Celebrity Berkeley falcon Annie’s new mate Lou has shown another gesture of unusually attentive fatherhood, bringing the hatchlings food, even though they’re still not hatched and can’t eat it yet.
When we last checked in the love lives of the famed peregrine falcons atop the Berkeley Campanile (who are famed because of the live 24/7 webcam recording their nest) there were two eggs in their annual springtime hatch, with a third believed to be on the way. But hey-o! As seen below, there are now four eggs in the nest, and according to the Cal Falcons raptor experts who maintain the webcam, the “Estimated hatch day is April 11th.”
The new father in the roost is named Lou, and he’s a fairly recent addition to longtime Berkeley Falcon Annie’s rotating cast of mates. (Her five-year mate Grinnell was found dead in March 2022, Annie quickly rebounded with a new mate Alden, but he hasn’t been seen since November.) Now we see Lou has taken up the fatherly task of trying to feed the li’l hatchlings, not realizing that they can’t eat the food because they haven't hatched yet, and he may be unclear on how all of this works.
We should cut Lou some slack, as it is believed this is the first time he’s a father. (Whereas it’s Annie’s seventh season as a mother.) But as the video below shows, he’s a rather attentive father, offering to do extra incubating so Annie can have more “her” time.
There's been additional falcon drama at the campanile, as a separate unattached female tried to raid the nest last week, and a passerby photographer caught the melee in a multiple-image Instagram post. “To my eye it looks like another adult unbanded female,” the photographer posted. “Annie wasn’t having it and was on it immediately. I hear all sorts of racket and alarm calls as the two faced off right outside the west balcony.”
“It appears in one of the photos that Annie actually gets her talon on the other falcon’s tail feathers,” the post continues. “After the interaction near the west balcony they took to the sky and flew NW calling as they flew. Lou came out too and joined in the fray flying under the visitor. They chased the visitor away.”
Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of trying to hatch and raise a cauldron of baby peregrine falcons. Again, these chicks are expected to start hatching April 11, and if things go as last year, they'll be flying by late June.
Related: Annie, Berkeley's Celebrity Falcon, Has Yet Another New Mate, as Bird Soap Opera Continues [SFist]
Image; @CalFalconCam via Twitter
