For peregrine pair, noisy perch is peachy

As downtown Salt Lake City's human inhabitants prepare themselves for at least four years of City Creek Center construction, another kind of resident appears willing to brave the noise and the dust.

A pair of peregrine falcons, along with three chicks that hatched this past week, is nesting on the east side of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. Apparently, they wintered in Salt Lake City this year — and state wildlife officials are confident they'll easily withstand the construction.

"They're willing and apparently able to put up with quite a bit of disturbance," said Bob Walters, coordinator of the Division of Wildlife Resources' Watchable Wildlife Program.

The falcons are a perennial crowd-pleaser in Salt Lake City. Peregrines have nested on downtown buildings, including the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and the Deseret/First Security Building, most years since 1986, with a dry spell from the late 1990s until 2004.

From year to year, the birds can either return to former nest sites or find new sites, so the fact that they have stuck around in Salt Lake despite the construction this year has Walters hopeful they won't be fazed.

"As long as we in a way keep our nose clean and don't do anything right there at the nest site, we're going to be OK," Walters said. "The birds, as per normal, will be making the decisions."

Still, he and the volunteer Salt Lake City Peregrine Falcon Watchpost Team will keep an eye on the birds, especially as work intensifies on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' City Creek Center project, just a block south of their current nesting site.

That work will include a planned August implosion of the old Key Bank building, which lies to the southwest of the Joseph Smith Memorial building. Walters said he figures the three baby falcons — "eyas," they are called — will "earn their wings" by mid-July, so even the implosion should have a minimal impact on them.

If a bird is perched on the side of the building when the implosion occurs, it could be knocked off the edge and sent flying. More likely, though, the birds will all be "out and about" or, at worst, will be startled away for a little while.

"They're very definitely habituated and seem to put up with an awful lot," Walters said. "I can't think of any species at all that can contend with as much as the peregrines."

Much of the DWR's monitoring of the falcons is via a camera hooked up in the nesting box. Live footage from that camera can be viewed 24 hours a day at wildlife.utah.gov/peregrine.