My friends and I used to play a schoolboy prank on unsuspecting passers-by in the English town where I grew up. We stood on street corners gazing and pointing skywards, to see how many people would stop and do the same thing, trying to discover what we were looking at.
It proved hilarious, with groups of people huddled on street corners for no apparent reason.
More than half a century on, I was doing the same thing on the corner of Collins and Queen Streets in Melbourne’s CBD earlier this month. Not a silly schoolboy prank this time, I was deadly serious, trying to spot Melbourne’s latest social media phenomenon –- the nesting site of peregrine falcons.
“New peregrines in town” proclaimed a headline in the Age newspaper and it was not difficult to appreciate the excitement surrounding the nest high up at 367 Collins St.
The peregrine is the fastest warm-blooded creature in the animal kingdom with a recorded “stoop” or dive of an astonishing 320 km/h when it homes in on flying prey.
It’s also a beautiful bird, the male blue-grey on the back, with a silver spotted chest and a dark hood. The hood extends below the eyes, creating a “moustache” which is believed to absorb the sun ‘s glare during the peregrine’s death-defying stoop.
Peregrines are particularly exciting for me because I never saw this universal species in my home country, where they were on the brink of extinction as a result of poisoning by chemical pesticides, the notorious DDT among them. The danger of the pesticides to both wildlife and humans was exposed in the book, Silent Spring.
The poisons were eventually restricted and the peregrine has bounced back in a number of places where it had vanished, including England and the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.
It was never in extreme danger in Australia, however, apart from campaigns to banish it from cities by pigeon fanciers , who blamed the bird for killing their prized racers. A bounty was once placed on its head in Tasmania before the killing of all birds of prey was outlawed.
In Melbourne, the peregrines first returned three decades ago and have managed to rear young most years on the ledges and balconies of high-rise office blocks which strangely resemble their traditional nesting sites on cliffs.
The Collins St peregrines failed to produce young last year, a female abandoning her nest in what appeared to be a territorial dispute with another female.
But the latest nesting attempt has been successful so far. The male and female are taking turns to incubate two eggs and thousands of nature-lovers have tuned into a webcam to await the appearance of chicks. A Facebook page dedicated to the birds, 367 Collins Falcon Watchers has attracted 50,000 followers and the site contains a link to the webcam.