Falcons Make Home, Sweet Home
Folks here think nothing of seeing a peregrine falcon perched in a tree along the freeway, right in front of a big sugar factory.
A mile up the road, in another tree next to the freeway, there’s another. This one is larger - a female.
It turns out these magnificent birds are right at home. The pair has a nest atop a smokestack at the Amalgamated Sugar Co. factory, where it’s raised young every year.
“They’ve become the most prolific pair of falcons in Idaho,” said Bruce Haak, a biologist with Idaho Fish and Game in Nampa.
It’s the first time in recorded history that peregrine falcons have nested in such a busy, noisy, industrial spot - and stayed put. The falcons love it there so much that they don’t leave - they skip the annual flight south for the winter, and stay at their smokestack year-round.
“They get left alone, and there’s lots of food,” Haak said, mainly pigeons and starlings.
The male peregrine was released in downtown Boise in 1988. In the 1989-90 winter, it found a mate - a female that had been released 100 miles to the north in Hells Canyon. The happy couple made its home atop the busy factory, as trucks whizzed by on I-84.
Fish and Game workers helped out with a nest box placed in the birds’ favored spot, “and they moved right in,” Haak said.
The female met a sad end a couple of years later when it fell into another smokestack and couldn’t get out. But the male found another mate and kept the nest going. Twenty young falcons have learned to fly from atop the sugar factory since 1990.
Haak said people from all over the world have come to see the falcons at their factory home. “It’s so unusual.”
Andrus legacy
A bipartisan group, including Coeur d’Alene’s Brad Stoddard and Dennis Wheeler, Wallace’s H.F. Magnuson, and Caldwell’s David Kerrick (the state Senate Republican majority leader), is raising money to establish a Cecil D. Andrus Leadership Chair at Albertson College of Idaho. Earnings from a $1 million endowment would pay for a top-notch professor to inspire future leaders.
The group, in a fund-raising letter, gave high praise to the famous former governor’s leadership in Idaho: “Cece Andrus is one of the most important figures in Idaho’s history.”
“This effort, we believe, is a critical piece of the Andrus legacy,” the group wrote.
Haile to the jail
Canyon County may be the only county in the state that calls its lockup anything other than the plain old county jail. Instead, the Caldwell jail is dubbed the “Dale G. Haile Detention Center.”
Said county Commissioner Abe Vasquez, “Dale Haile was a former sheriff here in Canyon County for umpteen years. … They thought it would be befitting to name it after Dale Haile, and everyone seemed to approve of it.”
Haile, who has since passed away, cut the ribbon for his namesake project after his retirement.
Decorating garbage
Owners of a big, old Boise home that’s undergoing a face lift didn’t let their messy remodeling get in the way of their holiday spirit this year. Instead, they decked the extra-large Dumpster in their yard with colored lights and a sign saying “Noel.”
, DataTimes MEMO: North-South Notes runs every other Sunday. To reach Betsy Z. Russell, call 336- 2854, fax to 336-0021 or e-mail to bzrussell@rmci.net.