Falcon chicks check in to their Sheraton digs
Peregrine parents welcome newborns to 18th-floor ledge abode; officials say there could be more
Sheraton Hamilton Hotel’s falcon babies are back.
Annual raptor residents Lily and Ossie welcomed two chicks Tuesday to their ledge on the 18th floor of the downtown hotel.
The Hamilton Community Peregrine Project captured hungry beaks of the newborns on their Falconwatch livestream cameras shortly after 8 a.m., April 28.
“Two chicks,” the group noted on their website Tuesday morning. The first hatching, the website says, happened “sometime overnight.”
“Shortly after 8 a.m . ... Lily left the nest, and as Ossie came in to replace her, a beautiful white head poked up above the edge of the ledge.
“A few minutes later Lily returned with the first meal, and during feeding it became obvious that she was feeding a second chick.”
Just one day prior, Falconwatch posted a hopeful message that “now is the time” to watch the nest, noting reports
of other Golden Horseshoe hatchings.
The falcon duo began “steady incubation” of the eggs around March 25, after Lily laid her first egg March 18.
This year is the pair’s sixth nesting season at the hotel, the project website says. However, in 2019, Lily laid several eggs, but none hatched.
Peregrine falcons have been nesting at the hotel since 1995.
Lily usurped the Hamilton nest from its previous tenants Madame X and Surge in 2015.
Surge’s reign on the perch ended after a battle with a younger suitor in January of that year. Madame X flew the coop in mid-March.
This year is an atypical nesting year at the Sheraton, with the COVID-19 crisis causing a sharp decline in the hotel sector and reports of Hamilton Health Sciences’ plans to use the hotel if a coronavirus surge happens in the city.
Weather conditions, however, were “optimal” for brooding, the falcon watch group says, noting they expect Lily laid an average size clutch of perhaps four eggs.
If the chicks survive, the peregrine project group is seeking volunteers to help with “onstreet watch” when the young falcons make their critical first flights in June. And with those optimal brooding conditions, they say, there may be more than just the two chicks.