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The Life and Times of George and Gracie
The story begins with George’s grandmother, Cloey. Cloey was hatched at the Bird Group (SCPBRG) in 1986 to a captive pair named Angel and Cain as part of SCPBRG’s peregrine restoration work. Angel was also captive bred at the Bird Group from a pair called Nugget and Butterfly Jones. Cain came from Colorado by way of the Peregrine Fund. Cloey was not released into the wild because she had a prolapsed cloaca and had to receive medical treatment, hence her name. She was trained and flown as a falconry bird by Jamie Eddy of the Bird Group with the intention of becoming one of our captive breeders once she reached adulthood at two years of age. Being flown after wild quarry allowed her to get plenty of exercise and grow strong and healthy. It also allowed her to become used to humans, which made life as a captive breeder much less stressful for her.
After the falconry season Cloey was housed in a breeding chamber at SCPBRG’s facility on the UCSC campus with her mate, Shelby. Shelby had hatched in the wild near Shell Beach and was found with his wing feathers burned from an encounter with a power line. He was non-releasable and so, after a period of human habituation, he too joined the captive flock. By 1992, due to the splendid recovery of the wild peregrine population in California, the Bird Group had divested itself of all of the captive breeders except Cloey and Shelby. In 1993 they produced the last chicks captive bred by SCPBRG. Two were females, Cloey's daughters.
These are Cloey's daughters. I cross-fostered them into this prairie falcon eyrie in the Ohlone Wilderness in 1993. Cross-fostering was a common technique we used to re-introduce peregrines into the wild, along with direct fostering, giving captive hatched chicks to peregrine pairs whose thin-shelled eggs had been previously taken to the lab for incubation (dummy eggs left in place), and hacking (see “Peregrine Falcons/Our Part” on this website for more about how we helped facilitate the recovery). The prairie falcon chicks were redistributed into other prairie nests. Cloey's daughters were observed by an attendant until after they had fledged successfully. Once they reached independence, we lost track of Cloey’s daughters until one showed up in 1995 on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
This is Cloey's daughter in 1999 as photographed by David Gregoire. David has been volunteering to observe the Bay Area peregrines and coordinate chick rescues like this one for over a decade. In this shot (personally considered one of the finest peregrine photos ever taken) she is vigorously defending her eyrie from a bunch of lumbering, bi-pedal, self-appointed do-gooders. If you look closely and the trailing edge of her wings you’ll notice that in certain spots they look kind of ragged, some feathers are not as long as those on either side. That is because she has started to molt shortly after laying her eggs and at this point her chicks are 21 days old. Gracie should look very much like this right now.
These are two of the do-gooders doing what only they think is good. That is, removing Cloey’s grandkids from their eyrie underneath the western span of the Bay Bridge. The do-gooders have seen too many of these young ones take their first flights only to end up in the Bay or flattened during rush hour. They feel the chicks would be safer and have a better chance at making it in the wild world at a hack site just a ways down the coast. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell Cloey’s daughter that. On the left is Rick Sharpe, long-time associate of SCPBRG, falconer extraordinaire, and bay area nest site attendant, with one chick in the box. The one on the right is yours truly, going in for seconds.
There is a one-out-of-three chance that this is George, taking his first, albeit extremely premature, flight. The eyrie, inside a large beam with a small opening, was underneath the roadbed at the central concrete pier. Getting to the chicks required one to hook one’s leg into a girder, lean out over open space, and contort one’s torso in a pretzel-like fashion that would make a dedicated Yogi proud. It also helped to have a long stick with a u-bolt lashed to the end, our official Caltrans made-on-the-spot chick extractor in addition to the safety harnesses and lines, also supplied by Caltrans. The blue between the girders is the San Francisco Bay, 200 feet below.
This is George et al. about to start their vacation with Grandma Cloey. George is the one on the left; you can read his VID band, a sideways C over U, on his left leg (click image for close-up). The chicks were removed from their natal eyrie at 21-days old, before they became too mobile, but two weeks before they would be old enough to go to the hack site. Fortunately, Grandma Cloey was available to serve as a temporary foster mother.
Cloey takes charge of the grandkids. After the Bird Group closed down its breeding facility, Cloey went to spend her twilight years with Shelby at our associate Bill Murphy's breeding project in Watsonville. A short time after Shelby passed away, the grandkids came to visit. George is one of the two in the back row. The other is B/W, the male that bred for one season with Sadie at Oracle in 2000 when he was less than a year old.
After a two-week vacation with Grandma Cloey, George and Company are starting to look like the real thing. George is on the left, and B/W is the middle chick. This is the day they started out on their own (more or less) and took the journey to their new eyrie near San Gregorio.
No parental guidance and all the quail you can eat, what more could three young boy birds ask for. George and B/W are in the back of the hack box. Attendants, camping at the site 24/7, discreetly dropped thawed quail into the box through a food chute daily, discouraged predators from the area, and kept the curious public at a safe distance away from the site.
Our Dr. Staveley (or soon to be) is shown here single-handedly holding down the hack tower against the persistent high winds while standing by with her trusty, manually operated extinguisher in case of wild fire. Clare had come to the hack site to check on the condition of the chicks.
Release day and George or one of his sibs on the veranda in pre-fledge mode. The chicks had been in the box for one week and were now approximately 40 days old and ready to fledge. The box was opened in the morning, after thoroughly wetting down the chicks with a spray bottle (to discourage them from bolting straight out of the box and possibly getting lost), and three days worth of food had been laid out for them. The attendants watched and guarded the site from a discreet distance.
Stalwart and true, Scott Sokol is seen here on guard over three of the 16 peregrines we released in 1999 on that godforsaken, windswept knoll (it was blowing sea-fog 9 days out of 10 up there). George and his siblings were the first of four consecutive broods released that season. They stayed near the hack site all summer long and helped the later released falcons by serving as role models of what and what not to do if you happen to be a young orphaned peregrine falcon.
George’s next stop in life so far as we know was a brief visit, caught on webcam, to the Oracle nest box in March of 2001. Apparently George came to the PG&E building in 2002 where David Gregoire and I saw him (unidentified at the time) courting Gracie on the 33rd floor ledge when she was just a subadult in petticoats.
Speaking of Gracie...
Gracie is wearing a silver colored Fish and Wildlife Service band on her right leg. During the eyas banding in San Francisco in the spring of 2006, SCPBRG staff were finally able to read Gracie's band number with the aid of a spotting scope. Her band number revealed that she was banded by our friends at the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory in November of 2001 as a hatch year bird. This means Gracie would have hatched in the spring of that year. Her natal origin is still unknown however, as she had already dispersed from her nest region by the time she was banded in the fall. After contacting GGRO, we learned that she left quite an impression on Tobias Rohmer, who was responsible for capturing and banding Gracie...
On the GGRO banding day that a huge juvenile Peregrine showed up, I was very VERY excited. Once in hand, however, I was very very worried about what she was going to do to my fingers, hands, arms, chest….anything she could lay her fierce mouth on. Luckily, another bander came down from the site uphill from us to appreciate the bird up close. I promptly borrowed her vest, in an attempt to protect my torso from this bird’s bite, only to soon learn that it was unnecessary.
She was beefy through the chest (click image for close-up), obviously a powerful bird (especially at 1080 grams), but never once bothered to lash out. She had this superior air about her, as if she wouldn’t waste her time and energy on something as insignificant as me. It seemed as if she knew she’d be free momentarily, and we were mere peons in her presence. She was truly calm and collected, and had a majestic look to her. I instantly took to calling her Empress… it just seemed so natural and fitting.
I’ve now been watching the nesting pair of Peregrines in downtown San Francisco for a few years on my lunch breaks. Needless to say, I was so pleased to learn that this bird that had such a lasting impression on me in 2001 has survived the hardships that young raptors face, and grown to be the successful and awe-inspiring Gracie. I’m happy that she is doing as well as she is, and I am thankful to have had the short interaction with her that I did. I know that the world knows her as Gracie, but she’ll always be Empress to me… Empress Gracie.
- Tobias Rohmer (GGRO)
