Falcon box comes down as CTV tower removed

Tower comes down at old CTV station It’s a piece of television history and the former home of multiple peregrine falcon families. CTV’s Colton Wiens reports

The transmission tower beside CTV Kitchener’s old station has been fully dismantled.

Starting with removal of the antennas and radio equipment on Wednesday, construction crews took the tower down step by step.

"We're going to package it all up and ship it out by transport,” construction site supervisor Barry Lacroix of Lacroix Construction Co. Ltd. said Wednesday.

“After that is complete, another crane will mobilize in here and we'll start cutting the tower down."

Crews worked through the rain and the snow, eventually removing the tower in sections, and cutting the pieces up to make a pile.

The tower has helped CTV broadcast to outside the Region of Waterloo for years.

“That tower was our signal feed to Baden, which is where our transmitter site is for over the air,” said Randy Jacobs, Bell Media regional operations manager.

“We used that right up until we made the move to here, so it was with us for quite a while. We also had cellular added to it, so Bell Cell put their 5G network on it,” Jacobs said.

FALCON FAMILY HOME

Besides its use for CTV and cellular connection, peregrine falcons started using a satellite dish on the tower as a home in 2013. A nesting box was installed two years later, giving the birds a place to return to almost every year since.

“Overwhelming success. Your peregrines have been producing in that nest box ever since. It has been a huge bolster to the recovery of this species,” Mark Nash, executive director of the Canadian Peregrine Falcon Foundation, said.

Nash said each year the birds choose somewhere to nest. The peregrines were spotted by the tower this year, but didn’t use the box to nest. With the tower coming down, the shelter has been removed and preserved. Nash said he hopes residents will watch for where the peregrines go the next spring, so the nest can be moved to wherever the birds choose next.

“You still have a pair that’s in Kitchener-Waterloo, they just haven’t shown us where they’re going to set up house yet. So we’re looking for a lot of support for those eyes in the skies especially come March time,” Nash said.