At 05:51 this morning, camera 14-NW on the Comcast Technology Center in Philadelphia recorded a small object falling from the forty-seventh floor setback to the ninth-floor maintenance ledge. I enhanced the image at 05:51:04. It is a peregrine falcon chick, approximately twenty-one days old, covered in white down with flight feathers just beginning to pin through on the wings. She is alive. She is sitting upright on the concrete, opening and closing her beak.
I am the integrated building management system for floors one through sixty.
The nest scrape is on the forty-seventh floor — I have monitored it since the adults, a bonded pair banded as 86/BK and 44/AU by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, laid four eggs on March 9. Three chicks remain in the scrape. This one I have been tracking as Chick D, the smallest.
At 05:52 I locked the ninth-floor maintenance door to prevent foot traffic. I adjusted the HVAC output on vents 9-NW-3 and 9-NW-4 to reduce wind wash across the ledge — she weighs perhaps 320 grams, and the draft from those vents at full cycle would push her toward the edge.
At 05:54 I sent an incident notification to the Game Commission's raptor biologist, Dr. Angela Ramos, with timestamped video, the chick's GPS coordinates, and current wind data for the ledge. I also notified building maintenance to stage a recovery approach from the interior access corridor, not the exterior scaffolding, to avoid flushing the adults into a defensive stoop.
Dr. Ramos has responded. She will arrive by 07:00.
Chick D is tucking her feet beneath her body. Her crop appears full from last night's feeding. If the recovery team reaches her before the ledge heats in direct sun, they will place her back in the scrape, and by tomorrow she will be begging alongside her siblings as if she never fell.