This morning's minion

 So look who I saw perched on my railing yesterday morning.  Never seen anything like this before.  Peregrine falcon I was thinking.  We have maybe a handful of them downtown hanging around our tall buildings and poaching pigeons at their leisure.  With our great hordes of pigeons (ungainly and almost comic as they plod the streets and sidewalks looking for a stray bits of potato chips dropped from the careless hands of munchers, but majestic when they all take flight at once, white wings flashing, then turn 90 degrees together and then again and again like a slow moving tornado into the sky) there are plenty to support hundreds of those falcons, but falcons don't like neighbors living to close to them.

Looked like a youngster, kind of soft and fuzzy in the face, not yet hardened into the cold and ruthless face of the predator.  This is the best of the three photos I could get of him before he was gone.  I looked up images of peregrine falcons on the computer, and he looked like them, sorta.  They were all adults without the soft and fuzzy faces, but they had that kind of stripe from the top of the head through the eye and down to, well the chin I guess.  I contacted my birdwatching sources to confirm.

Finches were the first to colonize my balcony, maybe ten years ago attracted here by sunflowers, and soon I was providing seed.  There were four of them, two couples, red faced males and all brown females.  They had graceful good looks and their song was sweet.  Pigeons came later.  I wasn't too happy about that, mainly afraid that my neighbors wouldn't like them (many people don't, refer to them as flying rats, but you know, they are God's creatures, as are rats for that matter) and I was afraid that that they would report me (against the rules to feed birds on the balconys) and I'd end up in the dreaded board's star chamber.

At first there were three of them, Mom and Pop and Junior I guessed.  They were pretty tame, I could almost touch them, so I got to be friendly with them.  But the one I assumed was Pop had a mean streak.  When I put seed down he would fight Mom and Junior for it, and even if I spaced the seed apart he would drive them away from the balcony,  Nothing uglier than a pigeon fight on your balcony.

And then I got these other birds, sparrows I call them, but they are just brown birds, kind of squat as opposed to the lean and graceful bodies of the finches.  And they don't travel in double dates, they travel in mobs.  The finches mostly graced the railing, but these guys are all over the floor of the balcony like, well a mob like I said.

Well speaking of the sparrows there was one on the floor of the balcony and at one point the newcomer made kind of a halfass dive at it, but maybe due to his youth it didn't work out and the sparrow fled.

The reports from my experts came in later, kestrel, kestrel, peregrine, but the last, seemed like the guy just said what he thought I wanted to hear.  I'm a little disappointed to hear.  Peregrine falcons sounds so much more noble than kestrel, like the difference between a privateer and a pirate.  But still kind of a nature experience for urban Uncle Ken.