Young peregrine falcons fly over downtown WIlmington

It was dinner time for Wilmington’s peregrine falcon family and mourning dove was on the menu Thursday.

The four young birds – distinguished by their deep, grey feathers – squawked for food and sounded, at times, like a door swinging on rusty hinges. Their parents, like parents everywhere, tried to ignore them.

And then, they all hit the skies.

They did not disappoint the dozens of people who came out to watch them from the top of the City Center Parking garage.

They swooped. They dove. They glided in the sky over downtown Wilmington – sometimes four birds at a time.

These birds are part of an urban, conservation success story. They were nearly wiped out from the eastern United States from pesticide poisoning in the 1950s and 1960s. Now, thanks to recovery efforts, they have rebounded.

Their natural habitat is cliffs but in Delaware, they nest in a specially built box in the Brandywine Building and on several bridges.

Craig Koppie, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service eagle and raptor biologist, said that even with the recovery, the birds raised in urban settings like Wilmington still need a lot of help.

Because all the young peregrines in the region take flight at about the same time each spring, federal biologists can’t be everywhere to rescue birds that aren’t successful with their first attempts at flight.

“The hard part for all of us is what you see now. These birds have a very tough row to hoe,” he said. “All these birds are jumping at the same time.”

In Wilmington, a team of volunteers starts monitoring the nesting box starting about Memorial Day weekend. For two weeks, they wait and watch. If a young bird crashes, they find it, return it to the nest box or if it is injured they take it to Tri-State-Bird Rescue and Research for care.

“This has been the least eventful year,” said Bill Stewart, president of the Delmarva Ornithological Society. “They all fledged safely on their own. . . nobody got grounded.”

On Thursday, the society celebrated another successful nesting season at the top of the City Center Parking garage. Stewart provided a play-by-play as the birds swooped, soared and dined. Watching a young peregrine eat isn't for the faint-hearted. They literally rip into the birds.

Once they fly, they get help learning to hunt and find their own food in a progression that starts with easy food drops and moves to more complicated in-flight transfer of prey, Stewart said.

“Eventually, they’ll kick the kids out,” explained Jean Woods, curator of birds at the Delaware Natural History Museum.

By that time, the four young birds will be experienced hunters, preying on medium sized birds like the doves they feasted on Thursday.

Wilmington’s young birds were adopted by a group of fifth and sixth graders at Uwchlan Hills Elementary School in Pennsylvania. They monitored the progress of the birds by way of the Wilmington Peregrine Falcon webcam, Stewart said.

The students got the honor of naming the four birds, Stewart said. There’s Soren, Zeus, Athena and Dynamo – who was the first to fledge -- and the first to eat Thursday night.

Reach Molly Murray at (302) 463-3334 or mmurray@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @MollyMurraytnj.