Richmond Falcon Update
On Thursday April 11th Biologists with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF), with the assistance of Dominion personnel, installed two webcams at the peregrine falcon nest box on the 22nd floor of the Dominion Building at One James River Plaza in Downtown Richmond.
These two cameras will allow biologists to monitor the progress of the birds through their breeding cycle and provide the public with an opportunity to see the day to day lives of these amazing birds of prey. This project is jointly sponsored by VDGIF and Dominion. With the assistance of the University of Virginia Long Term Ecological Research project, live images from the camera will be made available to the public. We are working on the technical aspects of making these images available and hope to have it up and running soon. DGIF biologists will post information and updates through the breeding season.
The pair had laid a five egg clutch for the first time. The camera allowed us to see that one of these eggs was not being incubated through much of the day on Friday. On Friday evening at approximately 7:30 pm we could see that only four eggs remained in the nest box. Falcons will often remove non-viable eggs from the nest and we suspect that is what occurred. A DGIF biologist searched the ground underneath the nesting area on Saturday morning and found no sign of the egg. The female continues to incubate the remaining four eggs. Peregrine falcons typically incubate their eggs for 33-35 days and we expect these eggs to hatch sometime next week.