About the falcons
The Minnesota Power Cohasset peregrine falcons are nesting on the catwalk of an unused power stack at the Clay Boswell facility in Cohasset, MN. The falcons can also be watched here: https://www.mnpower.com/Environment/FalconCam. This nest was first productive in 1993 and has produced 77 falcons to date (2018). It has a history of unbanded falcons. Who are they and where are they coming from? While we don’t know a whole lot about who they are, we know that we had a new 2-y/o falcon in 2017 since she still had some immature feathers. Unusually, she tends to stay in the nest box to defend her young instead of flying at banders. This was the first and is (to our knowledge) still the only nest in Itasca county. Having said that, these unbanded falcons have to be coming from somewhere. While falcons can range far afield when they disperse or lose a nest, there may be a mine, industrial, or even tree nest somewhere that we don’t know about.
Clay Boswell is located on Blackwater Lake next to the Mississippi River and is rich in food resources. In general, the falcons begin courtship between early and Mid-March and lay eggs between late March and mid-April. Hatch should begin in early to mid-May, fledge generally occurs 38-40 days after that, and young disperse in late August or mid-September. If one or both of the adults migrate, they leave in the late fall. Adult falcon pairs are not believed to migrate together.
Peregrine falcons do not make stick nests. Instead, they make scrape nests on ledges and debris, and feed primarily on birds that they catch in the air. To learn more about peregrine falcons in general, please follow this link to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Peregrine_Falcon/id.
The Raptor Resource Project