of my time doing green roofs and the like, it sometimes difficult to find time to bird watch in the London area. A tweet came through today from @2greenfish about the success of Peregrines in Ontario. This reminded me to check out my old friend, Dave Morrison, and his London Peregrine website. It also reminded me of the small part I had played in the Peregrine renaissance in London and Dave’s work.The Peregrine was for many of us birdwatchers, a talisman, a bird to see and a bird that had returned from the brink of survival. Seeing one was always a magical thing and they were few and far between when I was a child/teenager birding in East Kent. These days though I have a little time to monitor or even just go out in search of them I am fortunate that I regularly see them in travels around London. Only the other day I was walking down Oxford St and one flew east virtually following the line of retail heart of the capital. A couple of weeks ago I had an email from a colleague over at Canary Wharf stating that her CEO had observed a bit of a kerfuffle happening around their skyscraper. A couple of young peregrines were having a little parental bullying.

My real engagement with the London birds was ten years ago. Entering an old power station building in South London in search of black redstarts, a came across a pair of adult birds hanging out around the chimneys. It look to me that they were very territorially. Strangely enough it appeared that the black redstarts were nesting in the immediate vicinity of the adult birds. Strange as it seems, I soon realised that his was a rather good strategy by the passerines. The Peregrines took little interest in them but the magpies certainly did though. And kept a very respectful distance away from the both the Peregrines and the redstarts. I have since seen this with black redstarts in the vicinity of both Peregrines and Kestrels. Always good to have the biggest and best strike force protecting your nest.

The site in question became quite a well known nesting location. Both Dave Morrison and I became intimately involved in monitoring the adult birds and their young. One of the problems we soon gathered for young birds in cities is the lack of uplift on hot summer days when they are about to fledge. Quite a few times young birds would leap in to the unknown, and although superb fliers at this stage of their development lift is needed to get them airborne. Several youngsters over the years became grounded. And several ended up in the jaws of local foxes. Fortunately the clerk of works of the site in question managed to alert us to some of the groundings and both Dave and I managed with some difficulty to either encourage the bird to flap unsteadily to a higher perch. In one instance Dave managed to catch one. A big burly crane driver then gentle carried the tender young bird high up onto the top of the building to safety. Its later attempts at flight were successful. It’s young bird’s wings catching the breeze and i am sure it is know an adult breeding somewhere in the London area.

Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome are good places to see Peregrines. They are often perched on the towers of the Dome. They roost at night on at least one of the Bank towers on the CW estate, keeping warm by the red halogen lights, which are markers for airplanes flying in and out of City Airport. however for a few years no one knew where they bred.

It was probably about 2003 when we asked to go on the main tower at Canary Wharf to confirm whether birds that had been seen possibly nesting on one of the Towers on the estate were actually doing so. Myself, Dave and a couple of other friends spent three hours high above London scanning and watching for raptors. We confirm Kestrels nesting behind the umbrella logo of one of the banks but the frequent views of Peregrines can to nothing. As the birds dipped below the light of the sky, they disappeared into the melange of brick and steel. They were carrying food but it was to a location some way off the estate.

Heading home that afternoon I stopped to check out a local pair of black redstarts. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a large bird perch on a tall building some way off. A female Peregrine and the site had been found.

I can see this site from my sitting room window high on a hill SE London. Occasionally I have a look and occasionally I see a Peregrine perched their.

Peregrines give a great deal of pleasure to a great deal of people and I am pleased to have been partly involved in observing the return of the Peregrine to London. May their return continue and numbers increase. Cities can be as good for wildlife as the countryside and the Peregrine proves that.