(Bird)Life Imitating Art

by Nikki Logan

WikiCommons

This month a nice little piece of synchronicity has happened that has me smiling. In 2010 I wrote a book called Rapunzel in New York for RIVA (out in July, UK) with a heroine who lives in a tall Manhattan apartment building where she watches and enjoys the exploits of a pair of peregrine falcons who mate and raise chicks on the ledge of her high-rise bathroom.



WikiCommons

This past fortnight in Toronto, home of the Harlequin head offices, staff in Harlequin’s North York offices have been captivated by the courting and nesting behaviours of a pair of falcons in the building across from their windows. Head of Harlequin, Donna Hayes (a keen birdo) first spotted the pair and then reported them to a group with an interest in urban raptors. After painstaking stakeouts the pair were individually identified as three-year-old Quest, a female who’d come across from the US and two-year-old Kendal--as Twitter delightfully put it ‘a hot, younger Canuk’.

Typical romance audience J

'Kendal' bringing a love tribute to his US girl
www.thestar.com  Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star

Harlequin staff now spend their coffee breaks squeezed around the best viewing windows and the couple of telescopes quickly set up by the company for the purposes of peregrine monitoring. They were all-a-twitter on Twitter when Quest laid her first eggs last week.

All this interest in peregrines is very timely given my Rapunzel in New York comes out in July. While Quest and Kendel have brought the people of Harlequin together with their nestbuilding activity in North York, my fictional falcons Fred and Wilma bring my hero and heroine together with their nestbuildilng activity in New York. IT guru Nathan Archer is ordered by the NY courts to help reclusive Viktoria Morfit set up a webcam to take her nesting falcons to the world after he busted down her door in a misdirected Prince Charming moment. Their love story unfolds parallel to Fred and Wilma's as they raise then finally release their young family.

I adored researching 'Rapunzel', particularly the bird elements (warning: watching real hungry birds on nest-cams is way more addictive than any game equivalent) and so I was so excited when the news of the Quest/Kendal/Harlequin love-trianagle broke on Twitter.

Read more about it in the Toronto Star piece here .


Fast Falcon Facts

• Birds-of-prey scraping out a living in cities are part of a group called ‘urban raptors’.
• Falco peregrinus (Peregrine Falcon means ‘wanderer’). The only place on the planet you won’t find this species is Antarctica.
• They do well in very big cities because they prey on smaller bird species and particularly pigeons which thrive in human-heavy areas.
• Peregrines are monogamous and will return to the same place to breed season after season.
• Their nests are called 'scrapes' because they barely go to any effort at all, simply making a groove in the dirt/substrate and laying their eggs straight on top.
• Peregrines will lay between 3 and 5 eggs which incubate for 35 days before hatching. They fledge (get full flight feathers) after another 45 days. By three weeks of age, the voracious little chicks are ten times their birth size.
• Hunting peregrines can reach 300+km an hour. Faster than a tornado!