Harvard’s Memorial Hall Falcons are Now on YouTube

A pair of peregrine falcons nesting atop Memorial Hall now have their own YouTube livestream thanks to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The popular perch on Memorial Hall’s bell tower has housed several peregrine falcon families in the last few years. Memorial Hall Building Manager Ted Sowa said the cameras were installed in June after FAS Dean Hopi Hoekstra visited the building’s attic to see the birds and greenlighted the project.

While the current two falcon occupants do not have any offspring, Raymond Traietti, an administrator at the University’s Office for the Arts and former Memorial Hall building manager, said he has “high hopes” there will be a nest in the spring.

“We would go up to William James and try to get binoculars to try to see, but you couldn’t see into the nest box,” said Traietti, referring to the 15-story FAS building across the street from Memorial Hall.

“I’m grateful that we got the camera. I hope the community enjoys it as we do,” he added.

Traietti, now a resident expert on the falcons’ local history, said the University has been contacted multiple times by bird watchers and ornithologists interested in protecting the falcons.

He said they were first sighted around Memorial Hall in the 1950s before the population was decimated by the use of pesticides. Today, there are fewer than 50 breeding falcon pairs in Massachusetts. Falcons returned to the site in 2021, and have maintained a constant presence since.

Planning for the falcon camera began late last year, but Sowa said the installation had to be completed around the birds’ schedules.

“We couldn’t go up there at specific times because the birds would be nesting, or whatever they do,” Sowa said. “If there was chicks up there, we couldn’t go up there because the chicks would leave the nest and then there would be nothing to video anymore.

Sowa said he was “relieved” when the livestream began in June. “It had gone wrong for such a long time, and it was difficult to get it to go,” he said.

For Traietti, the falcons’ long history at Memorial Hall was a hopeful story of coexistence.

“It kind of gives you a different perspective of your environment to know that these animals are thriving here,” he added.

—Staff writer Anna Shao can be reached at anna.shao@thecrimson.com.