It’s only appropriate that one of the peregrine falcon chicks that was banded from the nesting box on the top of the Mississauga Executive Centre at 1 Robert Speck Pkwy. Monday should be named Ishaq.
Not only does it lend some Mississauga-style diversity to the chicks’ nomenclature, which tends to consist of very Anglo-sounding names, but it honours the man without whom the urban nest site in the City’s downtown core would never have happened.
Ishaq Gilyana started working with Oxford Properties Group, which owns the building, way back in 1987. He remembers coming on to the site with another man and marking the corners of the future building with tires under the direction of Harold Shipp himself, who kept an eye on the location from one of the adjoining high-rise office towers that he had built first.
Gilyana even remembers watching horses graze on the property when it was a horse farm and City Hall was located just across Hurontario St. at 1 City Centre Dr.
One day about a decade ago Gilyana, the handyman for MEC 1 as it is commonly called, went up to the rooftop to check things out. It was a cold day, with some snow still on the roof.
As he checked the area near the conning tower, Gilyana noticed that something strange was going on. There were small bones scattered all around the place and what looked like feathers. A piece of wood was sitting on an angle that, as it turned out, was where a pair of falcons had taken up residence.
Eventually the Canadian Peregrine Foundation was brought into the picture and a proper nest box was installed on the roof in 2001. The nesting pair of falcons — who now stay year-round because the pigeon pickings are so good (it’s still close to City all don’t ’ya know) took out a long-term lease and began producing regular broods.
Nearby Sts. Peter and Paul Elementary School got involved, more or less adopting the birds as a neighbourhood cause. They have invited the Peregrine Foundation to come to make their presentations at the school. They have invited the mayor to speak. She says it’s one of her favourite schools because it’s named for her sons, although we’ll take a wild guess that Her Worship hasn’t always found her sons, Peter and Paul, to be saints.
For the last couple of years, some of the falcon chicks have been named in honour of the school (Peter and Paula were two of last year’s crop) and some by the building managers.
Sante Esposito, general manager for Oxford, says the birds have often been named in some way for the building’s tenants, especially those on the 16th floor who have to put up with dirty windows from their messy avian neighbours. A window washer would take his life in his hands to try to do his job while the peregrines were raising a brood nearby.
This year, Esposito decided to name one of the birds Manny, in honour of the building’s operations supervisor, whose father died last week.
The other name chosen was Ishaq, not just to mark the fact that Gilyana discovered the nest but also to honour the great job that he does. “We call him Superman,” Esposito said. “Everybody in the complex appreciates his good work.”
As if on cue as Esposito is being interviewed, a minor crisis develops in the banding process. The birds each have one tiny silver band put on one leg indicating they are registered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and one black one on the other, indicating they are registered in the national Canadian data bank. The bands will be life-savers for the birds if they are trapped on their migration to the south, proving they are part of a recovery program for the threatened species.
In order to tell the individual birds apart in case of later mishaps, the silver bands are wrapped with different colours of electrical tape. That makes it easy for the volunteers who will be watching the birds for the next few weeks to know who is already flying and who has fallen out of the nest again and needs another elevator ride to its rooftop home.
At the last minute, it turns out that there aren’t enough colours of tape on hand for the four chicks.
So guess who is enlisted to instantly some other coloured tape?
A short few minutes later, Ishaq is back with what is needed.
Yes, it’s Superman to the falcon’s rescue again.
Finally, the man who started the nesting site, gets to relax for a minute and pose with the bird named for him.