Happy news at the Cathedral of Learning peregrine nest. The first chick has hatched! Welcome to the world, “C1.”

This morning at 6:18 am Hope was restless and pulled one of the eggs away from the other three. In this photo you can see that the egg is cracked. The chick was about to hatch.

Soon Hope moved the egg back to the clutch …

… and at 6:42am she called to Terzo, “Come see what’s happening.”

Terzo arrived at 6:55am (top photo) to see the chick nestled in the half shell.

Hope left to have breakfast and Terzo settled on the chick and eggs to keep them warm.

By 7:27am Terzo showed the chick completely out of the shell. Notice the two halves of empty shell.

Welcome to the world, “C1”! We hope we’ll see more “C’s” hatching soon. (See this blog post about nestling names.)

UPDATE AT 4:00PM: I’m sorry that I’ve been out of cell range for the past 5 hours. At around 2:15pm the second egg hatched, Hope killed it and fed it to the first chick. I have never seen this behavior before and do not know enough yet to speculate on why this happened. I’ll publish more news when I have it.

(photo from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ. of Pittsburgh)