The next May a nesting pair was seen flying frequently to the nest box with prey, signaling the potential return of falcons to campus.Īnd return they did, with a total of forty falcon chicks fledged from 2003-2016!Ī live web camera was installed atop the Du Bois Library in 2012, allowing the public to watch the pair raise their chicks, and garnering more than 200,000 viewers in 2014 – double the audience in 2012. Du Bois Library with an adult falcon observed going in and out of the box that same year. In March of 1998, a nesting box was installed on top of the W.E.B. That July the five falcon chicks took flight, eventually leaving the Campus Center never to return, and marking an 11-year falcon chick hiatus for UMass Amherst. It allowed us to explain the project and teach them a little bit about Peregrines and their endangered status.” “People would see us with this huge scope in the heat of summer and ask us why we were out there. “The job was partly about outreach,” says Doyle. The women, wanting to avoid human contact with the birds, watched and recorded their activity through a spotting scope from a rise near the Campus Pond and secretly dropped food into their nesting box. Kate Doyle ’90, G’97 and Katherine Kripp ’90, G’97, then graduate students in Biology at UMass Amherst, were given the task of feeding and monitoring the chicks until they fledged. Inside were five chicks, flown in from Peregrine Fund headquarters in Boise, Idaho, to be raised and released that summer. With the strong conservation efforts in the Pioneer Valley, it’s no wonder that by 1988 UMass Amherst had begun its own falcon program, setting up a nesting box on the 13 th floor of the Lincoln Campus Center. Peregrine Falcons are one of the most widely distributed birds, living in every continent except Antarctica, but DDT in the United States decimated their numbers, leaving no nesting pairs east of the Mississippi River and creating a desperate need for restoration organizations. The Peregrine Falcon chicks were bred, raised and released by the Peregrine Fund, a non-profit organization created in 1970 dedicated to saving birds of prey from extinction. Tom in Holyoke between 19, according to the Massachusetts Division of Wildlife and Fisheries. The Pioneer Valley has been active in falcon restoration efforts since the adverse effect of DDT, an agricultural pesticide, became public knowledge in the sixties one of the first release sites was on Mt. The most well known pair, which nested on the Library roof from 2003-2014, hatched a total of 37 chicks. Peregrine falcons have successfully nested on the roof of the Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst since 2003. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center Science & Engineering Library Floor Directory.Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion (JEDI).Open Scholarship & Scholarly Publishing.
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