Meg Millure, the annual giving and stewardship officer for the School of Information, has long been fascinated by falcons. (Read their Staff Spotlight in the Record.) They offered these five tips for watching falcons on campus, one of their favorite activities: 

Check both Burton Tower and North Quad: When standing by the Modern Languages Building, look across Washington Street at North Quad. The nest box is in the right archway above the Ehrlicher room. The falcons can often be spotted on the perch that extends out from their box. Peregrines like to be up high, so the pair can often be spotted on the ledges near the top of Burton Tower. 

They’re smaller than you think: Peregrine falcons are about the size of a crow. In flight, their angled wings can easily be mistaken for a seagull or even a pigeon. 

Time of year matters: Now is the best time of year to be an Ann Arbor falcon watcher. In June you can find the fledglings learning how to fly. At first they’ll cling to the perch, flapping their wings and screaming. Then you’ll see mom and dad try to use food to lure them onto a nearby building, often the Institute for the Humanities. The parents have to teach their young how to pluck prey out of the air, so you’ll see them practice handing off food to the fledglings in the skies above campus.  

Identify the female by her size and the fledglings by their color: Peregrine falcons exhibit “reverse sexual size dimorphism,” meaning the females are larger than the males. Females are one-third larger, and their large size helps them incubate eggs, while the males’ small size helps them maneuver with speed while hunting. At first, differentiating the parents is difficult when you’re only observing one, but once you see them perched near each other enough you’ll get a good idea of who’s who. As for the fledglings, they have darker chests than their parents. Adolescents also have long dark streaks on their chests instead of the horizontal bars they will develop as adults. 

Don’t forget to look down, too: The fledglings grow fast and require a lot of food to do so. A falcon’s diet consists primarily of birds. When they consume one, they’ll leave the wings and head to the ground. If you can’t catch a glimpse of a falcon around Burton Tower, check the ground for evidence that they’ve been hunting and you’ll usually find it. During June, you may also find whole dead birds from failed hand-off attempts. You may even get lucky and find a casting (falcon pellet).