On the 16th March I led a tower tour at 12:45. As usual when we arrived at the top of the tower/ base of the spire I turned on the FalconCam and there was Mrs Falcon sitting on the nesting box.

We did the usual sightseeing out of the doors, looked at the spire construction and then back to the camera where Mrs Falcon had disappeared, leaving… a potato?

The camera picture on the PC inside the spire is pretty grainy but it certainly looked like a rather tasty russet potato.

We agreed that for some reason the falcon had turned vegetarian and set off back down the stairs.

There are a few simple rules in detective stories and one is that the obvious answer can sometimes be the answer. If a bird is sitting on a nest and then the bird is not on the nest but something else is, the thing on the nest might, just might, be an egg. Even if it looks like a potato.

Because your guide didn’t know that the way birds look after eggs, is that they lay them one at a time over several days, and only when the clutch is complete do they start sitting on them full time to incubate them so that they all hatch together.

This picture is from a few days later.

This guiding business is harder than it looks.

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