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Tower Girl. Photo Virginia Hoffman<\/p>\nIn November of that year, Hoffman began following the increasingly famous Tower Girl. Hoffman then started coming to campus to see her in the feather. \u201cI was coming down trying to get outside the webcam and see what she was doing. And she definitely was mating. I was seeing courtship and copulation.\u201d<\/p>\n
At that stage, Hoffman decided to lean into the rabbit hole by traveling back to her native Pennsylvania and volunteering at the Rachel Carson Building in downtown Harrisburg at Falcon Watch, where she picked up a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge. (Carson\u2019s book \u201cSilent Spring\u201d was a seminal work of the environmental movement.)<\/p>\n
Before Tower Girl, Hoffman knew little about birds. Or photography. \u201cThen I realized, well, if I\u2019m going to do this, I need a camera, because it helps you know what\u2019s going on better. I literally walked into the store at the beginning of the pandemic, and I didn\u2019t even know how to turn the camera on or off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tower Girl. Photo Virginia Hoffman<\/p>\n
After that, she was off and running. \u201cI had this grandiose idea that I\u2019d be able to figure out where the peregrine goes when it\u2019s not on campus. That failed terrifically,\u201d she says with a laugh. She began frequenting Austin birding hot spots where Tower Girl might be \u2014 Mount Bonnell, Roy G. Guerrero Park, Hornsby Bend. \u201cI would climb up every parking garage in the city, because if you go up there, you get to see what\u2019s flying over. Every now and then, I\u2019d have to come back down to UT just so I could see a peregrine and feel like I\u2019d accomplished something!\u201d Hoffman watched Tower Girl year-round through the pandemic.<\/p>\n
In February 2021, winter storm Uri crippled the state, and Hoffman recalls the community\u2019s worry. \u201cWhenever there\u2019s some really severe event, I\u2019ll come back down and check. She made it through the ice storm, and there was a male with her, too. They looked really ragged. They were getting ice on them. But I was elated, thinking, this is great; \u2029she made it through!\u201d<\/p>\n
Based on research, Hoffman knew Tower Girl was at least 13 years old and probably 15, which was \u201cgetting up there,\u201d and she knew the falcon was already weak before the storm. It did not help matters that the cold killed a huge number of birds that would have been prey. A week or so later, at the time of year she would be on the Tower more and would start building a nest, she was gone. When several weeks passed with no sign, Hoffman made the call that Tower Girl was no longer with us. \u201cIt was pretty sad for everyone,\u201d she remembers.<\/p>\n
But within weeks, another female arrived. By this time, Hoffman had logged so many hours observing peregrines that she felt confident it was the same bird occupying and defending the Tower and not just another passing through. Tower Girl had been easy to ID from a scar on her wing. The new one, not so much. Because feathers fall out every year and can grow back quite different, Hoffman relies on her body shape and behavior, but she concedes it\u2019s quite difficult to be certain.<\/p>\n
Additionally, peregrine migrations are perplexing. Some do, some don\u2019t. Those that migrate from Texas follow the central flyway used by many species, flying to the Coastal Bend, then crossing the gulf and heading to northern South America. In Tower Girl\u2019s case, because of her scar, many theorized she was injured and so didn\u2019t have the strength to migrate.<\/p>\n
Tessie is a migrant, and every fall, Hoffman waits a while before declaring the falcon on the Tower is Tessie. \u201cI\u2019ll compare my hundreds and thousands of pictures I\u2019ve taken, and say, \u2018It looks like the same body shape.\u2029 But you really can\u2019t identify her. She doesn\u2019t have distinctive markers. She doesn\u2019t have bands.\u2029 So at some point, I just have to say, yeah, she\u2019s kind of exhibiting the same habits. She\u2019s claiming the Tower as her territory. She shows up about the same time every year.\u2029 It\u2019s got to be Tessie.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Tessie. Photo Virginia Hoffman<\/p>\n
So why the name? By fall 2022, when the same female returned and started to defend the Tower as hers, Hoffman had become a frequent poster on the Facebook group \u201cTower Girl \u2013 UT Austin Peregrines\u201d (now with 2,600 members). Posting so often, she needed a name for the bird, and she asked Crump to do the honors \u201cbecause of his love and dedication to Tower Girl.\u201d Over the years, Crump had hauled plywood to the top of the Tower, climbed 70-year-old ladders, hung out on scary ledges, constructed the nest box, moved the box to get it out of the sun, run cable for the webcam, and more. \u201cPlus, he was from UT; I was not.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crump picked Tessie, which means \u201chunter\u201d or \u201charvester\u201d (Greek to English).<\/p>\n
And what is it about the Tower that attracts these birds? They like wide-open spaces they can hunt around but need enough greenery to attract the prey birds. They only eat birds and bats. \u201cI think bats are a delicacy,\u201d she says with a laugh, having personally seen Tessie take a bat in flight. Hoffman says Tessie likes to face the sunrise, theorizing it is to better see other birds in silhouette.<\/p>\n
Moreover, the Tower is a whole ecosystem unto itself.\u2029 The building\u2019s bright lights bring in insects, which in turn bring in birds. American kestrels, a smaller falcon than the peregrines, come in for the insects, feeding off the walls. \u201cGrackles all come in, and the peregrines say, \u2018Yum, I\u2019ll take the grackle,\u2019\u201d she says. And the prey can get even bigger. Crump once took a picture of Tessie dining on a duck, specifically, a blue-winged teal.<\/p>\n
For beginners trying to tell a falcon in flight from, say, a hawk, she says the key is the wing silhouette: The tips of a hawk\u2019s wings are rounded, whereas falcons\u2019 are pointed. As in most raptors, the females are larger than males, so if a pair is together, the size comparison will tell you which is which. If they\u2019re alone, it\u2019s much harder to identify the sex, but Hoffman can tell by the speed of wing beats: \u201cBecause the male is smaller and has shorter wings, it has a little bit faster tempo.\u201d<\/p>\n
What is it about them that has captivated her so? \u201cThey\u2019re a beautiful bird. Also, it\u2019s the fact that they were almost extinct.\u201d The widespread use of the pesticide DDT during the 1960s and 1970s caused peregrine eggshells to thin, dooming the chicks inside. By 1975, their lowest point, experts believed there were only 324 nesting pairs in North America. Bald eagles and ospreys suffered the same fate. When DDT was banned, all the affected species rebounded.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing is, they\u2019re never fully restored,\u201d Hoffman says. \u201cWe let our Earth get to the point where we devastate another animal species, and then we take all this time and effort to restore them, which is great and wonderful for the ones we can restore. But there\u2019s part of me that thinks we need to stop before we get to that stage. We really need to put more emphasis on keeping all the species alive. We\u2019re just one species. There\u2019s so much more we can do to protect birds and make them part of our world.\u201d<\/p>\n
But considering her passion for these birds, she takes a nuanced view of human development. \u201cI\u2019m never going be that person who screams, \u2018You can\u2019t do this because it\u2019ll harm the bird!\u2019 It might or might not. The more knowledge you have, the more you can protect them.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Tessie leaves, which she does for months at a time, Hoffman does too, but she monitors the Facebook group and keeps one eye on the eBird app for any news. Hoffman spends three to four months each year back in Pennsylvania, chasing other wildlife with her camera, from goshawks to Allegheny woodrats. \u201cMy migration basically mirrors that of the peregrine,\u201d she muses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In November of that year, Hoffman began following the increasingly famous Tower Girl. Hoffman then started coming to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":{"0":"post-221736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-austin","8":"tag-austin","9":"tag-austin-headlines","10":"tag-austin-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}