Winnipeg falcon chicks die, despite rescue attempt

Three peregrine falcons chicks hatched on a downtown Winnipeg hotel late last month have died, despite a dramatic rescue attempt by the city's fire department Friday morning.

Dozens of people from around the world who had been watching the progress of the three chicks via a webcam — dubbed the Falcon Cam — called CBC Manitoba and the Peregrine Falcon Recovery Project on Friday to report the birds appeared to be having trouble coping with water accumulating from the heavy rain.

The Falcon Cam showed one sodden adult bird — likely the female, dubbed Princess — trying to shelter the eight-day-old chicks on the Radisson Hotel's 13th-storey ledge, which appeared to contain several centimetres of water.

Tracy Maconachie, a conservation biologist who has co-ordinated the recovery project for 15 years, said she knew the rain was going to be a problem for the chicks as soon as she logged on to the webcam Friday morning.

"They've lived through snowstorms when they were in the eggs and rain and ice storms and 60-kilometre-an-hour winds blowing them off the eggs and off the chicks. They managed to weather all of that," she said.

"But the one thing they couldn't protect them from was the water, the rain coming down so hard over such a short period of time."

Environment Canada issued a rainfall warning for the Red River Valley, including Winnipeg, on Friday morning. More than 35 millimetres had fallen on downtown Winnipeg by 10 a.m.; as much as 70 millimetres  were expected.

Parent bird watches rescue attempt

A firefighter with the department's high-angle rescue unit rappelled down from the Radisson Hotel's roof around 11 a.m. Friday, startling the adult bird off the chicks.  She sat on a nearby ledge and watched, squawking angrily, as the firefighter tucked the three tiny, white chicks into a knapsack.

The firefighter then brought the chicks to the ground; the plan had been to move them to a nestbox on the 30th floor of the building, where the adult pair raised chicks last year, in the hopes the adult birds, who share parenting duties, would follow.

The peregrine adults may nest again this season if they have the energy, but will likely choose a new location — possibly in the nest box higher up on the hotel, Maconachie said.

Pair produce peregrine brood

Since 1989, various pairs of the peregrine falcons have been nesting on the downtown hotel.

The nesting pair this year are Trey, hatched on the same ledge of the Radisson in 1996, and Princess, hatched in Minneapolis in 2002. They have produced 13 young — three of which are known to have survived — in addition to the three that were in the nest on the ledge, which is over a window in a hotel meeting room named the "Peregrine Room."

This year, Princess and Trey produced four eggs, but one was removed by the parents early in incubation, after it was either damaged by a snowstorm or infertile. The other three eggs hatched by May 28; the chicks had not yet been named.

Peregrine falcons were close to extinction in the U.S. by the 1960s, and in Canada east of the Rockies in the 1970s. The pair that nested at the hotel in 1989 was the first confirmed peregrine nesting in Manitoba since the mid-1900s.

In Canada and the United States, it is illegal to kill peregrines or disrupt their nests.