I finally got COVID and spent longer in a Seattle hotel room than anticipated. The silver lining was that I got to know one of the local Peregrine Falcons, who hunted from and ate breakfast on a nearby building on the mornings when it wasn't raining.
The week before the Seattle trip, I wrapped up my 11th season of hawkwatching for Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, so I was primed to scan the sky for birds from my hotel room quarantine. The 17th floor of the hotel offered a slightly different view than the Marin Headlands, but Red-tail Hawk over the Seattle skyline doesn’t look so different from one over the Presidio! I’ve already been thinking a lot about urban wildlife as my“Flight Lessons” project is about urban-living falcons (and people), and here was another example. I wasn’t going anywhere, but plenty of interesting local birds were, and I had an excellent view.
Downtown Seattle, like the San Francisco Bay Area, has a lot of pigeons, aka falcon food. The roosted in the eaves and clucked from window ledges. The skies and rooftops were also full of Glaucous-winged Gulls. It would have been ideal if I was more interested in gull-watching. Dozens of the gulls had a lot to say and do all day long, calling and yelling to one another from dawn to dusk, standing in roof-top puddles, buzzing the windows. But they didn’t interact in any discernible way with the falcon, who I first saw zipping past in pursuit of a pigeon the first morning I was there that it didn’t rain. One day, a Cooper’s Hawk cruised below the rooftop corner while she (I’m pretty sure it was a she) was eating. The hawk didn’t do more than fly by, but the falcon took off with its breakfast to finish it elsewhere. Nature anywhere hates a vacuum. After the falcon left, the Crows — another ubiquitous bird — flew to the vacant spot to pick at any leftovers.
I learned Seattle also has a well-documented (and web-cammed!) breeding pair of Peregrines. While I don’t know for certain if the bird I saw was one half of the local pair, there’s a good chance it was. The Urban Raptor Conservancy, a robust, Seattle-based raptor conservation group — kind of a Northwest analog to the Bay Area’s Predatory Bird Research Group, GGRO and Cal Falcons — monitors and bands urban Peregrines (and other birds of prey), conducts fledge watch and does a lot of community outreach and education. If you’re an urban Northwesterner who is interested in raptors, the Urban Raptor Conservancy looks to be the call. They even have a Merlin project!
This was all a good distraction from having COVID, which, this late in the pandemic, was as much of a surprise (“wow, these tests do work”) as it was a drag (whoosh, there go a raft of plans) and a cautionary tale. Like so many people, I’m not exactly sure where or how I got it. So goes. I’m glad to have caught it at a time when there are treatment options. And hopefully, my immunity will be that much better for the holidays.