Training ground for baby falcons

By Rhonda Dredge

On Monday, March 1 there was a strange sighting down at Westgate Park.

At 11am birdwatcher Joshua Clark saw a baby Peregrine falcon swoop.

He didn’t take a photo so Southbank News has no record of the event.

The baby swooped, at the world’s greatest speed for a bird, on a grebe, a small water bird that looks like a duck.

“The mother was teaching it how to dive bomb off the CFMEU crane,” Nick Brinkley said. Mr Brinkley is the general manager of Westgate Biodiversity, a small organisation that manages the park.

He didn’t see the novice successfully engage in a hunting incident but news was reported back to him by the bird watching group.

“There has been some unsuccessful hunting,” he said, sadly. “One crashed down on a road at great speed.”

Now it looks like they’ve learned their lesson and are using the CFMEU crane, which adjoins the lakes, to dive bomb.

The falcons belong to the famous CBD family filmed at the top of a building and posted on YouTube. You could call them celebrities they’ve had so much media.

The success of this latest hunting trip is due to the behaviour of the grebe, according to Nick.

“They are the best swimming water birds but clumsy flyers so they’re perfect prey,” he said.

The falcons catch them when they’re coming back up from a dive, presumably spotting their characteristic ripples in the surface of the water.

Nick was pleased that Westgate Park was the place the mother falcon had chosen to train her young.

“It’s the biggest community-run park within five kilometres of a CBD in Australia,” he said. “It’s genuinely that unique.”

The stories that emerge from Westgate Biodiversity are inspiring and mostly pertain to this 50-hectare strip of land that has been replanted with indigenous vegetation and is now visited by 140 species of bird.

During the lockdown the group planted mistletoe to increase the number of species and claims greater success rates than the City of Melbourne.

A friendly rivalry spurs on the group, the small guys keeping up an optimistic stance against the big guns of the CBD •

Caption: Diving water birds make characteristic ripples that attract baby Peregrine falcons at Westgate Park. There were no grebes when Southbank News visited.