[Tweeters] Falcons at Play (was Re: Tweeters] Wednesday Walk at Billy Frank Jr)

[Robert O'Brien]

Peregrine & bald eagle:
I may have told this one before but it's such a good story here it is
again. I didn't see this, it was reported on o b o l.
A bald eagle was flying casually across Yaquina Bay. A Peregrine came up
and started dive bombing it. Over and over, up and down, up and down. The
bald eagle wasn't in for playfulness. As the Peregrine came rocketing past
for the nth time, the bald eagle simply flipped upside down and grabbed it.
Literally out of mid-air. R. I. P. The Peregrine, no more fun and games for
that one. Who says bald eagles are simply scavengers and klepto parasites
Bob O'Brien Portland

On Saturday, September 9, 2023, Michael Price <loblollyboy at gmail.com> wrote:


> Hi tweets

>

> What makes the idea of raptors engaging in interspecies play seems

> incongruous with general raptor behavior which, it's got to be said, seems

> to me on the whole to be rather dourly, even calvinistically singleminded.

> But falcons are different in that they have a capacity for play which all

> other raptors seem to lack. How come?

>

> Then the of-course moment. Falcons are not even closely related to other

> raptors; they're related most closely to *parrots. *And parrots *love* to

> play. There's even two geographically widely-separated species that are so

> similar in ecology, psychology and behavior you'd swear they'd been

> separated at birth: New Zealand/Aotearoa's mountain parrot, the Kea (*Nestor

> notabilis*), notorious for its (sometimes) destructive playfulness, and

> the Striated Caracara (*Phalcoboenus australis*) or 'Johnny Rook', a

> falcon of extreme southern Patagonia and the Falkland Islands/Malvinas.

> Parenthetically, there's a marvelously informative and very well written

> book on Johnny Rook, *A Most Remarkable Creature*, by Brad Meiburg (who's

> a pretty remarkable guy in his own right), published in 2021, in which the

> close, almost identical behavioral and ecological similarities between the

> two birds is simply stunning.

>

> Common to both is that they have replaced both inner hierarchy and

> within-species aggression with playfulness and curiosity. Granted that both

> species are probably at the far end of the behavioral spectrum, our own

> observed falcon behaviors (eg, Merlins fooling around with crows and

> swallows, peregrines with ravens) suggest our own falcons as somewhere not

> too distant on that same spectrum. What fun.

>

> Now, since it's been established that parrots and falcons are so closely

> related, if I could only get my peregrine to duet with my African Gray on

> the opening bars of 'Up in the Air, Junior Birdman....'

>

> best, m

>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20230909/2f9449c9/attachment.html>