If you had a choice of a beautiful towering waterfront penthouse, hand-crafted just for you or a loft in a 1950s-era industrial vestige from another age, which would you choose?
That’s the choice that the resident peregrine falcons at Lakeview Generating Station were offered this spring and the boxy old powerhouse at the power station proved to be a chick magnet to them – much to the inconvenience of all of the humans trying to manage their lives.
Ontario Power Generation (OPG), working in consort with the Canadian Peregrine Foundation (CPF), paid for construction of an 80-ft. tower last year that they hoped would become the new home for the raptors, but it didn’t work.
The birds like to be on the highest point of land possible, which is why they nest on cliff faces when they aren’t living in the suburbs.
Even though huge nets were draped across the Lake facade of the powerhouse to try to prevent the falcons from making another nest on a ledge, a small hole was apparently ripped open by the wind and they set up housekeeping there. On a recent tour of the site in anticipation of the demolition of the powerhouse scheduled for next Monday morning, one falcon could clearly be seen at his/her post.
Officials from CPF and OPG have been negotiating for weeks about what to do about the falcon dilemma and had worked out some tentative plans.
Against its better judgment, says Mark Nash of CPF, that group was preparing to assist Ministry of Natural Resources biologists remove the young chicks from their parents. Because of the danger of being attacked by the fierce birds, the biologists were going to be ensconced for their protection in a cage similar to the kind that divers use underwater when dealing with sharks.
The babies were late hatching and could not have regulated their own body temperatures without their parents, so they were to be taken to the CPF Wildlife Centre where they would have been raised, fed without human contact and eventually released back into the wild.
It was not the best solution but given the pending destruction of the powerhouse, it was the best of a bad lot of alternatives.
Alas, the effort is no longer necessary. There were three eggs in the nest originally but one disappeared some time ago. Only one egg hatched last Tuesday and by Thursday, there was no sign of any chick.
It’s unlikely that any other predator could get at the area because of the nets. The chick may have died or fallen prey to illness which has taken some others this spring, and the parents may have eaten the remains or removed from the ledge.
“We’re a little befuddled about what happened,” said Nash. “It goes to show again that Mother Nature is pretty cruel.”
A rescue is no longer required.
There was more bad news this morning from the Mississauga Executive Centre site at 1 Robert Speck Pkwy. where the second of four fledglings has died. Officials from nearby Square One called to say that they found a peregrine body, after one of the chicks fell to the ground — again — while learning to fly Sunday. It then took off again and flew west towards the dangerous parking lots across Hurontario St.
Earlier, the chick named Manny smashed against the building on a test flight and was killed.
The CPF volunteers have rescued the birds from the ground a dozen times already, bundling them into a bag and taking them back up to the 17th floor via elevator to the nesting box.
Things are going better at the St. Lawrence Cement site where there were four fledglings.
The best bit of news that Nash had to report about the Lakeview site, which seems to have been dogged with bad luck through the years, actually came a couple of weeks ago.
The adult falcons have shown no interest in the past in the artificial nesting box built for them, so that OPG could comply with legislation that prohibits the destruction of habitat of an endangered species. But this spring, Nash has seen both and the male and the female perched on the tower.
“That is very significant,” says Nash. “It demonstrates a huge acceptance of that box.”
It bodes well for next year when, with the Four Sisters blown to the ground and the powerhouse gone, the Peregrine-Tower-By-The-Bay condo, “will be the only game left in town,” says Nash.
Maybe then, the falcons will decide that the gentrification of Lakeview really does make it a good place to successfully raise a family.