The two pair of gyrfalcons have now produced eight (8) eggs between them, four per pair.
 Last year Brian took eggs from the nest and incubated them himself with the aid of a fancy incubator. When you do this the falcon will lay more eggs to bring the clutch up to four again – amazing!

The male gyrfalcon is the smalleer of the pair and can be seen at the top right hand corner, the femail is sitting on the ledge upon which she has laid four eggs.

By the way, we used to have three breeding pairs of gyrfalcons but a bobcat managed to climb to the top of the mews, which is covered with a wire mesh, then kill and half eat a female!
This was of course very upsetting and annoying to say the least, apart from the bond between the gyrfalcon and Brian in particular, the bird is valued at over $25,000 and would have produced four more falcons this year!
Having said that, one has to admire the ingenuity of the bobcat which does, after all, need to eat; Brian figured that the bobcat climbed up a nearby tree (..plans in place to remove it) from which it jumped across to the wire mesh which covered the top of the mews (..mews is a fancy name for places birds are kept in). The bobcat must have then snagged the gyrfalcon when it flew by close to the wire and within range of the bobcat’s claw – the bobcat managed to eat half of the gyrfalcon before what was left fell to the floor.

The peregrine falcons lay later than gyrfalcons but there is lots of chatter going on between them right now.

Falcons are amazing birds and our guest love watching them fly to the lure. Brian does this every day to exercise the falcon, which involves releasing the falcon and having it try to catch a lure which Brian swings around from a line attached to the top of a pole; this requires a lot of skill since the lure must be accelerated away from the pursuing falcon just at the right time.

It’s of interest to note that the falcons return to Brian and the mews, even though they are released for the exercise and are quite capable of catching their own food!

Related posts:

1. Signs of Spring
2. Flying Falcons to the lure
3. Eggs a Pippin, Cranes a croaking!
4. Just 10 days out of the shell!
5. Falcon babies at Echo Valley Ranch

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 6:43 am and is filed under Echo Valley Ranch & Spa, Falcons, The Ranch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.