The Peregrine Falcons welcomed egg #3 Saturday night. I wasn’t sure any more eggs were coming since it had been so long since the second one was laid.  Jeanne Hibbert provided specific data about the timing of this year’s eggs on the Facebook page, Peregrine Falcons Lincoln NE.   The period between the first and second egg was 60.5 hours and it jumped to 97.5 hours (slightly more than 4 days) between the second and third egg.  This is a notably …

Big news!   After overcoming an array of technical obstacles, our American Kestrel streaming video, A.K.A. KestrelCam, is back up and running after being offline for more than a year. Currently, our resident unbanded female is incubating five eggs, the first of which was laid in late March. This means we may only have to wait approximately two weeks before the eggs will begin to hatch.  I know a lot of people missed KestrelCam during its absence and will be please …

On Tuesday evening, the Peregrine Falcons welcomed egg #2. It is anybody’s guess how many more eggs there will be, if any.  To watch the adventure unfold, please check out our Falconcam.

In what can only be described as an Easter Sunday shocker, the Peregrine Falcons at the Capitol welcomed their first egg on Sunday, 16 April. This egg is a surprise (at least to me) because it comes so late in the spring.  It appears almost a month (27 days) later than when the first egg at the Woodmen building in Omaha appeared.  The Capitol’s first egg usually appears about a week later than the Woodmen pair’s first egg.  It is …

Back on 22 March on this blog, I made the brash and incorrect prediction that the Peregrine Falcons at the Capitol would have an egg by 27 March.  This was largely based on the fact that the Woodmen birds had an egg by 20 March and the Capitol birds are usually about a week behind with their first egg.  It is now 5 April and no egg has been laid, which is raising questions whether Alley and 19/K will breed …

Big news came out of Omaha yesterday with confirmation of a pair of Peregrine Falcons on territory and possibly nesting at St. Cecilia’s Cathedral in Omaha.  Yesterday, the male was identified and details about who this bird is were announced yesterday in the following press release. As noted above, Mike Benkis captured photos that facilitated the identification of Orozco and a couple of those photos are below. The news kept coming Wednesday morning when Robert Wells sent me a photograph clearly …

So here we are once again at the beginning of what should be another nesting season for our Peregrine Falcons.  Both the female, Alley, and the male, 19/K, are still present at the Capitol.  This is not only notable since both birds are getting up there in age (Alley hatched in 2004, 19/K in 2001), but more so because 19/K spent much of last year at Fontenelle Forest’s Raptor Recovery after getting injured in early June.   He was released at …

No one needs an excuse to go birding, not in Nebraska where we have half a million Sandhill Cranes, lekking Greater Prairie-Chickens and, of course, Pileated Woodpeckers.   However, one’s birding can always be made a little more interesting when you set a goal for yourself.  Such is the thinking or function of doing a big year.   A big year is where you try to see as many bird species as possible in a certain geographic area (e.g,. a state). …

Since my last post was about a declining species, the Black-billed Magpie, I will focus this blog post on an increasing species, the Pileated Woodpecker, to balance things out.  Pileated Woodpeckers are big (about crow sized), striking,  black-and-white woodpeckers with a red crest that are found in heavily forested regions of North America.  Pileated Woodpeckers occurred in extreme eastern Nebraska prior to settlement of the area by European Americans, but were extirpated prior to 1900.  Other than a few oddball sightings, …

Many birders and birdwatchers in western and central Nebraska have noticed the unfortunate absence in recent years of a distinctive, entertaining and familiar bird species, the Black-billed Magpie.  Magpies standout among birds with their striking black and white plumage.  Their blackish wings and long tail show greenish iridescence in appropriate lighting.  Magpies often make their presence known in an area with their “ka ka ka“ call before they are seen.  Not long ago in the late 1990s, Black-billed Magpies were found …