Atlanta’s falcons now have country cousins

Nesting: The peregrine nests on skyscraper ledges, rocky cliffs and other high places; the nest may be simply a scraped out spot littered with leaves and grass and remains of prey; nest sites are often reused; the female lays three to four creamy to buff eggs, heavily blotched with reddish brown; they are incubated for 32-34 days, mostly by the female; hatched chicks fledge in 40-42 days.

Feeding: Their diet is almost exclusively songbirds, doves and other birds that the peregrine snags in midair with swift, spectacular dives, called stoops. The peregrine is masterful at catching pigeons in the city and is known to take prey as large as geese. It hunts most often at dawn and dusk, when prey are most active. A survey by Marietta naturalist Greg Greer shows that a large part of the diet of Atlanta's nesting peregrines is yellow-billed cuckoos — common, summer-nesting songbirds in Georgia.

Other facts: The peregrine is a superb and formidable hunter and the world's fastest bird, with diving speeds up to 200 mph. When diving for prey, the peregrine clenches its feet and then strikes the prey with a lethal blow that sends both the falcon and its prey tumbling; sometimes it bites off the head of the prey in mid-flight.

A few weeks ago, biologists were “banding” four peregrine falcon chicks in Georgia’s only known falcon nest — in a flower box on a 53rd floor balcony of the SunTrust Plaza Tower in downtown Atlanta. Then, the biologists got an unexpected call.

Nathan Klaus, a Department of Natural Resources biologist, was calling with stunning news: Rock climbers had found a peregrine nest with two chicks on a ledge in a steep, rocky canyon wall of Tallulah Gorge State Park in Rabun County. It was Georgia’s first confirmed peregrine nest in the wild since 1936, when a pair of falcons nested in Cloudland Canyon in extreme northwest Georgia.

Greg Greer, a peregrine expert and owner of an environmental education company in Marietta, was helping with the chick banding in Atlanta when Klaus called.

“To say we were excited is an understatement,” said Greer, who spoke about peregrine falcons last weekend at the Atlanta Audubon Society’s monthly meeting.

By the end of the 1950s, he noted, the peregrine — the world’s fastest bird, with speeds of nearly 200 mph — had all but disappeared because of the widespread use of the pesticide DDT and other problems. DDT was banned in 1972. After that, intensive conservation and reintroduction efforts by Greer and other experts helped rescue the bird from extinction. It made an amazing comeback; in 1999, it was removed from the federal Endangered Species List.

But even before then, in 1996, a pair of peregrines nested on a ledge of a downtown Atlanta hotel, to biologists’ great delight. The next year, a pair nested atop the SunTrust Plaza Tower, and that’s been the case ever since. (Two other known nesting sites downtown haven’t consistently produced chicks.)

Earlier this week, the chicks in the Atlanta nest were attempting to fledge. The nest can be monitored via webcam at georgiawildlife.com/falconcam. At Tallulah Gorge, the chicks are expected to fledge within a few days. If you visit the park, you might see them.

In the sky: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: The moon will be full Tuesday — the "Green Corn Moon," as the Cherokee Indians called June's full moon. Mercury is low in the west at dusk and sets about an hour later. Venus, also in the west at dusk, sets about three hours later. Jupiter, high in the west just after dark, sets in the west just before midnight. Saturn rises out of the east at dusk and will appear near the moon Monday night.