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Comment by hackeraccount | Hacker News Reader

There are Peregrine falcons in my city. I remember walking downtown one time and seeing one on the sidewalk with a pigeon in its talons. All the commuters and I just walked around it. Really weird somehow.

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Melbourne, Australia has a family of falcons living on the roof of 367 Collins St in the CBD. You can find some of the falcon cam footage on YouTube.

London apparently has a high density of them (but high density still only means something like 40 breeding pairs), and some people are all excited about the prospect that they can do something about the rapidly rising wild parakeet population...

I'm having a hard time squaring away the image of grey gloomy London also being overrun with colourful tropical looking birds, I had to google it and see.

Here are some pictures taken out of my home office window too:

https://m.galaxybound.com/@vidar/114256153547342202

And a short walk from mine:

https://m.galaxybound.com/@vidar/114582595390607406

They're everywhere at this point.

Those are fantastic photos!

They’re surprisingly well adapted to a large range of temperatures because of the species found in temperate rainforests at higher altitudes. They frequently enough escape from pet stores and zoos that there are many sizable populations spread out around the world. The one nearest me is the infamous Pasadena parrots [1] which is made up of thousands of birds likely built up over decades of escapes. There are populations in Chicago, New York, Rome, Tokyo, and plenty of other cities in the world.

[1] https://www.lafieldguide.com/p/the-pasadena-parrots

Interesting, around here raptors hunt high, and if prey falls to the ground they abandon it; too dangerous to go down in the streets.

That's a hawk vs falcon hunting difference, not a city vs countryside one.

Quail won't take off if a falcon's shadow passes over them; they'll burst if a hawk's does.

I almost ran one over turning in a car park in Edmonton. Backed up and it was still standing on the pigeon glaring at me. I drove around.

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