MDC offers web links to peregrine falcon nest viewing

Kansas City, Mo. – Except for wind ruffling feathers, all is calm this week in the Kansas City area peregrine falcon nests, which are viewable online via streaming video. Parent falcons are incubating the eggs. The nests will be abuzz with activity, though, in the coming weeks when falcon chicks begin hatching, said Joe DeBold, urban wildlife biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC).

Chicks will begin moving about the nests in the days after they hatch. Parent falcons will return from hunts with food for their young, such as pigeons snatched from the air. The young grow quickly and seem to change almost daily.

The falcon nests are a partnership between MDC, Kansas City Power & Light Co. (KC&L), and American Century Investments. Cameras are mounted to peer into the nest boxes and provide streaming video.

One nest box is online from high on a smokestack at KCP&L's Iatan Power Plant north of Weston. Four eggs are being incubated, DeBold said. To view that nest, visit http://new.livestream.com/accounts/8268653/events/3883686.

Another falcon pair is also tending four eggs in a nest at the American Century tower near the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. That nest is viewable at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/kansas-city-plaza-falcon-cam.

Biologists in the coming weeks will also be checking nest boxes for activity at the KCP&L power plant at Sibley, and at a nest box on Commerce Tower in Kansas City. Those two nest boxes do not have cameras this year. The Commerce Tower site is where MDC re-introduced peregrine falcons in the Kansas City area to encourage nesting amid the skyscrapers in 1991. Peregrine falcons were originally cliff-nesting raptors. They are endangered in Missouri.

For more information on peregrine falcons in Missouri, and for other wildlife cameras, visit http://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/wildlife-cameras.