Some of you may have noticed some falcon activity going on in the nestbox lately and wondering what the heck those birds are doing in there. Just poking in corners or doing a crazy, whirling dance?
Well, they are "building" their nest. But in the case of falcons, it isn't a traditional nest, like the one a robin in your backyard might build. If you look at the material at the bottom of the nestbox, you will see it consists of pebbles. And what you see the birds doing is making a depression in the pebbles. This depression area is called a scrape and will be the sweet spot for KathyQ to lay her eggs.
Both birds will get in the box and do this digging act. As a human being, I sort of imagine it would be like lying on my stomach in a pile of sand and kind of skooching back and forth with my chest while my legs and feet are pushing the sand out until a depression forms beneath me. Now, this is just my imagination working a picture in my head (I'm not responsible for any human trying to skooch a scrape). Richard likes to describe it like one of us making a snow angel, only in reverse (unless you create your snow angel on your stomach!).
KathyQ and Kinney use the breast area of their bodies and their feet also to create their scrape. There will be multiple scrapes in the box. That's why you may see one falcon over in the back corner of the box, while one works on a scrape closer to the front of the box.
Although it seems an unusual type of nest to us, it works for peregrine falcons and has for hundreds of years.
As Richard has observed through these many years (he used to watch the birds through a closed circuit monitor in Market Tower long before the world had access to the falconcam), Kinney usually has a different idea than his mate of the perfect location of where the scrape should be. KathyQ will ultimately be the decisionator and may "tidy up" Kinney's attempts at a scrape. And she will probably have a couple of scrapes in the box before deciding which one to lay her eggs in. That's exactly what John Castrale, the DNR biologist, found when he went up to check the nestbox back in February - as he put it, two nice scrapes.
By Laura James-Reim
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