Hi, Tweeters-- Just two quick comments about PeterW's mail--

1) Dan Varland introduced kestrel boxes by IOWA highways/interstates,
after powerlines had been buried, and kestrels had no place to perch or
nest. Dan V is now in Washington State, and you can hear him at the
October 20 Seattle Audubon Society Membership meeting, speaking about
Marbled Murrelets, Northern Spotted Owls, and more-- Center for Urban
Horticulture, Thursday, Oct. 20, 7:00PM. (Call 523-4483 for details.) (No
doubt, he'll speak to the kestrel issue if someone asks. He's a Raptor
Man from way back.)
2) Unlike some other cities' Peregrines, the Peregrines which nested on
the WAMU Tower last summer found this site for themselves. They simply
appeared. The only facilitation to their nesting was the placement of
nest-boxes on the WAMU tower. The two adult Peregrines had been
considering a flower-box on the Key Bank building that came complete with
sprinkler heads.... and nearby windows which made the nest-site too
accessible to humans.

*************************************************************************

On Sat, 10 Sep 1994, WHITLOCK. PETER L. wrote:

> The recent questions about peregrines hitting windows remind me of a
> few conversations I have had with various raptor biologists in the
> last few years. Dr. Tom French of Massachusetts Fish & Wildlife is
> one of the most vocal people I have seen speaking in support of
> reintroducing peregrines in cities. I've seen him show graphs with
> return rates for peregrines reintroduced in cities and with those
> released at historic cliff sites. If I remember correctly, the
> difference was that almost three
> times as many birds tend to return to a site somewhere in the
> state if they were reintroduced in a city rather than on a cliff.
> That was gathered from birds over more than 15 years in various
> eastern states. Band recoveries sometimes seem to suggest that
> survivorship is higher among city birds; this seems esp. strange
> given that one is more likely to recover the bird in a city. The
> reason most frequently suggested is that food is much more available
> in cities. I suspect there is also an effect with birds becoming
> more easily habituated to human activity. Cliff sites are becoming
> increasingly prone to disturbance, and thus
> nesting at these sites may be risky. But birds in the city with no
> fear may have an easier time.
> Dr. Dan Varland recently published a paper about a kestrel nest
> box program along interstates in Indiana. As a rehabilitator a few
> years ago, I was all too familiar with kestrels hit by cars, and
> Dan's paper made me ask what in the hell he was thinking of. But he
> said kestrel productivity in these boxes was quite high, and road
> mortality from roadside nest boxes was not high enough that it was a
> great concern. It seems strange to me, just as Dennis Paulson's
> concerns made the Seattle peregrine situation seem a bit strange.
> It's necessary to remember that mortality is high among raptors.
> Perhaps they are learning to coexist with humanity much better than
> it would seem when you are staring a dead or injured bird in the
> face. And perhaps what cityfying these birds has done is bring their
> deaths out into the open where we can see them. That does not
> necessarily mean a larger number are dying.
> Dan Klem of York University is the first name that comes to mind
> for studying window kills, but he hasn't done a study of raptors that
> I know of. There is some info in Ian Newton's _Population Ecology of
> Raptors_; I'll check if there's anything esp. relevant.
> The Raptor Research Foundation held a special symp. on raptor
> coexistence with people at their last annual mtg. in Charlotte, NC.
> Harriers hunting around mine tailings, a guy from Barlow U. who
> suggested that screech owl productivity is higher in suburban than in
> rural areas (but his definition of rural was flawed, mostly farmland
> rather than wilderness), etc. I'll check the abstracts from that too.
>
> Peter Whitlock
> Boise State University
>