The Falcons Have Flown

We’ve had almost more excitement than we can stand during the past two days.   The falcons have flown!  Bet you didn’t know we were falcon watchers.  It started during our first week here when one of our trainers mentioned the peregrine falcon nest box that is on a ledge near the top of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building and has two web cams in it.  The church, in conjunction with the US Wildlife and several other agencies, has participated in wooing a falcon pair to nest here for many years.  We started checking in on the birds once in a while.  There were four eggs the parents were taking turns sitting on.

About five weeks ago three eggs hatched and the fun of watching them grow began.  Luke gave me the idea to keep the web came open in the corner of my computer desktop and I have done that at work every day since then.  It has been great fun watching them grow, the parents bringing them fresh birds to eat, and them fighting over the food, etc.  We learned that when it is time for them to fledge (see, it has even broadened my vocabulary!) that there would be trained watchers on the plaza watching and ready to rescue them, if necessary.  The brick and glass buildings and traffic of a city pose great hazards as they are learning to fly.  There were even large, yellow traffic signs put up on each street around Temple Square which say, “Falcon Bird Watch – Prepare to Stop.”  This past week the three birds, who are big by now, have been spending a lot of time flapping their wings and looking out of the box.  Just trying to get up courage, I’m sure.

Friday was the day.  When Lou turned the web cam on at 6:15 a.m. one of them was gone.  We watched them off and on as we got ready to go to work, and he saw the second one take off about half an hour later.  I watched #3 all day at work.  She acted very anxious, but just didn’t dare try her wings.  At lunch we sat out on the plaza and talked to one of the watchers and learned that #2 had taken the longest fledgling flight they had ever seen.  She had flown across South Temple Street to the roof of Macy’s in the City Creek Center.  So he had been named Macy.  The first one out was named Primo and he was hanging out on the Church Administration Building just a short distance from the box.

But later that evening I read the sad news that Macy, who had taken several short flights during the day, had then taken off and crashed into the Key Bank high rise building and died.  I was so sad. 

But that’s not the end of the story.  Yesterday morning  #3, who has been named Boxer because she was staying in the box, started acting very strangely.  She was extremely agitated and flailing about in the box.  Finally, the wildlife guy, Bob, who is called a ‘rehabilitator’ carefully took the back off the box from inside the building and reached in with a towel to try to capture her.  Instead, it scared her and she flew out very quickly.  So I was reading blog posts all day keeping track of her.  They later caught her and took her to rehab and even took an x-ray of her gut.  Said she seemed fine but they kept her there overnight and will likely release her sometime today.  So that is a bit of the story of the SLC falcons. I see on the internet that there are similar falcon pairs and boxes and web cams in several cities in the U.S.  Another interesting perk of this mission.

On another subject, I just want to tell you about an interesting experience I had at work this week.  One day I received an email from our dear friend, Monday, in Nigeria.  My kids will remember us talking a lot about Monday and his family.  He is an exemplary church leader and is educated and ambitious, but couldn’t (and still can’t) find work and can barely feed their six kids.   He asked about what we are doing on our mission here, so in reply I told him about what I do in the patriarchal blessing department.  I was surprised to get another email right back from him saying that he wanted to get a copy of his blessing.  I thought, “Oh no, this likely isn’t going to work.”  I have watched for but have never yet seen a request come in from Nigeria, and I didn’t have much faith that the patriarchs would have sent in their blessings regularly.  But I told him just how to go to lds.org and where to  find the request form.  I thought it would be several days before he would get to a computer again so I told him to email me when he sent it so that I could try to arrange to have his request put in my queue.  (There are 16 people in my department all answering requests.)

I was, again, very surprised when I had another email early the next morning saying that he had sent it in.  (I later learned that he has a laptop computer and a modem now. The only problem is that they don’t very often have electricity!  This just blows my mind that he could scrap together enough money for a computer.)  So as soon as I got to work I had my coordinator look for his request and assign it to me.  I was so excited just to see his name, but almost afraid to open it.  Imagine my delight when I saw his blessing appear, already matched by the computer.  The system works!!!  Obviously, it worked because his patriarch had done his job correctly.  The blessing was given way back in 1998.  Monday has been a faithful member since the very early days of the church in Nigeria.  Those faithful members have so little and expect nothing (because the fast offering system didn’t really work there).  Yet they know the gospel is true.

I hope many of you were able to watch Music and the Spoken Word today.  It was their Independence Day special, with the orchestra and bells, and it was magnificent!  What a great way to start this week. Wishing everyone a good 4^th of July.  We have so much to be thankful for in this country.