As he loads and unloads flatbed trucks every day at his job at St. Lawrence Cement, Armando Castro keeps glancing anxiously toward the sky. He keeps a pair of field glasses hanging on a nearby machine and every once in awhile, he will take them down and direct them toward the object of his avian passion — a pair of peregrine falcons who live year-round at the plant.
Castro and Barb Smith, another long-time employee of SLC, are the resident guardians of the falcons, keeping an ever-watchful eye on the nest and keeping in regular contact with Mark and Marion Nash of the Canadian Peregrine Foundation.
Once a year, in what has become an annual ritual, biologist Mark Heaton, the Nashes and rock climber John Miller make an early June appearance at SLC for the entertaining and highly important task of banding the new crop of chicks.
Miller rappels down from a silo above the nesting site, puts the fluffy chicks into a duffle bag, sends them back up on the rope and then spends an anxious hour or so fending off the attacks of the parent falcons who dutifully try like to rip his face off. He waves his arms wildly in big circles to fend them off. Every once in a while, he takes a glancing blow.
The chicks, meanwhile, are taken down to the plant where they are sexed, weighed and banded by Heaton and Castro, then returned to the nest so that, theoretically, their parents never even know they have been gone.
That's the way it is supposed to go.
Then there was yesterday.
When the trap-door hatch high above the nest site was opened so that Miller could prepare to descend, the falcon parents took off as expected in screeching complaint.
Then, surprisingly, there appeared two little bodies teetering on the edge of the roof. They were not the fluffy little balls of peregrine that were expected, but were more like gawky adolescents, already resplendent with distinct brown and beige streaks on their chests. The birds were 10 days older than estimated. That meant it was too dangerous to band them, because they would likely jump in panic rather than allow themselves to be caught.
But, as fate would have it, another opportunity would soon arrive. One of the birds fell from the nest about an hour after the biologist left the site. The ever-watchful Castro was there to scoop him up and put him in a rescue box. This morning, biologist Heaton returned to the plant to band "Clarkson" as the battling little male was named, in honour of the 200th anniversary of the village where he was born.
Castro has a long-standing interest in birds. He keeps a Harris Hawk in a huge coop in his own backyard. When SLC help a suggestion program called Eureka many years ago, he suggested they try to acquire a pair of peregrines to keep down the pigeons who frequent the plant.
That didn't prove practical but word must have been passed along on the peregrine hotline, however, because they arrived to stay a few years later.
The first of them was the legendary "Nate the Great" who garnered a boatload of publicity because he was one of the first of the birds to be outfitted with a tracking transmitter. The technology was able to show the bird's incredible migration patterns.
"Nate was a fierce little guy," recalled Castro yesterday, pointing out on the side of a building near the kiln where he and his mate settled in the "Cadillac of nesting boxes" to raise their young.
Nate's territory was challenged more than once by interlopers, sparking some of the amazing aerial duels between the males that are legendary among birders.
After a long career, Nate was killed at SLC at night by some kind of predator, probably an owl.
His successor, named Jackson "caught a bus" as Castro refers to being hit by a vehicle, at Winston Churchill Blvd. and Eglinton Ave. W. a short time later.
That's when Storm, the current SLC male, moved in. His mate has not yet been identified so she has not been given a name, in deference to the fact she may already be a known quantity from another site.
The experience of having the falcons nest at the plant has been a rewarding one for everyone who works there, says Barb Smith, the other key employee in the falcon protection phalanx.
"I can't say enough about what he puts into it," she says of Castro. "We purchased a scope for him because the one he had wasn't good enough for the resolution he needs. He's absolutely devoted to these birds."
And he is not the only one.
"Every person here watches out for them," Smith says. When a young red-tailed hawk went to the ground recently with a broken wing (he may have come to close to the falcon nest), Armando was immediately notified and the bird was sent to the Toronto Wildlife Centre for repairs. "It's really raised the whole awareness level about the natural world" with employees, says Smith.
A construction road that runs through the plant is officially called "Peregrine Way" and the plant schedules its construction work around the nesting habits of the bird.
"They kind of rule the roost," says Smith with a laugh.