big day, big day - - BANDING DAY
Zipporah for the wife of Moses. Hebrew for "little bird."
Baker for John Alec Baker: Obscure British librarian (hee) and author of a book of nature writing titled Peregrine. (I'll have to check out - I've never read it myself.)
Horus for the Egyptian deity represented as a falcon or falcon headed man.
Boccaccio for Giovanni Boccaccio: author of The Decameron, containing a memorable story about a falcon.
See the second shot with the little bandaged toe? Poor little guy lost his talon while he was in the box with his sib's after being removed from the nest-cap and brought inside the library for banding. A freak accident. It'll heal and he'll do just fine. I felt bad about it though.
Before the window below the nest-cap was even opened - well before the banding had gotten underway - the parents started going crazy: flying back and forth in front of the nest-cap eyrie, circling over the library, screaming bloody murder the whole time. A good crowd of people had come to watch the banding because it had been posted on the falcon-cam website, but more joined in after the parents' screams and wild flying drew them in to see what the ruckus was all about. I was still standing outside the library with the Director of the Chicago Peregrine Program Mary Hennen, part of her banding team, and some other faithful watchers. We'd never seen them go into alarm mode so early before. We found out later that it was just the sight of the waiting ladder through the window below the nest-cap that set them off. Interesting. People going back and forth past that window are fine, but that ladder is a threat. I wonder if it's a threat as in big-scary-object, or as in the recognizable object that's used to invade their inner sanctum and (temporarily) steal their babies.
After the banding and the blood samples were all done, Mary allowed some of the guests to hold the chicks for a photo op. There was one university professor from Southern Il Champaign Urbana (maybe) who'd started driving at 4:30 AM to make it to the banding, some old geezer I didn't know but who Mary knew. I didn't mind them getting to hold chics. But then the next thing I knew, two of regular watchers, neither of whom was me, were up there smiling and holding up the other two chicks. Mary'd never offered to let anyone outside her banding team hold one of the chicks in previous seasons, and I was taken by surprise by this unexpected generosity on her part, and by self pity that she hadn't asked me if I wanted to hold one. I was so shaken by this that I walked out of the library to watch from outside, as they returned the chicks the nest-cap and to observe the parents' behavior. I'm not devastated or anything like that, but I'm ashamed to admit that with that one little incident, my mood plummeted. It's not the excitement of holding a chick - I've held lots of birds before, including peregrines. It's just that I wasn't asked, and that's just silly. But it did rather sour the event for me.
For about an hour I watched from the sundeck of the building across the street and from a well placed window in the same building, when it got too windy on the roof. So, unlike previous years, I didn't talk with anyone else, which is really a shame because it isn't every day that I'm around other people who share my interest in the peregrines, and I squandered a rare opportunity. I wasn't sulking or miserable, it wasn't that bad. But I just felt...somehow rejected, so I went off on my own.
Anyway, it's way past my bed time on the night before an early morning for double volunteer duty tomorrow. Enough rambling. Maybe some judicious cutting, editing or even deleting tomorrow, but for now I'll leave it as is and be off to bed with a fresh cup of jasmine tea, a sugar-free popsicle, and a Spuffy-fic to read before I drift off to sleep.