Yaxley Peregrines (2023)

Early this year a male peregrine was spotted in and around the tower of St Peters’ Church in Yaxley Nr Peterborough. Several different females were seen vying for the males’ affection. It was soon spotted that the male was ringed – Orange VJP. This male was part of a brood reared in Stamford in 2021 so it was fantastic to see this male potentially pairing up and breeding.

19 March 2023

Below are pictures of the male VJP

12 June 2023

I took a visit to Yaxley in the morning. There had been some chatter that the male hadn’t been seen much but I saw him straight away and fairly soon he flew off presumably to hunt. I also spotted the female on the spire (she is an un-ringed bird). There wasn’t any action for several hours when the male returned with no food. He again flew off and after several hours had still not returned. I noticed around mid afternoon the female dropping off the tower just after a pigeon flew past. I didn’t think much of that but only a few minutes later she was back with a pigeon. Shew flew around for nearly ten minutes loudly calling finally alighting on the top of the main square tower wall where she plucked the kill. She then dropped down behind the wall.
It was at this point I was very sure I could hear additional calling and was convinced there was at least one chick if not two.
All the pictures are the female apart from the last one as noted.

It was the next day that the team at the church came clean and revealed that there were 3 chicks and they’d ringed them several days before. How exciting!

29 June 2023

The team at Yaxley had prepared for the possibility of a chick grounding itself – This happens when a chick attempts their first flight but fails to get enough lift to et back to the height of their scrape and end up on the ground. Although the adults would continue to feed the chick they are very vulnerable to predation or attack by a dog or cat. What was done was that they placed a plastic storage box in the south entrance with lid, gloves, instructions and a list of phone numbers in the event of a grounding.

On this day I arrived at the church about 9 am and had excellent views of the male and female with and without prey.

At about 11am I was met around the back of the church by a photographer whose husband had brought a van to a nearby garage for work and dropped her off at the church. She mentioned (I think her name was Janet Dobson) that she thought she’d seen one of the falcons in the large tree to the right of the graveyard as you enter the church grounds. I said no that won’t be a peregrine. We watched the falcons and one of the adults returned both food and flew to the front of the church. As we walked around Janet spotted a chick on the wall at the back of the church! Clearly she’d been correct and we soon saw it was VAH that had clearly made a mis-calculation! I went to the box and dialled the numbers on the information left. I decided I wasn’t going to try and catch this chick as I could see easily that it could run pretty fast and frankly I cannot.
I managed to get hold of the team at the church and after about 90 minutes they managed to gather team to try to catch the chick. We were advised that a net or sheet would be good as catching it by hand would be impossible. This turned out to be true and after a fairly short but comical chase around the gravestones the guys managed to corner the chick in an area on the outside of the church and get hot into the box.
Whilst this was taking place the adults flew about making a terrible racket. I must say these alarm calls which I experienced when the Stamford chicks were ringed are actually quite distressing.

Here are a lot of pictures of the chick and the adults too.