All day Tuesday, the giant screen on the outside of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive streamed live footage of eggs hatching in a nest box atop UC Berkeley’s historic Campanile.
A group of volunteers called Cal Falcons built the box for Annie — a peregrine falcon — to lay her eggs and raise her young.
Mary Malec, one of the volunteers, explains the nesting conditions weren’t quite right when Annie and her original mate first showed up in 2017. She says, "We knew that it was just a concrete floor up there and her eggs were not going to succeed. The next year we built this permanent box, and she’s used that ever since."
Annie and her offspring are contributing to the resurgence of the worldwide peregrine falcon population, which crashed in the middle of the twentieth century when the now-banned pesticide DDT was still in use.
John Davis, another volunteer, is happy to be a part of this resurgence. He says, "I work with biologists who figured they would never see one in their lifetime and figured the next generation had no hope."
But once again, the fastest bird alive is flying high.
