La Serena

5 March 2009 (Thursday, Day 10)

We are trying to report from the field as often as possible but it can be a real problem finding both the time and the WIFI spot to do so.

Interesting few days. We are staying at our friend Bob Lang's house, a short distance from town and just down the road from La Serena's main perch trees. We have seen her there (with her transmitter clearly visible) many times now. She is amazingly regular at this spot, the same location where I saw her last December and exactly where we caught her two years ago. Don Mc Call reports that, according to the GPS signals, she flies back up into the mountains each night to roost, presumably at her eyrie. We have also observed her down here on the coast perching with an adult male on two different days and we suspect that it is her mate.

This morning, as we headed into town to look for "Dora", the cathedral bird (so named by our friend and colleague Manual Enrique Rojas of La Serena), we got sidetracked by the La Serena falcon once again. In fact, we chased her around for over 3 hours in an attempt to catch her to remove her transmitter but she would have none of it. We did discover two more of her perches, one on a typical Auracaria tree and the other in a dead Eucalyptus tree near a huge flock of Rock Pigeons, no doubt one of her major prey items. We have watched her flying back and forth across the narrow, fertile coastal plain in pursuit of a wide variety of birds.

Later, we spent the entire afternoon buying materials and brainstorming exactly how to catch the cathedral bird. It is not going to be easy.

2300-On the way back to Bob's, we observed the cathedral bird roosting on a central sconce of the tower in a place we think we can get to. We'll see.