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Xcel Energy’s web cams monitoring 10 baby falcons 

MINNEAPOLIS - Nest boxes at three of Xcel Energy’s Twin Cities power plants are home to 10 baby peregrine falcons that have hatched in the past week. Internet “falcon cams” are monitoring the progress of the falcon chicks, and can be viewed at the company’s Web site at www.xcelenergy.com (go to the “Bird Cam” link on the left).

Xcel Energy’s High Bridge plant in downtown St. Paul is home to four baby falcons. The Riverside plant in Minneapolis has three falcon chicks, and the King plant in Oak Park Heights has three hatchlings. Falcon cam viewers can look in on the nest boxes at each plant.

The King plant nest box was the world’s first to be installed on a power plant stack. Mae, the matriarch of power plant falcons, has occupied the nest box each year since 1989, a time when there were only a handful of peregrine falcons in Minnesota and the bird was on the endangered species list. During Mae’s reign, other falcons nesting at power plants across the nation and in many foreign countries have followed her example.

While Mae takes care of her three chicks, one of her sons is tending to his four offspring at the High Bridge plant nest box.

Peregrine falcons had been pushed to the edge of extinction by the use of the pesticide DDT from the 1940s to the 1960s. Before it was banned, the toxic chemical thinned the birds’ eggshells, making it nearly impossible for peregrines to reproduce. 

When the power plant nest box program started there were very few peregrine falcons left east of the Mississippi River. Today, the bird has been taken off the federal endangered species list and is now repopulating bluffs along the Mississippi for the first time in nearly half a century.