Week 46/2025: Falcons fledge

Week of 16 November 2025

This was kind of a slow week. Not much happened in my world. I went to work and my acting class. Not a lot going on here.

This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.

Melbourne falcons fledge

The most exciting part of the week was seeing the 367 Collins Street falcons fledge.

In case you don’t know, a pair of peregrine falcons has a nest on the side of a building in Melbourne’s CBD. The building owners livestream the action from the nest from August each year, when the eggs are laid, until November, when the six-week old birds leave the nest.

People are very invested in them, as they grow very quickly from cute fluff balls to full-size predators. It’s fascinating to observe what they do.

This year there were three babies, and the first one flew off on Thursday morning. A bit of drama on Friday when the young male followed and almost immediately after came crashing back onto the ledge. The second female left a few hours later, and there was much speculation as to what had happened and whether the boy had been hurt in his crash landing.

Someone has posted the footage of the whole thing here.

Never a dull moment at fledging time. Last year one of the chicks accidentally fledged when it was trying to push its parent away.

The boy recovered and, after a visit from his sister, left for a second time on Saturday afternoon.

They’re gone now and the cameras are switched off (Monday morning to be exact). What we know, thanks to Dr Victor Hurley of the Victorian Peregrine Project, is they will stay with the parents in the area, learning how to hunt. Once they make their first kill, the adults will stop giving them food. Eventually the parents will chase them out of the territory and they’ll be on their own, dispersing an average of 64 km (female) and 25km (males).

We also know that there is a 66% die-off of these birds within their first year (some don’t even survive to fledging), so statistically at least, only one of these three will survive into a second year. Given they need to be 2.6 years (average, female) and 3.3 years (average, male) before they first breed, well (statistically), one of these might survive that long. But we rarely know what happens to them after they leave the ledge and the cameras are switched off, unless something happens in the city and they’re found. A couple of years ago a newly fledged baby crashed into a building and was rescued from the street and taken to the wildlife sanctuary.

So we watch them and appreciate this brief opportunity to see them grow, then we we farewell them and wish them well.

Open House Hobart Part 2

Here’s the second of my photoblog posts about Open House Hobart.

As I mentioned last week, we went to the Riverview Motel in Berriedale and had a look through the motel rooms and the gorgeous River House.

Habit tracker

Existing habits

• Go outside first thing (7 days): 7/7
• 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 6/7
• Hip exercises (5 days): 7/5
• Walk (7 days): 7/7
• Carry a notebook with me when I walk (7 days): 3/7
• Thinking time (4 days): 6/4
• Mid-day journalling (7 days): 3/7
• 9.30 shutdown & dim lights (6 days): 3/6
• Evening routine (6 days): 7/6

New habits

• Set timer for morning planning (5 days): 0/5
• Work shutdown (5 days): 0/5

Summary of the week

This week I learned

Sometimes the best way to pull of an audacious jewel heist is to do it in broad daylight when there are a lot of people around. Like I’ve always said, if you wear a hi-vis vest, you can get away with anything. (Yes, I have been listening to too many podcasts about the Louvre heist, and yes, I think there are now suspects in captivity but still. Wasn’t it a fascinating story?)

Related to the above, there are people who do penetration tests of your establishment. (They are called penetration testers and I’m sure your mind didn’t go where mine did when I heard that.) Penetration testers actively try to break in to a premises to see how easy it is to do.

Not related at all, I read a post during the week that claimed a computer scientist called Admiral Grace Hopper coined the term ‘debug’ after pulling a moth out of a computer. Cool story. It’s not true. The term ‘bug’ had already been in use in technology circles for over a century. (Grace Hopper, though, was a very highly acclaimed computer scientist and programmer, and the moth thing did happen but it’s not where the term came from. Also, moths aren’t bugs.)

This week I noticed

There’s a magpie that visits my yard frequently. It seems to have no fear of me.

But it and its mates hate the kookaburras, and on Saturday I saw them chasing the kookaburras away. I’ve seen them do that a couple of times. It was very intense.

This lyric from a new Paul Kelly song “I Keep On Coming Back For More”.

Like a sick dog
licking in its spew,
I keep on turning
back to you.

I thought that was what he’d said and I had to go back and listen to it again to be sure I’d heard it right.

What’s making me think?

From @JieJie_AiNi on social media:

Seeing the absurd electricity usage by AI after growing up in the 90s surrounded by campaigns telling us not to leave the lights on when we leave the room to save power and help the environment . . . I can’t begin to explain how much this hurts my brain.

This was a huge thing for my father when I was a kid. It was drilled into us. I can even remember reading an article about the Queen that said she used to go around turning lights off.

Yet here we are . . .

Reading

• The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
• Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare
• Vagabond by Tim Curry

Watching

• Resident Alien
• Doctor Who ‘Terminus’

Listening

• Seventy by Paul Kelly