Last Sunday, 6 November 2016, Tony Bruno photographed a peregrine falcon that’s been hanging out at the Tarentum Bridge. His photo is beautiful and tantalizing. You can almost read her bands.
Even at high resolution all we can see is black/green, 4??/BR. There’s a digit after the 4 but the bird’s feathers cover most of the number.
The black/green 40-series/BR means she’s a female from Pennsylvania but without the last digit we don’t know who she is. Art McMorris, the PA Game Commission’s Peregrine Coordinator, examined the photo closely and wrote:
I agree that the bottom combination is BR, which means that it’s one of my bands. And the first digit on top is clearly a 4. However, I’m not so sure about the second digit. I see what you mean about it maybe being a 4, but I think that 2 is also possible, and even more likely, but I can’t be sure. I’m comparing your photo with bands that I have, and looking at the shapes of the digits.
What I can say is that the bird is a female, from Pennsylvania, banded in either 2014 or 2015. As Kate mentioned, 44/BR is from the Glenfield [Neville Island] I-79 Ohio River Bridge in 2015. 42/BR is from the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, also in 2015.
So now we wait for more sightings of this peregrine and another great photograph to learn her identity.
What we do know is this: She’s not Hope, 69/Z, who sometimes returns to Tarentum for a visit. Hope “owned” the Tarentum Bridge for six years before she moved to the Cathedral of Learning 12 months ago.
(photo by Anthony Bruno)
And 69Z was in Tarentum the next day – Monday. Photographed by Steve Gosser!
Also – I had a near overhead overflight through the marina parking lot last night @ 4:39 PM, shortly after I arrived. PEFA went out to the upnav support wire for a few minutes, then went to roost.
I hope she chooses a site and stays put. Otherwise, she might get hurt trying to defend two sites.