Up the birds!

[The cost of relocating the pair of peregrine falcons is estimated to be more than £80,000 © Dan Kitwood/Getty Images]

Apparently some part of the Palace of Westminster is spending more than £80,000 to relocate a pair of peregrine falcons. I dare say the protection of birds industry could whack up some kind of a case for this kind of spend - RSPB has pots of money - but as things stand it strikes me as a very wasteful use of public money, money which we are told is a very scarce resource these days. Why not abandon these two to their fate and buy some more, somewhere else? They can't cost that much each and I believe (from an episode of Vera) that there are enough people about breeding them for sale - not least to the sheiks, princes and kings of Arabia, who are rather keen on falconry.

Maybe one could persuade some banking types who need to brush up the goody-goody side of their images to put some on top of their tower blocks in the City? They might even do it for free.

And then what about the cruelty to all the pigeons, probably killed rather crudely on the way to becoming lunch? If indeed they are killed before lunch starts. Which is not necessarily the case with goshawks according to the hawk book referenced at the end of reference 3 and noticed properly at reference 4.

Not in the same league as the bat nonsense noticed at reference 2, but still nonsense.

PS 1: I had thought that falcons killed on the wing while hawks killed on the ground. Consulting Wikipedia, I am no longer sure, with a key difference there being that falcons kill with a tooth like spike built into the upper beak while hawks kill with their feet. Perhaps I will ask Gemini.

PS 2: five years on, it seems that the jury is still out on the CHRNA7/smoking/Choline/Schizophrenia linkages reported at reference 3. The word 'schizophrenia' does not appear on the Wikipedia page for choline.

PS 3: looking again at the snap above this (Saturday) morning, it struck me that, while it had presumably been taken with some kind of fancy telephoto lens, there were still a couple of the same kinds of problem that I get on my telephone. First, the image has trouble with the shiny, gold painted ornaments on the top of stone features. I dare say that, when the sun is right, they can be shiny, troublesome even, in real life, but what do you want to do about them in an image? Second, it seems to make a bit of a meal of the strap lightning conductor left. Just part of losing focus generally on its hosting stone feature in the left foreground?

References

Reference 1: Re-housing falcons and a £10mn front door: Westminster’s spiralling refurbishment costs: MPs worry that recent building blunders will be repeated when badly needed works to upgrade Parliament begin - George Parker, Financial Times - 2025.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/churchy.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-family-with-troubles.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/12/goshawk-white.html.