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Big-eyes babies born on city bridges
Photo credit: Urbanite
A baby falcon poses inside his nest at the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge.
(Photo courtesy MTA Bridges and Tunnels)
Amid the rumbling and honking, New York City’s bridges are singing lullabies to fluffy, feathery babies.
Three pairs of falcons have given birth to chicks on top of the Verrazano-Narrows, Throgs Neck and Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial bridges this spring, according to MTA Bridges and Tunnels.
Three boys and a girl were born in the last month, with the oldest now bearing talons the size of a human hand. The nests are perched on bridge posts as high as 693-feet above the water.“We’re like absentee landlords,” said Ray Higgins, maintenance superintendent of the Throgs Neck bridge. “We set them up with a nice place to live and then try not to bother them.”
The peregrine falcons, which are on the state endangered species list, dig bridges. The birds also nest on church steeples and high-rise buildings here to peer down on pigeons and other prey.
The falcons have taken to city bridges for decades. On the Marine Parkway bridge, the birds cozy up in an old gun turret installed during World War II.
Names for the babies were not immediately available.
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