Bird Strike Force

Monday, March 25th, 2013.   A calm day.  I got the birds out, cleaned boxes, straightened out the area and went on both fist and flight patrols during the day.  It was a quiet day, a handful of grackles were visiting the pool area, and I flew Mercedes during the day on patrols.  She likes the pool railing to sit on, as well as the wall at the back gate.  Two good places to deter birds.   She is a naive hawk and is a good one for such work.   I saw some local wildlife, the dolphins, the resident iguanas.  There is a resident peregrine falcon in the area.  I saw it soaring the previous evening around St. Louis.  At 6:00 evening abatement patrols stared.   Just as the staging set up.  I looked up and saw the wild peregrine fly right over the parking garage with a kill (likely a pigeon) in her feet, heading towards St. Louis.  The grackles are getting later in the day arriving, so I let the hawks up just before 7:00.  I flew 2 hawks to keep a close eye on the birds.  One hawk stays with me well, the other is a bit more aloof and she had moved to the back garage across the street., it took me some time to find her later in the evening, using the telemetry receiver.   The second one had moved away and I had some trouble locating her. She had moved around the office building across the street and was roosting for the night.  As I was getting her down.  We moved a lot of birds out of the trees in the area.  So that will be a new part of our route in the evening.   To locate her, transmitters were removed from the remaining three, I then could locate her by the transmitter.  She had settled in to roost in a tree  and the long pole 16 foot pole came in handy again.  She was carefully lowered down to be safely tucked away in her sleeping crate for the evening.