The Golden Girls

Jo Durt & Kids On Grass have done it again: they are raising four very healthy babies on Bonnet Island just off the Causeway Bridge to Long Beach Island. It looks like we treated their awful parasitic fly infection just in time, as these four are healthy, growing, and generally thriving on top of the tower.

And, big surprise: we have four girls! Four golden girls. While I do love a brood with mixed sexes as the dynamics of males and females are just so different, this is certainly going to be a unique season with four females.

Girl falcons are significantly larger than males. So much so that males and females have different sized bands. It was actually quite challenging at fist to determine for sure that they were all females. Usually you have at least one shorty little male to help make the enormous females more obvious. But this banding was tough and we even resorted to trying to fit a male band on the two smaller girls’ enormously thick legs.

But nope. All females!

So now we wait. Soon these four beauties will start wandering out of the igloo and exploring the deck of the tower. Their beautiful brown and golden feathers will poke through all the fluff, and soon after that, they’ll attempt their first flights.

Will the girls work together to learn how to fly and help each other avoid the heavy traffic on the bridge? Stay tuned.