Of all the guilty pleasures on the internet, few are as absorbing as the one being broadcast from Melbourne’s CBD. There’s love, death, sibling rivalry and a dark secret. But this isn’t a binge-worthy series on Netflix. It’s vision of a peregrine falcon nest, streaming live 24/7, from the top of a Collins Street office tower.
Like thousands of others, I’m getting a privileged peek into the private lives of these top-order predators, whose eggs hatched on September 29. And right now, it’s a cliffhanger (pun intended), with the two youngsters of this year’s brood poised to take their maiden flight.
Peregrines first attempted to breed in 1991 on a long, sheltered ledge above the 33rd floor of 367 Collins Street. Raptor expert Victor Hurley installed a CCTV camera the following year and commenced a live feed to the foyer.
With advances in technology, the privately funded Victorian Peregrine Project (VPP) joined the many "nestcams" worldwide in 2017, using cameras trained on nesting birds to stream online, reaching a global audience.
A falcon-watchers' Facebook group began, with photos, videos and commentary offered from 6000-plus members. An app also streams, complete with chat function, with every little detail remarked on and analysed, in real time. Early on, I was moved by the mother’s tenderness brooding her eggs. She delicately shuffled them beneath her downy midriff and folded her wings like a soft, avian hug. Four speckled eggs had been laid, three hatching into tiny white fluffballs (dubbed "murder pom-poms"). We watched them – hardly able to lift their heads – gobbling up pieces of pigeon shoved in their beaks.
They grew fast, with greyish-brown feathers emerging after about a month. A stream of prey birds was delivered and demolished. "Uber Eats is here!", "Nom noms!", people said, making light of this life-and-death drama.
Tragedy struck on October 28 when the smallest chick died, presumably from a parasite carried by pigeons. One of the others lay on it for a couple of days (ew!) until a parent mercifully took the corpse away.
Now, the young falcons are nearly fully grown. They have brown and cream chevrons right down their chests, bright-yellow feet, and black heads, each with a slim mohawk of down left on top.
It’s predicted they’ll leave the nest soon. They’ve been flapping like crazy, preparing their chest and wing muscles ("flappercise" or "wingercise"). But until then, the siblings still need to eat, and with every food drop, they fight for the spoils. Mum and dad are believed to be withholding food now, so their chicks are forced to fledge. They’ve been spotted circling the ledge, perhaps enticing the nestlings to leap off. Our hearts are in our mouths watching the still-flightless falcons running and fluttering so close to the edge, 150 metres up.
The irony of watching screens instead of the skies doesn’t escape me. I’m like the person in the Leunig cartoon, watching a sunset on TV while the sunset occurs outside.
So I headed to the city – to one of its busiest intersections – and saw the real thing. I even managed to photograph one going into a hunting dive – known as a stoop. With so much public discussion, there’s one big secret: the camera’s location mustn’t be divulged, for fear the birds will be persecuted. There are thought to be no more than 1000 pairs of peregrine falcons in Victoria, so this fear is real.
As I write, it’s the 40th day of the young falcons’ lives. Heavy rain has left the ledge slippery. The nest boxes are streaked with two months’ worth of bird shit (despite the falcons’ agile projectile poos off the edge).
Will today be the day the first falcon fledges? Will tonight see only one left in the nest? Every evening, the lights of the buildings far below the ledge sparkle. Hundreds log on and chat. Even when the birds are off-camera, even when we go to bed or go to work, we keep the falcon-cam switched on.
Peregrine falcons mostly nest on cliffs so I’m buoyed by Victor Hurley’s comment: "To them, the CBD is a canyon full of cliff faces." It’s uplifting to see wild peregrines in a modern city, using our concrete and steel canyons and getting on with their lives. But it’s poignant, too, since they have no choice: we stole the cliffs and nest sites they’d have used in the past.
Ironically enough, cities like Melbourne are these falcons’ best shot at a future. (This piece was first published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in November, 2019)
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