The downtown falcons: peregrines on the towers

A nest box about 1993; the territory record 2003–2025

The box and the first perch: South Bend's peregrine story begins with a box. A South Bend Tribune photograph from 2002 — its caption preserved in the newspaper index — shows a peregrine falcon perched "next to the nesting box placed there nine years ago" atop the Tower Building downtown, with Carol Riewe of the Rum Village Nature Center watching: a box placed about 1993, in the years when Indiana's reintroduction program was putting peregrines back on the state's tall buildings, on what was then the city's most falcon-shaped address. The systematic record opens a decade later. The Midwest Peregrine Society's Indiana nesting reports carry the South Bend territory — listed as "City-County/Tower Building," for its two successive homes — continuously from 2003 to 2025, and the 2025 report totals the territory's production: sixty-three chicks fledged across those years, 2.74 a year, a figure the earlier reports corroborate on the way up (forty-nine through 2019; fifty-five through 2022). The birds moved their residence from the Tower Building to the County-City Building, and the city watches them on its own falcon cam.

The named birds: The reports and the DNR's releases give the territory a cast. In 2013 the resident female was Guinevere, twelve years old, raising that season's young alone in the record's phrase — her mate Zephyr had died the summer before. By 2019 the pair was Maltese — a female banded b/r 47/V, herself wild-produced at the Malteurop Complex in Milwaukee — and Peace, banded b/r P/23, wild-produced at Mt. Clemens, Michigan, in 2015; and through those years the resident male was a South Bend bird, banded b/g W/55, produced in this city's own nest in 2007 and still holding the territory in 2022, his fourteenth year. In 2023 the cast turned over: a new male appeared, Flash — banded b/blue M/52, wild-produced at Fort Wayne in 2019, a bird from the sister territory down the Maumee — Maltese disappeared with an injured leg, and the season's eggs were abandoned. The 2025 season, the latest in the reports, ran five eggs laid between 23 and 30 March, five chicks hatched between 1 and 5 May, and four young banded on 29 May by Grace LeCuyer, the reports' compiler — three females and a male — with the current adult male a Grand Rapids-produced bird, banded C/78. And the territory has its one famous evening: three newly fledged chicks, the Tribune reported, chased an unidentified drone across the downtown sky over Washington Street one Wednesday at about half past seven — the first drone encounter Carol Riewe, the city's rehabilitator of record, knew of — the recovered falcons of a recovered species, defending a downtown that their kind had been absent from within living memory.

Sources:

1. Indiana Peregrine Falcon Nesting Reports, 2019–2025, Midwest Peregrine Society (midwestperegrine.umn.edu), compiled by Grace LeCuyer — the South Bend territory 2003–2025, sixty-three chicks fledged; the named birds and band records; the 2023 and 2025 seasons.
2. "Gone a-courting; Peregrine falcons find new perch in city," South Bend Tribune (2002) — the Tower Building photograph and its nesting-box caption (the article as catalogued in the Michiana-area newspaper index).
3. Indiana Department of Natural Resources release (2013), carried by Birding Wire — Guinevere and Zephyr; the state's nesting attempts that year, South Bend among them.
4. South Bend Tribune, the downtown drone encounter, as reprinted in the Rochester Falconcam forum archive — the three fledglings and the drone; Carol Riewe's account.
5. City of South Bend — the falcon cam, southbendin.gov/falcam.