Preening Peregrines

Down by the riverside (oops, that’s a song) there’s a tree favored by a pair of peregrine falcons that’s appeared in several earlier posts. On an absolutely beautiful day: cool bordering on cold, no wind, cloudless blue sky and crystal clear air I walked along the river and found the pair of falcons in “their” tree.

Here they are, the female on the left and the smaller, paler male on the right –

They both posed nicely, although I wished they’d been much closer together –

Can you tell which is which? The answer is at the end of the post.

Although I’ve gotten a few photographs of a peregrine taking off or in flight, those were always a happy accident while I was concentrating on taking photos of a perched bird. On this day my goal was to get some photographs of one of the birds on the wing. So I set up the camera and settled down to wait for one or both to leave their perches.

They looked around, and looked around, and looked around –

As I waited both birds commenced to take care of their feathers by preening –

The female also scratched a few times, offering a view of her foot, the specie's feet earned it the long-ago name of “large-footed falcon”.

The female bobbed her head repeatedly and seemed to concentrate on something these mere human eyes couldn’t see. But after a while she settled down and went beck to preening. Patience is not my strong-suit, so after almost an hour it was time to move on.

The female is on the left in the photograph, the male is on the right.