Bud,
Thank you for your informative post. I had no idea. Your ending was very
nice too.
Kevin Lucas
Selah
On Sat, Apr 21, 2018 at 12:51 PM, Bud Anderson <
falconresearch at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
Lynn Oliphant was the first person to document Merlins moving into a North
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American city back in 1971 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
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>
The next year they found 2 pairs and by 1982, there were 16. Lynn
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estimates that there are now around 30-40 pairs in that city.
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>
A similar Merlin expansion also took place about that time in Edmonton,
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Alberta.
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>
Here in Washington, nesting Merlins had always been very rare despite many
>
experienced raptor people looking for them for decades.
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>
There is very little historic information about them for our state.
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>
That all started to change in the 1980's thanks to people like Tom
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Gleason, Jim Fackler and others who started finding nesting pairs on the
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Olympic Peninsula and up the Skagit and Stillaguamish Rivers among other
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locations.
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The first known city pair that I am aware of was found in a neighborhood
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in Bellingham in 2000.
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>
The number increased to at least four pairs in Bellingham over the next
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few years.
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Then Merlins started a slow southward "colonization", showing up over the
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next few years in Burlington, Mt. Vernon, Anacortes, Stanwood, Everett,
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Edmonds and finally Seattle.
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Fortunately, we have had Ben Vang-Johnson and Kim Mc Cormick documenting
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and studying this expansion in Seattle since 2013.
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>
This phenomenon of raptors moving into cities is, of course, not just
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limited to Merlins.
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We first saw it in Red-tailed Hawks after the I-5 freeway opening back in
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the mid-60's, Bald Eagles showed up in Kirkland and Seward Park shortly
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afterwards, peregrines arrived in 1994, and who knows when the first
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Cooper's Hawks started to breed in Seattle. Butch Olendorff had a pair on
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the hillside west of the Duwamish Slough in the late 1960's.
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Ospreys are likely to have been nesting on Lake Washington even further
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back in time.
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This colonization involving raptors moving into urban habitats is
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happening all across our continent.
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>
It is also underway in Europe with goshawks and sparrowhawks also moving
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into cities.
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>
So Merlins are likely to keep increasing in numbers locally, and Seattle
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should be no exception.
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How wonderful is that?
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>
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