Pioneering peregrine lost in love triangle

Right out of a soap opera storyline, a vamp showed up at High Bridge Park this spring and apparently broke up one of Spokane’s standout romantic couples.

Love was in the air as normal on May 9 when Peaceful Valley resident George Orr reported seeing the usual High Bridge peregrine falcons in courtship for the eighth consecutive year.

Indeed, the female has been the queen of the skies in that area each summer, and a devoted mate and model housekeeper as well.

For seven years, the 14-year-old female peregrine – one of the oldest wild moms of her species – had made a nursery under the Sunset Highway bridge upstream from the confluence of Hangman Creek and the Spokane River. The bridge, with its ample supply of prey in the form of white-throated swifts and pigeons, is considered one of the country’s premier urban nesting sites for the once-endangered species.

By late May, however, area birdwatchers realized something was awry. The queen apparently had been dethroned by another female that had the chocolate-brown appearance of a juvenile peregrine.

“That would be unusual for a juvenile to move in,” Howard Ferguson, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist, said last month. Ferguson has banded each brood of High Bridge peregrines.

But he’s always known that a younger female would eventually take over the territory.

With the older female gone, the male was observed in courtship with the unusual-looking new female.

Closer examination by suspicious falconers using high-powered spotting scopes revealed the newcomer to be a captive-raised gyrfalcon-prairie falcon hybrid that had been lost by an area falconer last year.

“Those things shouldn’t happen,” groused one falconer who helped confirm the bird’s identity. He said falconer’s cringe at the thought of interfering with the nesting success of wild birds.

“On the other hand,” he said, “there are so many hazards, so many things that can happen, especially to a female that old. She could have clipped a wire or had a run-in with a red-tail or maybe she caught a pigeon disease.”

Doug Pineo, another local falconer who’s helped Ferguson band the peregrine chicks produced under the Sunset Highway bridge, obtained permission from the Fish and Wildlife Department to use a pigeon lure and capture the hybrid falcon last week.

On Monday morning, a lone peregrine – probably the original male – was perched on the railroad bridge just north of Interstate 90.

“That’s too bad if a captive bird ended up chasing the old female off,” Ferguson said. “It’s pretty late for any courtship to happen now, but maybe another female will come by and the male will lure her in to evaluate the site.”

Given a chance, the male might actually show the nest site to a prospective mate and instigate whatever instinctive arrangements falcons make to meet back here next spring.

It worked that way once, so it can happen again, he said.

The old queen of High Bridge skies was hatched and banded in 1991 and the male she eventually mated with was hatched in 1994, both at the World Center for Birds of Prey near Boise. At that time, peregrine falcons were still an endangered species.

Various agencies, volunteers and Washington Water Power (now Avista) cooperated to raise these and other peregrines in a box along the Clark Fork Delta near the Idaho-Montana border, where they took off on their own when they were strong enough to fly.

This pair of birds is known to have produced 17 chicks in Spokane. Nine were banded.

Their success is among the shining examples in the recovery of a species that was on the verge of doom 30 years ago.