At dusk on a weekday evening in late February of '08, I was heading
east on Rt. 100 near the airport when a gyr-like figure on a tall roadside
fixture caught my attention. Ridiculous as all the ramps and u-turns seemed
for such a likely mis-read (especially after a long work day!), I was
pleased to find that the bird was indeed a white Gyrfalcon.  No jesses, but
overall behavior seemed uncharacteristic and a small area of oddly laying
feathers on the back raised my suspicion that the bird was wearing a
telemetry transmitter.  The suspicion was confirmed the following morning
at work at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center when a co-worker casually
mentioned seeing a falconer on center recovering the signal (and the
Gyrfalcon) that he had lost the day before.  My recollection was that the
bird was assigned the task of clearing runways at BWI.

Dave Ziolkowski Jr.
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PWRC, Laurel, MD