Subject: Yellow-billed Cuckoo prey of Peregrine
Date: Feb 19 12:59:01 2004
From: Jay Withgott - jwithgott at msn.com



Saw this thread while catching up on email after a trip, and was excited
because it mirrors precisely a phenomenon my mother and I witnessed in
Massachusetts back in the late 1980s.

A Peregrine pair had begun nesting on buildings in downtown Springfield,
Mass., and for a while we monitored the various bits of decapitated prey
items below their primary feeding perch. Yellow-billed Cuckoos showed up as
prey several times, despite the fact that the nearest Yellow-billed Cuckoos
at the time were many miles away. Birders hardly ever saw YB Cuckoos in the
river valley near Springfield, but only in the Berkshires further west
(where they were not particularly abundant either). So either these falcons
were traveling long distances to hunt certain preferred prey, or else they
were locating, closer to home, individuals of a species at such a low
density as to be hardly ever detected by birders! We also saw high numbers
of Black-billed Cuckoos as prey items, and so hypothesized that cuckoos'
leisurely flight style might make them especially vulnerable to attack.
However, these particular falcons seemed to have a taste for "good" birds in
general. If our samples were representative, the falcons largely bypassed
the abundant pigeons, starlings, etc., in their immediate urban environment
to take everything from rose-breasted grosbeaks to catbirds to woodcocks to
nighthawks to Virginia rails. This contrasted with the diets of Peregrines
nesting in Boston at the same time; a biologist monitoring the Boston pair
told me they were eating lots of pigeons. Of course, maybe that was just
the standard line for public consumption.

Jay Withgott
Portland, OR
mailto:jwithgott at msn.com


On 2/16/04 11:27 AM, "Dennis Paulson" <dpaulson at ups.edu> wrote:

> Hello, all.
>
> I've lost the original message asking for information on the poor
> innocent cuckoo that was photographed being torn asunder by a cruel
> Peregrine Falcon at the Washington Mutual building in Seattle, but I
> have the info. The date, according to Steve Mlodinow, was mid June
> 1997, and the bird is on record with the Washington Bird Records
> Committee.