The crow-sized, slate-blue-backed peregrine falcon, with its bright yellow feet, soars across the skies from Greenland’s Arctic tundra to the steppe plains of Patagonia in South America. Falco peregrinus is one of the most widespread birds on the planet, with 19 subspecies that call coasts, mountains, deserts and river valleys home. These eye-catching raptors are best known for their hunting skills. They can dive at lightning speeds of 320 kilometers per hour (200 miles per hour) — more than three times as fast as a cheetah, the swiftest land animal — to scoop their prey.
Falconers prize peregrine falcons and have traded them for centuries, sometimes stealing eggs and young chicks from clifftop nests to breed them in captivity and train them. But it wasn’t falconry, an ancient sport where raptors are trained to hunt specific prey, that caused their near-extinction. It was pesticides: After World War II, chemicals like DDT, aldrin and others became ubiquitous, used in neighborhoods, backyards and on crop fields to kill mosquitoes and agricultural pests.
That proved deadly to peregrine falcons. The pesticides poisoned their prey and bioaccumulated in their bodies, impairing their ability to reproduce. The eggs that females were thinner and more fragile, leached of calcium by DDT, and would break in the nests before the chicks could hatch. Peregrine falcon populations crashed across North America and Europe.
They completely disappeared from the eastern U.S. and were on the brink of extinction in the West. Then, in 1962, U.S. biologist Rachel Carson published...This article was originally published on Mongabay
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