falconspace

It's a good thing the two peregrine falcons living on a 17th-floor ledge at Nassau University Medical Center don't have to worry about putting their kids through college.

Since nesting at the hospital in 1996, they've given birth to 31 offspring, making them one of the more successful and productive pairs of these federally-protected birds in the metropolitan area.

Affectionately titled after the nearby parkway and NUMC's old name, Meadow and Brook recently welcomed the two newest additions to their family just over four weeks ago.

Wildlife specialists from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, which have closely monitored the two falcons over the last several years, banded the feet of the newborns last Tuesday, so they can track them after they leave the nest.

Banding the birds allows the DEP to keep a long-term record of their life span and how they reproduce in the future.

"In the New York metropolitan area, we have falcons that have winded up as far west as Wisconsin, down the Atlantic coast in Virginia, and some have come back and settled right here," said Chris Nadareski, DEP supervisor of wildlife studies. "So we're doing quite well."

Nadareski returns every year to band the chicks, hoping that the fiercely territorial mother and father are away from the nest. But they were home May 24, and squawked loudly as he approached the nest. "I've been attacked many times [by peregrine falcons]," said Nadareski, who luckily wasn't this time. "I wear a hard hat just in case."

In nearby New York City, there are only 16 pairs of peregrine falcons and only eight were successful in mating this season, he said.

Meadow and Brook have mated successfully every year since 1997, when a nest box was placed on the ledge for them to live in. Although the pair was active in courtship the year before, they didn¹t have adequate nesting for their eggs. They've since given birth to as many as four young in a year.

"They've been extremely successful," Nadareski said. "It's an ideal structure for them to nest in. There's enough available food around, such as pigeons and song birds, and they prefer to hunt over open areas and there's plenty of that on Long Island."

The two new chicks, both females, appear to be in good health, Nadareski. Shelley Lotenberg, NUMC spokeswoman, named them Marissa and Samantha, after her nieces. "For us it's exciting every year to find out how many babies they had," Lotenberg said.

Over the next two and half weeks, Marissa and Samantha will learn to fly. Four to eight weeks after that, they'll learn to hunt and eventually leave the nest.

Peregrine falcons have a high mortality rate in their first year of life, so if one of the two chicks makes it to adulthood Nadareski would be happy, he said.

Breeding season for the peregrine falcon, which mates for life with the same partner, begins with courtship in February and March. Egg laying usually occurs as early as March, though it can be delayed as late as April. Incubation takes about 30 days.

Since they nest at high altitudes, the towering NUMC building on Hempstead Turnpike makes for the perfect home.

Demonstrating a strong fidelity to both their mates and nesting area, peregrine falcons in this region usually live no longer than 14 or 15 years.

Adult males measure 15 inches from head to tail, while the females stand about 18 inches tall, with a wingspan of 3 1/2 feet.

The falcons have the ability to dive at prey, which consists strictly of other birds such as pigeons, at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour.

DDT and the ingestion of other contaminants led to the sharp post-World War II decline of peregrine falcons in the eastern United States.

# posted by Unknown : 1:58 PM

LINCOLN, Neb. -- The first peregrine falcon to born atop Nebraska's Capitol got a tour of the building Tuesday.

Games and Parks Department workers used a special shield to protect the chick as they removed him from his parents for banding. The bird was the only survivor of a pair of falcons hatched outside the 18th floor last month.

A band to identify the young male was placed on each legs. He was examined for disease and insects. The bird was returned to his nest.

Games and Parks officials said the falcon is healthy.

# posted by Unknown : 6:51 PM

SOUTH BEND -- Apparently speed wins over size in the bird world.

One of the peregrine falcons who live in downtown South Bend knocked a bigger red-tailed hawk out of the air in an old-fashioned dogfight over Teachers Credit Union on Wednesday.

The hawk spent the night at Carole Riewe's bird hospital, recovering from bruising and shock.

Bob Babcock was driving down South Main Street and saw the whole thing.

"I heard them, the falcons, raising heck, and I looked up," he said. "I saw the big guy hovering, and one of the falcons hit him."

Red-tailed hawks are a third again larger than peregrine falcons.

Babcock, who owns a couple of Marathon gas stations downtown, saw the hawk fall and thought it landed on top of the Teachers Credit Union building.

He knew the peregrines were still fit and flying, so he just kept driving.

But someone else called Rich Ostrander, one of the falcon enthusiasts who watch the downtown birds, and told him a peregrine had fallen to the ground.

He and Riewe, a raptor rehabilitator, arrived to find the red-tailed hawk, not a peregrine, on the ground beside Teachers Credit Union.

It took a while for them to find a witness and determine what had happened.

The falcon chicks hatched downtown last year kept flying into buildings or ending up on the ground, so this year everyone is on the lookout for the big birds should they land on the ground.

Riewe said all three of the current crop of peregrine chicks were fine Wednesday afternoon.

One of them seems to have mastered flying, but the other two are still a bit unsteady.

"They need to practice," Riewe said.

She said the hawk is about a year old and probably doesn't have a nest of his own.

"He's never met up with anything like that before," Riewe said. "I'll let him out and tell him not to go downtown again. The peregrines are faster, and they've got kids to protect."

Peregrines have been clocked diving at 200 miles an hour.

# posted by Unknown : 6:47 PM

SOUTH BEND -- All three young peregrine falcons hatched in downtown South Bend were flying around by Monday morning.

Their human friends are watching their antics from the ground, hopeful that the youngsters will stay out of trouble.

"The first one at least seems to be doing well," said Carole Riewe, a raptor rehabilitator and ardent falcon watcher. "Keep your fingers crossed."

All three falcons who lived to leave the nest last summer either flew into buildings or wound up on the ground.

As of 1 p.m. Monday, all of this year's batch seen were sitting on various buildings.

One of the trio of female chicks flew Saturday.

The chick has been nicknamed Amelia because she appears to be getting around pretty well.

She spent most of Sunday sitting on the fifth-floor roof of the County-City Building.

Riewe said people observing her shooed her from there because she was sitting where the parents couldn't see her.

On Monday she made it to the top of the City Center Building before moving to the top of the County-City Building.

"She does things in stages," Riewe said. "And there's a good gliding wind today."

Riewe said one of the other chicks was on the fire escape on the back of the JMS Building.

The third one had hopped from the nest on the 12th-floor ledge of the Tower Building to the 11th-floor ledge.

Riewe said she had flapped her wings but hadn't taken a longer flight before 1 p.m.

There are 10 known peregrine falcon nests in Indiana this year.

Falcon rescue numbers

Here are the telephone numbers to call if you should find a young peregrine falcon on the ground in downtown South Bend.

Call anytime: (574) 532-2470 or (574) 208-4296.

Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., call (574) 315-9002.

And just in case you don't get anybody there, try:
Animal Control at (574) 235-9303 or South Bend police at (574) 235-9361.

# posted by Unknown : 11:47 AM

Keith Chen's Monkey Research

Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, was certain that humankind's knack for monetary exchange belonged to humankind alone. ''Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog,'' he wrote. ''Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.'' But in a clean and spacious laboratory at Yale-New Haven Hospital, seven capuchin monkeys have been taught to use money, and a comparison of capuchin behavior and human behavior will either surprise you very much or not at all, depending on your view of humans.

The capuchin is a New World monkey, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ''The capuchin has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and sex,'' says Keith Chen, a Yale economist who, along with Laurie Santos, a psychologist, is exploiting these natural desires -- well, the desire for food at least -- to teach the capuchins to buy grapes, apples and Jell-O. ''You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want,'' Chen says. ''You can feed them marshmallows all day, they'll throw up and then come back for more.''

When most people think of economics, they probably conjure images of inflation charts or currency rates rather than monkeys and marshmallows. But economics is increasingly being recognized as a science whose statistical tools can be put to work on nearly any aspect of modern life. That's because economics is in essence the study of incentives, and how people -- perhaps even monkeys -- respond to those incentives. A quick scan of the current literature reveals that top economists are studying subjects like prostitution, rock 'n' roll, baseball cards and media bias.

Chen proudly calls himself a behavioral economist, a member of a growing subtribe whose research crosses over into psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. He began his monkey work as a Harvard graduate student, in concert with Marc Hauser, a psychologist. The Harvard monkeys were cotton-top tamarins, and the experiments with them concerned altruism. Two monkeys faced each other in adjoining cages, each equipped with a lever that would release a marshmallow into the other monkey's cage. The only way for one monkey to get a marshmallow was for the other monkey to pull its lever. So pulling the lever was to some degree an act of altruism, or at least of strategic cooperation.

The tamarins were fairly cooperative but still showed a healthy amount of self-interest: over repeated encounters with fellow monkeys, the typical tamarin pulled the lever about 40 percent of the time. Then Hauser and Chen heightened the drama. They conditioned one tamarin to always pull the lever (thus creating an altruistic stooge) and another to never pull the lever (thus creating a selfish jerk). The stooge and the jerk were then sent to play the game with the other tamarins. The stooge blithely pulled her lever over and over, never failing to dump a marshmallow into the other monkey's cage. Initially, the other monkeys responded in kind, pulling their own levers 50 percent of the time. But once they figured out that their partner was a pushover (like a parent who buys her kid a toy on every outing whether the kid is a saint or a devil), their rate of reciprocation dropped to 30 percent -- lower than the original average rate. The selfish jerk, meanwhile, was punished even worse. Once her reputation was established, whenever she was led into the experimenting chamber, the other tamarins ''would just go nuts,'' Chen recalls. ''They'd throw their feces at the wall, walk into the corner and sit on their hands, kind of sulk.''


Chen is a hyperverbal, sharp-dressing 29-year-old with spiky hair. The son of Chinese immigrants, he had an itinerant upbringing in the rural Midwest. As a Stanford undergraduate, he was a de facto Marxist before being seduced, quite accidentally, by economics. He may be the only economist conducting monkey experiments, which puts him at slight odds with his psychologist collaborators (who are more interested in behavior itself than in the incentives that produce the behavior) as well as with certain economist colleagues. ''I love interest rates, and I'm willing to talk about their kind of stuff all the time,'' he says, speaking of his fellow economists. ''But I can tell that they're biting their tongues when I tell them what I'm working on.''

It is sometimes unclear, even to Chen himself, exactly what he is working on. When he and Santos, his psychologist collaborator, began to teach the Yale capuchins to use money, he had no pressing research theme. The essential idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it. The currency Chen settled on was a silver disc, one inch in diameter, with a hole in the middle -- ''kind of like Chinese money,'' he says. It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.

Then Chen introduced price shocks and wealth shocks. If, for instance, the price of Jell-O fell (two cubes instead of one per token), would the capuchin buy more Jell-O and fewer grapes? The capuchins responded rationally to tests like this -- that is, they responded the way most readers of The Times would respond. In economist-speak, the capuchins adhered to the rules of utility maximization and price theory: when the price of something falls, people tend to buy more of it.

Chen next introduced a pair of gambling games and set out to determine which one the monkeys preferred. In the first game, the capuchin was given one grape and, dependent on a coin flip, either retained the original grape or won a bonus grape. In the second game, the capuchin started out owning the bonus grape and, once again dependent on a coin flip, either kept the two grapes or lost one. These two games are in fact the same gamble, with identical odds, but one is framed as a potential win and the other as a potential loss.

How did the capuchins react? They far preferred to take a gamble on the potential gain than the potential loss. This is not what an economics textbook would predict. The laws of economics state that these two gambles, because they represent such small stakes, should be treated equally.

So, does Chen's gambling experiment simply reveal the cognitive limitations of his small-brained subjects? Perhaps not. In similar experiments, it turns out that humans tend to make the same type of irrational decision at a nearly identical rate. Documenting this phenomenon, known as loss aversion, is what helped the psychologist Daniel Kahneman win a Nobel Prize in economics. The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, ''make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.''

But do the capuchins actually understand money? Or is Chen simply exploiting their endless appetites to make them perform neat tricks?

Several facts suggest the former. During a recent capuchin experiment that used cucumbers as treats, a research assistant happened to slice the cucumber into discs instead of cubes, as was typical. One capuchin picked up a slice, started to eat it and then ran over to a researcher to see if he could ''buy'' something sweeter with it. To the capuchin, a round slice of cucumber bore enough resemblance to Chen's silver tokens to seem like another piece of currency.

Then there is the stealing. Santos has observed that the monkeys never deliberately save any money, but they do sometimes purloin a token or two during an experiment. All seven monkeys live in a communal main chamber of about 750 cubic feet. For experiments, one capuchin at a time is let into a smaller testing chamber next door. Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens, flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them -- a combination jailbreak and bank heist -- which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

This is a sensitive subject. The capuchin lab at Yale has been built and maintained to make the monkeys as comfortable as possible, and especially to allow them to carry on in a natural state. The introduction of money was tricky enough; it wouldn't reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel. To this end, Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.

But these facts remain: When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food and, on occasion, sex. In other words, they behaved a good bit like the creature that most of Chen's more traditional colleagues study: Homo sapiens.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of ''Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.''

# posted by Unknown : 9:08 AM

Richmond's youngest predators are on the loose. Under the watchful eyes of their parents, two peregrine falcon chicks were released this morning from their cage atop the First National Bank Building at 823 E. Main St.

To prevent them from falling or diving off the skyscraper before they were fully ready to fly, the 40-day-old chicks had been caged by a team from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

The best place to view the falcons is from the plaza in front of the Dominion building at Eighth and Cary streets. You can see a two-by-four jutting from the BB&T sign on the south side of the First National Bank Building -- that is the top of the cage. The two adult falcons frequently roost on the two "S" letters on the western face of the Suntrust building to the east.

A webcam of the nest site is available at www.mcguirewoods.com/falcons

# posted by Unknown : 5:26 PM

(Rochester, NY) 06/06/05 -- There's sad news for those who follow the Peregrine falcons who regularly nest on Eastman Kodak's tower.

One of the falcons, Hafoc, was found dead late last month. It appears he was hit by a vehicle.

Hafoc's transmitter went dead back in March and researchers had been looking for him since that time.

# posted by Unknown : 5:22 PM

Abu Dhabi - For the second consecutive year, a falcon beauty contest will be held this year as part of the Abu Dhabi International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition, organizers said on Friday.

"Following the huge success that we had last year, we have lined up a host of activities for the Abu Dhabi International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition which will be held from 12 to 16th September 2005. This contest is part of our effort to promote awareness as well as the ethics of falconry," said Mohammed Khalaf Al Mazouri, member of the Board of Directors of the Emirates Falconers Club.

The contest underscores the UAE's keenness to conserve some of the most endangered falcon species, said Mazroui.

He pointed out that although falconry is a popular local sport in the UAE, yet the country has been keen to strike a balance between preserving this local heritage while at the same time striving to protect the falcons.

The UAE is actively in involved in several falcon protection projects in conjunction with regional and international bodies. One of the most successful projects is the cross-breeding project in Al Ain, where certain species are cross-bred for the purposes of falconry.

Considered one of the largest cross-breeding farms in the world, Al Ain farm produces more than 300 captive-bred falcons a year. The farm is quite capable of responding to the needs of over 15,000 falconers in the Middle East region.

Captive-bred falcons have proved to be as efficient as wild falcons in everyway, said Al Mazroui, adding that the recourse to bred falcons will not only save wild falcons from extinction but also increase their population.

"Hundreds of captive-bred falcons, including Gyr and Shaheen species will contest for the first position. We hope that the beauty contest will encourage falconers to resort to captive-bred falcons as the best alternative for wild falcons." said Mazroui.

Al Mazroui stressed that falcon conservation is one of the key objectives of the Emirates Falconers Club which was established in 2001 under the Chairmanship of Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.

Since 1995, an estimated 5,000 UAE falconers shifted to the use of captive-bred falcons on the initiative of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.

By 2002, UAE falconers were 90% reliant on captive-bred falcons and the UAE became the first country in the Arab world to rely on captive-bred falcons.

Al Mazroui noted that the exhibition will feature other forms of competitions such as photography and painting.

A number of photographers and painters will participate in the contest.

The best painting depicting the heritage of the GCC region will be selected from among the entries which will be submitted.

Other categories of competition will include poetry and hunting paraphernalia.

The Abu Dhabi International Hunting and Equestrian Exhibition will be organized by the Emirates Falconer's Club in conjunction with the General Exhibitions' Corporation (GEC). Over 98% of the exhibition space having been booked and more than 300 exhibitors from 30 countries are expected to participate at the show.

Held under the patronage of Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, the exhibition is dubbed as the largest of its kind in the region and one of landmark events in the global calendar.

# posted by Unknown : 9:36 AM