“It has been for the first time this year that we have a successful peregrine nesting at Paramo in Pardubice. Last year, a camera trap showed the peregrine’s interest in the local box, but they did not nest there in the end. This year, ornithologists found out that a female had laid four eggs there. However, the peregrine season came amid the planned maintenance work on the chimney where they have a nest. So, we put off the work on the stack not to put the young at risk and enable them to grow up and learn to fly in accordance with their natural pace,” says Lucie Pražáková, director of the ORLEN Unipetrol Foundation.

The female warmed up the eggs with her body for about one month until the young hatched. Then, a whirl of events started for the parents, especially to provide their chicks with enough food because they need a sufficient amount of nutrients to grow quickly. Ornithologists will climb the chimney to the nest about three weeks after the hatching to checks the chicks and ring them, which will enable their identification and provide an insight into their numbers in our territory.

Thanks to the identification rings, the origin of both falcons from Pardubice is known. The young falcon parents, who produced their first offspring this year, both come from the Czech Republic. The female hatched in 2022 on a chimney in the grounds of the Prague Hospital in Motol. The male, with whom Parama nested on the chimney, comes from Mladá Boleslav and is one year older than the female.

The ORLEN Unipetrol Group has been monitoring peregrine falcons on its production premises with the ALKA Wildlife Association since 2011. Peregrines have ideal living conditions on these sites – peace and enough food, which the parents fly out to seek around their nest every day. They bring the prey to the young who get the food several times a day. “The peregrine’s diet in individual sites differs a lot; it depends on the offer. Pigeons dominate in some parts, and the peregrine’s presence can help reduce the undesired pigeon population. Yet, peregrines never hunt pigeons completely away or out. A peregrine never causes a prey to die out, but helps recover their population and develop defensive behaviours, which, in contrast, forces peregrines to change their hunting tactics. So, we can see a permanent race between a predator and its prey,” says ornithologist Václav Beran from ALKA Wildlife.

Peregrine falcons regularly nest at all ORLEN Unipetrol Group sites, including Pardubice-based Paramo. The female at the Kralupy nad Vltavou site laid eggs halfway through March, and three chicks hatched at the end of April. Last year, a peregrine couple raised four young there. The same number was born on the chimney of a heating station at the Litvínov Refinery, where the peregrines raised their young for the thirteenth time. A total of 58 chicks of this unique raptor have already been raised at all ORLEN Unipetrol Group sites to date.

The ORLEN Unipetrol Foundation launched its activities in 2017. During its existence, it has distributed CZK 9 million among 323 secondary-school and university students of natural sciences and technical fields as part of its scholarship programme. The school grant programme distributed over CZK 12.6 million among 94 primary and secondary schools throughout the Czech Republic to support educational and scientific activities. The Foundation supported 45 teachers with CZK 1.6 million within the grant programme for teachers. Ninety primary schools have already joined the educational project, ‘Plastík a jeho kouzelný kufřík’, since 2021. This project provides schoolchildren from the first to the fifth grade with an excursion into the world of chemistry through entertaining experiments. Additional information about the ORLEN Unipetrol Foundation’s mission and other activities is available at www.nadaceorlenunipetrol.cz.

Lucie Pražáková, director of the ORLEN Unipetrol Foundation

E-mail: nadace@orlenunipetrol.cz 

Telephone: +420 736 506 939