For those of you who like baby birds, but don't have a nest outside your window, here is a site that lists a WHOLE bunch of "Birdcams" on the web. My personal favorite is owlcam.com, which has carefully documented the nesting and raising of owlets by a pair of Barred Owls in Eastern Massachusetts every year for the past 6 years. Ward and June have two chicks this year, Spencer and Penelope.

We had city pigeons (AKA Sky Rats) nesting on the roof outside our laboratory window at NIH for several years, and it was a truly disgusting process to watch. Pigeons aren't much in the nest building department - they pile a few twigs kindof cemented together with pigeon shit on the nearest available flat surface and hope the eggs don't roll out. The young were featherless and quite ugly for a long time, and then they grow up to be pigeons. Yuck. I used to cheer when one of the young Red-tailed Hawks that occasionally wander into suburban Bethesda by mistake would grab a quick lunch on the NIH rooftops and the pigeon feathers would drift lazily on the wind....

There are Peregrine Falcons that nest in many American cities on skyscraper ledges, and help keep city pigeon populations down. When the National Folk Festival was in Dayton, OH, we enjoyed seeing random pigeon feet or tripes littering the street near our office trailer after the Peregrines had made a kill overhead. They are truly graceful and amazing birds (the Peregrines, not the pigeons...)