24 February 2025
If you watch courtship among bald eagles or red-tailed hawks you’ve seen that it includes flying together, perching together, and bringing sticks to the nest. Peregrine falcons also fly together but they have different traditions when it comes to close courtship and nest building. Yesterday the Pitt peregrines engaged in these activities as seen on the National Aviary streaming falconcam.
After a 12 day hiatus, Carla reappeared on camera yesterday and engaged in two courtship bouts with Ecco. Their ledge displays included bowing together, vocalizing and touching beaks (see Familiarities on the Cliff). This bowing session lasts about 90 seconds.
Following this encounter, Carla stayed at the nest to do some “nest building.” I’ve put those words in quote marks because it doesn’t look like building at all. Instead she scrapes the gravel with her feet, then putters and rearranges the stones and bones. There are lots of tiny bird bones on the gravel left over from last year’s successful nesting season.
Carla doesn’t add anything to the nest. No sticks, no grass. She will lay her eggs in the bowl she and Ecco scrape in the gravel. Her puttering takes twice as long as the bowing session — 3 minutes.
Carla hardly needed to do any scraping yesterday because Ecco has made the scrape deeper every day while she was off camera. You can see the scrape (bowl) under the roof in this photo.
And here he is, digging the scrape on 18 February.
For more information about peregrine “nest building” see this Peregrine FAQ: