Across East Anglia our cathedrals and high points have been host to a compelling avian family saga. The love and loss of the region’s peregrine falcons has been watched by many.
High up in cities and town, these raptors watch from spires and tall buildings. They nest in shallow scrapes called “eyries”, often on high ledges, and lay a clutch of three to four eggs. The earliest record of a peregrine using a building was 1864/65 at Salisbury Cathedral. Today they may be found atop Norwich, Ely and St Alban’s cathedrals, Cromer Parish Church, Martlesham’s Adastral Park Water Tower, Colchester Town Hall and around Cambridge colleges and University Library.
Peregrine falcons are crow-sized birds with blue-grey backs, barred white underparts, and distinctive yellow talons and beaks. The female (the falcon) is a third larger than the male (the tiercel) and has more pronounced dotted and barred markings on her chest.
Regarded as the world’s fastest birds, they are capable of reaching speeds of up to 200mph (320km/h) when diving to catch their prey. Their normal flight speed is a little more mundane, a mere 40 to 60 mph (64 to 97 km/h).
This year’s breeding season has met with mixed success.
Cromer’s peregrine falcons
In the third week of March, the peregrines laid three eggs which all hatched in the latter part of April. To the delight of a very excited crowd of onlookers, watching via livecams, binoculars etc. the chicks were ringed by the British Trust for Ornithology in mid May. This gave them their designations: VFP (presumed male, weighing 688gr), VBP (presumed female, 741gr) and VDP (indeterminate gender though later suspected male, 706gr). VDP fledged first, on 4 June, and landed near a herring gull nest on a building opposite. A little later it repeated the flying feat but had the misfortune to fly straight into another gull’s nest, with two chicks present and to the noticeable displeasure of two very protective gull parents.
All photos by Chris Skipper, used with permission.
When the new day dawned it became apparent that VDP was trapped. Rescue services required! Regarding the exercise of freeing the raptor as a useful training exercise, the emergency services diverted traffic away from the building and freed the bird under the watchful gaze of the rather concerned gulls. And VDP returned, eventually, to the church tower.
Meanwhile, VFP fledged, flew to another building, was mobbed by herring gulls, and after a prolonged reccy of the church nave roof returned to the tower.
The chicks are now regularly seen around the church. Their day is definitely divided into three segments. Early mornings they fly, feed and then sleep, with some sporadic flying, either just for exercise or for practice with either a parent or siblings. At lunchtime they enjoy another burst of activity involving food, flight and sleep, and this is repeated late afternoon/early evening. An essential hunting skill is the food pass, when a prey is passed from one bird to another on the wing.
The young are expected to remain near the nest site until the autumn when they will depart to find their own territories.
Chick mortality
After several years without a resident pair, a new pair of peregrine falcons arrived at Ely Cathedral this year. Again, three eggs were laid in April and the three chicks hatched in late May. Sadly their fate was different: the birds only survived a few days.
Chick mortality is common in the first weeks of life due to natural vulnerabilities – limited temperature regulation, weak immune systems, and potential food issues. In the case of Ely’s chicks, from the adult falcon’s behaviour it is possible she was a first-time parent. The adults have remained in the area, and the Hawk and Owl Trust continue to monitor them.
In Norwich the peregrines laid four eggs. Three chicks hatched but the youngest died a few days later. Of the two surviving chicks, the female nearly came to grief: after fledging, she ended up on the ground. She then managed to fly up to the ridge of a nearby porch, where a peregrine expert persuaded her to accept a rescue on a broom handle. She was then taken up and placed on the bell tower, above danger, where the parents could keep an eye on her and feed her. As in Cromer, both fledglings are now flying confidently and learning to hunt.
“It’s clear that these birds have captured the imagination of the public once again,” said Liberty Wells, Outreach and Conservation Ranger at the Hawk and Owl Trust. “It’s always remarkable to witness the moment peregrine falcon chicks take to the skies for the first time. When we believe intervention is necessary to support a young peregrine’s survival, we will not hesitate to act.”
More loss
The raptors at St Alban’s cathedral suffered a different calamity – someone crushed their first clutch in April. Hertfordshire police are investigating. Happily in this case, the parents laid another clutch and three male peregrine chicks hatched and later fledged. The parents, named Alban and Boudica, have used the cathedral as their home since 2022.
Meanwhile in Colchester it was heavy rain that destroyed the nest. The peregrine pair have been visiting Colchester since 2017 and used the Balkerne Water Tower as their nest site. But due to restoration work at the Victorian tower, affectionately known as Jumbo, the raptors were forced to choose a different site – the Town Hall. Alas, due to restoration work there too, a nest box could not be installed in time for the peregrines to safely build a nest. So with the heavy rains removing their nest, there was no chance the pair would produce offspring this year.
In Cambridge, peregrines circle the college buildings. A female, known as TVH and from a 2021 brood born on Wakefield Cathedral, has become resident. She is often seen flying around and perching on the University Library. At the start of the year she was seen bonding and mating with a resident male, and feeding on teal, fieldfare and goldfinches. But then an intruding male arrived. Since then the resident male has vanished suggesting he has either been pushed out of the territory or potentially injured or killed. In the end, though, nature triumphed and keen birdwatchers have been keeping an eye (and a lens) on the four chicks that have been raised in Cambridge.
Fighting to survive
Over in Suffolk, a pair of peregrine falcon chicks have fledged in Martlesham. The juveniles were offspring of the first breeding pair to nest on the water tower at BT’s Adastral Park in 2019. Taking 11 days longer than the usual 33 days to hatch, and to parents regularly seen fighting, they survived against the odds.
“It’s been a complete saga here – once these two youngsters fledge, it will be 23 birds that have come from this nest site,” said raptor expert Peter Merchant.
The future
Once threatened by persecution, peregrines have adapted to urban life, with 1,769 breeding pairs in the UK, including 200 in cities, where artificial light helps them hunt migrating birds at night.
By means of tracking the ringed birds, the Cromer project has established that a female, born on Cromer Church tower in 2020, has nested in Grimsby. The falcon L7, born in Norwich in 2019, now breeds in Glasgow. And so the wonderful peregrine saga continues.
And as for the Cromer herring gull chicks, they too are thriving.
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