02 Peregrine Falcons - with Victor
Hear about the Peregrine Falcons that live at 367 Collins Street in Melbourne’s CBD.
This episode is about Peregrine Falcons - how to identify them, what they eat, where they live and how a community comes together to watch the birds that live at the top of a tall building in Collins Street, in the heart of Melbourne.
As a wildlife ecologist, Dr Victor Hurley has conducted studies on a wide range of animals in many different environments. This has included radio tracking Carpet Pythons on the Murray River, leading an expedition to research goshawks on Christmas Island, oublishing the first ever manual on techniques for carving new hollows in standing trees for cockatoos and leading an expedition to the Strzelecki Desert to investigate diets of raptors. Victor currently works in the Victorian mallee as a Fire Ecologist and a Planning Officer in Emergency Incident Management Teams for Forest Fire Management Victoria. The Victorian Peregrine Project is a personal hobby that Victor started... which seemed like a good idea at the time.
Available on your podcast app or listen below.
Links
* 367 Collins Falcon Watchers Facebook group - @367collinsfalcons
* Birdlife Australia - Victorian Peregrine Falcon Project - https://birdlife.org.au/locations/barg/vpp
-
Kirsty: This podcast was recorded on Bunurong Boonwurrung Country and on the country of other traditional owners. I would like to pay my respect to elders past and present. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were Australia's first scientists. Their knowledge and connection to country continues to inform our understanding of birds and of nature.
Kirsty: Welcome to Weekend Birder. I'm your host and fellow learner, Kirsty Costa. 367 Collins Street is a building located in Melbourne's CBD on Wurundjeri Country. Since 1991, Peregrine Falcons have been observed in a nest on the rooftop of this very large building, which has 34 floors and is 153 metres tall. Thousands of people per year enjoy watching CCTV footage of the birds as they lay and then hatch their chicks. And this is all thanks to Dr. Victor Hugo and his team. Victor currently works as a fire ecologist and a planning officer, and the Victorian Peregrine Project is a personal hobby. Here's how Victor first got into birds.
Victor: Growing up in suburban Melbourne, south east Melbourne, I was always interested in nature, but I was a bit of a fish out of water growing up in the burbs. It was hard to see a lot of nature but there were a lot of parks and gardens where I could rummage around and collect insects and that sort of thing. I remember building a cage in my backyard for cicadas to breed in, which horrified my parents in turn. Over time, once I left high school, I got interested in what I'd call formal birdwatching - actually understanding different species and buying a guide (a simple photographic guide or a drawing guide of the different species), joining BirdLife Australia and went out on some weekend trips purely for birdwatching. And so it grew from there and my interest turned to raptor conservation because no one seemed to be terribly interested in them. It wasn't that I had a particular fascination with things that kill other things. It was just simply that no one else cared about them that much. They were all sort of interested but not to the point of doing anything. And I thought, "Well, that's a much understood group of birds, so how about I take up a keen interest in them?".
Kirsty: After starting out as a volunteer researcher with BirdLife Australia, Victor learnt why some scientists were hesitant to study birds of prey. They live a long time, they breed at really low densities, their nests can be hard to find if they build a new nest every year, and they travel really long distances after they leave the nest. But Victor was up for the challenge.
Victor: When I joined BirdLife Australia, one of the groups that they had was the Raptor Group and that was of keen interest to me. It got me thinking about conservation questions that I was interested in or ecological questions about Peregrine Falcons. The literature spoke about this odd occurrence of Peregrines breeding in tree hollows in Victoria and stick nests of other birds. Now remembering falcons as a group, all of them (all six species in Australia and across the world) don't build their own stick nest. They know what a nest is and they can breed in one but they're lousy tenants. They don't maintain it, they never pay their rent, and then they bugger off and adopt another one. Peregrines prefer to nest on a cliff ledge or a cave in a cliff with a rocky or a sandy substrate, and they dig a little scrape the way a seabird that nests 20 centimetres above sea level. Peregrines will do the same thing, but they want to be about 200 metres above sea level. So they've got what's considered fairly primitive nesting technique, and you would think that that would then limit their distribution to where there are cliffs.
Victor: In Victoria, because it's a relatively flat part of the planet, they're in fact using stick nests and tree hollows the way a large forest owl would or something. And they're mostly breeding within the distribution of River Red Gum - not necessarily in River Red Gum trees but within their distribution. And as the name suggests, the River Red Gums occur near water and Peregrines love to eat things that fly and live near wetlands and rivers. You have lots of ducks, grebes, quail and other things hanging around high biodiversity wherever there's water in the Australian landscape. In order for Peregrines to be able to access that food, they need to live nearby and in order to be able to breed nearby they can have to adopt something other than a cliff. There are not going to be that many cliffs in, say, the Mallee or other parts of Victoria that are low lying. So one of the first questions was, "Well, gee, are these birds breeding that are breeding in stick nests or tree hollows imprinting on that nest substrate as young? And then only nesting in that sort of nest in their later lives?". They don't breed until they're three. So sit around and wait patiently for them to get to three years of age. And then run around furiously and try to identify as many adults with bands on their legs and all sorts of nests. To see not just if they're going back to another stick nest, but if are they moving on to a building, cliff, tree hollow or doing something different. And so that was the driver for the project.
Victor: The question was, "Hmm, what's going on with those tree nesting guys? Are they are they isolating themselves genetically and behaviorally because they are imprinted on the nest type they're born on?". And it turns out they're not! The advent of digital photography, in the last decade especially, has really lifted the number of positive sightings. Birds have been photographed by people who I've never met before, and then through Facebook or some other mechanism, they find me with this picture that they'll post to me. And so that's a great way of enhancing the banding effort where other people are finding recoveries for you. Whereas in the first 20 years of the project, there was none of that. If we didn't sight the bird with our own telescope, it wasn't ever found again. Occasionally you'd get dead ones, they'd be hit by a car or something. They will turn up. But live sightings of birds breeding or not with bands on was just unheard of. So the digital photography revolution has made this science really open to citizens being involved who are not directly either aware of the project or involved. It's really great.
Kirsty: There are lots of birds of prey in Australia and they can be tricky to tell apart. Thankfully, we have our friend Victor here to teach us about how to identify a Peregrine Falcon in the wild.
Victor: They're a very compact, sleek kind of bird. The barrel-chested is the other phrase that springs to mind because they're such strong fliers and have very pointy swept back wings. Pointy wings, a fast wing beat and then fairly compact in their body size. They have a black hood which covers all of their face and the sides of their cheeks and the back of their neck. But on the front, below this sort of hood is a white or cream bib, and that contrast is really obvious with the adults especially. I'm just describing adult plumage at the moment. Further down the front, they have what looks like a milk coffee base color with a whole lot of black horizontal fine bars and then big thumping yellow feet (or talons). They've got huge feet. In fact, they're a unique subspecies to Australia and their Latin name is Falco peregrinus macropus. "Macro" comes from Latin, meaning large. "Pus" comes from the Greek "pod", meaning foot. So basically they're the Ronald McDonald of Falcons - they've got big thumping feet. Their favorite prey species is the galah. And so anyone who's handled an angry parrot will know that they've got a capacity to bite back. You need to be able to overpower these things and subdue them pretty quickly. And so these feet are built for that sort of gear.
Victor: The back of the bird then is a beautiful, dark slate gray. There are underwing bars and stripes, as well as on the tail. So essentially they've got a black hood, a white bib and a slate gray back to them. And these bright yellow feet. And they've also got a bright yellow ring and a sere. The sere is that soft, fleshy bit between the base of the beak and the start of the feathers on a bird's forehead. And they have two little holes in there, which is where their nostrils are. You'll see that yellow sere - if it's a really bright and almost orange-yellow, it means they're in peak physical health condition. If it's really faded and pastel colour, then you know they're not doing too well. And when they come into shelters or vet clinics injured, the sere is often a good indication that they're in poor condition and have been for some time.
Kirsty: As a beginner birder (that is, someone who doesn't take birdwatching too seriously), I've discovered that there can be visual differences between an adult and a young bird, which is also known as a juvenile. Peregrine Falcons fall into this category.
Victor: The juvenile's brown hood has a strong milky-tea base to the bib on the front and then vertical splotches down the body, instead of those horizontal bars and then the back. So the hood and the back of the feathers are brown, dark brown. And so you get the sense of the adults have horizontal bars on the front and a black hood. The juveniles have these vertical bars and a brown hood and are generally a brown colour. All birds probably have some juvenile plumage, which is quite distinctive visually to an adult, and this protects them from being attacked by adults because they look so different. This is such a territorial group of species that they will kill another adult coming near their nest. Whereas if they can see it's just a juvenile, they're like, "Oh, it's the local teenagers dagging around, I can chase those off, I don't have to kill them". If it's another adult, there's murder on the menu and they'll just kill them. They're not interested in mucking around and all adults know this, so they're pretty wary. Whereas the juveniles (teenagers)... what can you say? They don't know how to dress, they dag around, they do stupid things, they get into trouble. And the Peregrine Falcons are fairly tolerant of that - they will chase them away, but they don't feel the need to kill them. The only other species that is close-looking to a Peregrine Falcon is a Little Falcon, and these are fairly easy to confuse because they're very similar in shape. The Little Falcons tend to be smaller.
Victor: Now, one thing I haven't covered yet, and I'll briefly digress... with all birds of prey, the females are larger than the males. Now this is called 'reverse sexual dimorphism'. "Di" means two, "morph" means shape, and "reverse" means the opposite. So it's the opposite size ratio to every other bird species. If you see a larger member of a raptor species sitting or standing next to a slightly smaller one, the little guys are the males, the bigger ones are female. Little Falcons are smaller again. Little Falcons are also called Australian Hobbies so just be aware that most birds have several common names. This is why we scientists like the idea of having Latin names, because those don't change unless the geneticists (the gel jockeys) change the nomenclature. The Latin name tends to stay the same.
Victor: A female Little Falcon will be almost as big as a male Peregrine, whereas a male Little Falcon is going to be much smaller again. You'd go, "No, no, that's not a Peregrine. It's too small!". The big distinguishing difference between them is they both have a hood and a bit of a pale bib. The Peregrines have this tannin stain front, with either stripes or bars. With the Hobbie, it's a real rusty orange on the front and it has a pale bib. You'll see this very rusty orange that is a lot deeper in orange color, compared to the tannin and front of either an adult (or even a juvenile) Peregrine Falcon. The other key distinguishing feature is the hood isn't complete with Hobbies. They'll have a black cheek patch and around their ears and their eyes, but at the top of their head they'll have like a pale forehead - like they've been belting their head on a brick wall too often. And then a gray cap above that.
Kirsty: Ah, the world of bird identification. Don't stress if you can't remember what Victor just said about how to tell the difference between male, female and juvenile Peregrine Falcons... and how to tell these birds apart from the Little Falcon, which is also known as the Australian Hobby. There are lots of apps and books that will help you tell these birds apart and we will explore some of these tools in future episodes. Victor says that when it comes to identifying birds, we should be looking at much more than the appearance.
Victor: With all birdwatching, what the bird is doing and what habitat it's using is really important. So Peregrines are famous globally because not only do they have a global distribution, but they're the fastest terrestrial vertebrate on the planet. I don't know why we have to distinguish terrestrial animal. I don't know of any fish or whales that swim faster than Peregrines can dive but that's that's the line we apparently have to run with. So at that speed, parents don't want to be hunting in amongst the bushes because one mistake and you're going to rip off a wing because you're going to hit a branch, leaf or something. So parents prefer to be much more wide open country hunters or higher altitude. Whereas I've seen Hobbies in the gardens around the Shrine of Remembrance, diving into thick bushes to chase sparrows feet first. Just closing their wings and diving in or trying to chase Starlings or whatever. So if I see that behaviour - the Peregrines not going to do that. Not only do they have this specialty where they dig a scrape on a rocky or sandy ledge, they will they steal a nest of some other bird and don't try to build their own. Their other specialty is they only hunt things that are flying. In over 2000 nest site visits across 30 years, I've found two prey items that weren't birds. So if it flies, it's on the menu.
Kirsty: Victor has been monitoring the Peregrine Falcons that live on top of 367 Collins Street for many years. He's watched the birds come and go, and has also observed how challenging it can be for these Falcons to live in a city environment.
Victor: They were first detected in 1991 breeding and laid their eggs in a rain gutter on the third or fourth level of the building. Naturally those failed to hatch because September in Melbourne and rain just acted as a heat sink and so the parents couldn't keep the eggs warm enough for long enough to successfully incubate them. In the next season, some nest boxes were put in and there have been a pair of Falcons living there for most years ever since. There have been about eight females and seven males have been at that site that we know of. There was a gap of about a decade when no banded birds turned up and we didn't have the webcams, so we weren't able to distinguish between one and the other. That's been the history of the site. So 26 breeding events in 30-odd years.
Victor: There's about five years where the site went vacant. On both occasions, both adults died of what we believe to be incidental poisoning from people using a chemical that now is banned from the industry. Someone was trying to control pigeons and, according to Melbourne City Council, we don't know who it was but it would have been without a permit. They weren't authorising use of that chemical in the CBD and it did happen close to the nest site (this poisoning event). Then you've got this dying pigeon that the parents are going to grab. They fed it to the young or the young died and both adults are dead. And so the site just went vacant for a couple of years. So that's happened twice. Other than that, there's been a series of turnovers where one adult has died and been replaced. And the older surviving adult who's got the street cred (knows where all the good places to eat in town are) show the new bird the ropes. There's this overlap and sometimes you'll have a single male for maybe five years and 2-3 females, unfortunately, go through in quick succession. Other times the pair might be together for six years and then one or both die for whatever reason.
Kirsty: Victor has been raising awareness about the Colin Street Falcons for many years. This led to Mirvac, the owners of the building, installing a webcam in 2017.
Victor: In the same year a now friend of mine (who I didn't know at the time), Leigh Stillard, set up a Facebook group called 367 Falcon Watchers Group. That has grown in leaps and bounds and it's now got over 3000 members. In 2021, there was an earthquake in September, during the incubation period. The male Peregrine happened to be on the eggs when this earthquake struck. This is a fairly high (35 storeys high) building. They were on one of the lower levels and the building started shaking. A lot of these buildings have antennas and telecommunication structures on the top. In the webcam vision, the male is looking up. He can hear this gear on top of the building rattling because the building is shaking with the earthquake. Then he gets up off the eaves, he walks to the ledge and he looks up as if to say, "Can you keep the racket down? I'm incubating eggs!". And it doesn't stop so then he just flies off. He dives off and The Guardian newspaper contacted me from London and said, "Oh, could we have a copy of that ten second clip?". And I said, "Sure. Contact Mirvac, they own it". And they sent it to him and they posted it on the Guardian website. They had 186 million views in five days! You know that old thing that if you want to protect something, the first thing you've got to do is understand it in order to appreciate it and then to conserve it? My small contribution in that three-step process was to introduce people to Peregrines - wild birds in the city. It's a bit unusual. There are lots of other cities around the world that have got them, but it's the only pair in Melbourne and we've made it such a big Melbourne story over the years.
Kirsty: Victor has been watching and loving wild birds for many years. Here are his two pieces of advice for beginner birdwatchers.
Victor: There are about three different bird guides big enough to fit inside your glove box. There are over 650-odd species of birds in Australia. So, you know, it's hard to make the thing fit inside the back of a postage stamp! There really are a lot of birds, so have a good field guide that you can carry. Don't get a big coffee table sized book because you're just not going to carry it with you out in the field. And secondly, good optics - binoculars. You don't have to get a telescope for most birdwatching, but a good quality brand of binoculars is really essential because long after you've forgotten the price, you will always regret cheap binoculars. No matter how cheap they were, you'll still regret them. Whereas if you get good quality (obviously add them to your house insurance), quality is everything. It makes the enjoyment of birdwatching so much better if you can see the birds clearly.
Kirsty: Many thanks to Victor for his continued commitment to bird conservation, research and education. You can find out about the Victorian Peregrine Project and the Falcons at 367 Collins Street with a quick Internet search, or by checking out the links in this episode's notes. Thanks for tuning in. Now it's time to get out there and see if you can spot a Peregrine Falcon or some other awesome bird of prey in your area.
