Peregrine Falcon
© Rick Remington
Published:
November 7, 2011
A juvenile Peregrine Falcon carries a Northern Flicker in its talons near Montrose Beach in Chicago. Subscriber Rick Remington of Elk Grove Village, Illinois, took the photo on September 25, 2011, with a Nikon D7000 and a 300mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter.
The falcon is one of two chicks that hatched in spring 2011 from a nest atop the
Uptown Theatre, less than a mile west of Montrose Beach. Mary Hennen, who runs the
Field Museum's Chicago Peregrine Program, says the bird is named Jerry. (All of the Windy City's Peregrines are named.)
Jerry's mother is
Zoom, a falcon that fledged from a nest in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1997. She made her way to Chicago a few years later and has been nesting on the Uptown Theatre since 2001. At age 14, Zoom is one of the oldest breeding Peregrines in the Midwest; to date she has fledged 30 chicks.
"The Uptown birds are often seen at Montrose Harbor during the non-breeding season and have occasionally had one of their offspring overwinter with them," Hennen says. "It's more common for the young to migrate."
See more photos of Peregrine Falcons:
- On a 20th floor window ledge in Pittsburgh
- Adult and chick in a nest box in Minneapolis
- Adult atop the Eastman Kodak building in Rochester, New York See photos of Peregrine Falcons in our galleries
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