A Pole, a Pigeon and a Peregrine

     On the afternoon of June 24, 2015, I was driving through farmland between Ephrata and New Holland in Pennsylvania.  I saw a few birds on power lines along the road and stopped to identify them with 16 power binoculars.  There were two male red-winged blackbirds singing from the wires, several mourning doves on other wires farther away, and a few each of American robins and purple grackles still farther off.  But a brown and white lump on top of a wooden pole supporting those wires caught my eye.  I looked at that bump and discovered it was a large hawk of some kind eating a dead rock pigeon it no doubt killed and had taken there to ingest.
     The pigeon, one of many in Lancaster County's cropland, was lying belly-up under the hawk on the pole.  The pigeon's wings flopped off the edge of the pole and, sometimes, feathers floated away on the wind.  The raptor was tearing off chunks of meat and insides from the dead bird.  It must have been feeding for a while before I got there because its crop was bulging full of pigeon meat.  
     During the time the hawk was feeding I was trying to identify it.  It was large, dark-brown on its back and upper wings, but had a lighter chest.  I figured it was either a red-tail, Cooper's hawk or an immature peregrine falcon.  The raptor seemed slim so that ruled out a red-tail, which are bulkier.  And when the bird turned its head from side to side to watch for possible danger, I could see the dark face markings that indicated peregrine.  So I identified the hawk as an immature female peregrine falcon.  Female raptors are larger than their mates.    
     Meanwhile, the falcon finished her meal and I knew she would soon fly away.  So I watched and waited for her flight.  Soon she left her perch and flew toward me still seated in my parked car.  Suddenly she veered to the right and I could better see her shape, size and flight pattern.  She was a peregrine in Lancaster County cropland.  She was a bit of wildness in a human-made, human-dominated habitat where pigeons and other birds abound.
     Peregrine falcons, like bald eagles and ospreys, are making a come-back in this local area, and throughout much of the United States.  We will being seeing more of these exciting raptors all the time, if that wonderful trend continues.