Astrid began calling for Ares to relieve her at the nest box at 4:30 AM. He finally got around to it at 5:45. There was no food exchange at that time, but when Astrid returned to the box at 6:44, she had a full crop. It’s possible that she raided one of Ares food cache sites. It wasn’t the one that we can see on the north face of the State Building. That one seems to have a woodcock stored in it – one likely caught the previous night. Storing food is one thing the falcons do more of as it gets closer to hatch time. Just before 8:00, Ares may have been dealing with an intruder, even though no alarm calls were heard and no other falcon was seen for sure. Ares took over on the eggs about two hours later. At 11:14, Ares left the eggs uncovered when he presumably went after the elusive (at least to us) intruder. Astrid came to the box about two minutes later. Just after noon, the falcons began giving alarm calls and Ares seemed to be diving at something, but we were never sure what or who they were dealing with. Our best clue was that both falcons were acting like they do when a strange Peregrine shows up in the canyon; but once again the presence of a third falcon couldn’t be confirmed with the PTZ camera. Ares seemed to be more in hazing mode than in attack mode and that meant that the intruder was probably a young adult. Adults have much more patience with young upstarts than they do with full adults searching for a territory. At 4:00, Astrid took over at the box just in time for the hottest part of the day. She looked pretty uncomfortable in there and she soon switched from incubating the eggs to shading them. A food exchange finally happened at 6:15 PM. Ares brought a small hunk of prey in and Astrid grabbed it and flew over to the hotel to eat it. When she was finished with her meal, she did some fancy flying around the State Bulding. At 7:45 PM Astrid returned to the box to relieve Ares. At that point the birds seemed settled for the night.
