Eggs removed from the nest box

This morning I was able to get the eggs out of the nest box with no problems. The streaming video was not available at the time (server issue) but some photos were saved off of the stills. Tim Daniel, Div. of Wildlife photographer, went out on the ledge first to get into position to protect my back as I pulled the eggs from the nest. When we first got there, neither bird was at the nest or on the ledge. But it didn't take them long to figure out we were there and start attacking!


Tim got an especially close up view of Scout as she swooped at him, ending up mere inches from his face. Even though I was technically the "greatest" threat since I was taking the eggs, lucky for me the birds usually go towards the "biggest" threat -hence Tim took the brunt of most of the attacks today (he's 6'3" and was standing up while I was bent down, leaning into the nest box)! We were out on the ledge less than 5 minutes and no peregrines (or photographers) were harmed in the process!

Surprisingly, none of the eggs were pipped as we thought we saw via the camera. We will have the eggs evaluated to see if they were fertile or not. I will report the findings as soon as I have the information. Here is a photo of them to help you get a sense of their size.

Things should be quiet at the nest ledge for the next several days. Hopefully, Scout and Orville will produce more eggs this season. So now we wait to see if that will happen!