World Falconry Day and the Falconers' Birds That Brought Back the Peregrine

A peregrine falcon takes most of its prey in the air, folding its wings and dropping onto another bird from above. The dive, called a stoop, is the reason the peregrine gets called the fastest animal alive, and the speed usually given for it is over 320 kilometers an hour, about 200 miles an hour.

That number is easier to repeat than to measure. World Falconry Day, on November 16th, belongs to the people who train and fly birds like this one, and in North America those people once did the species a favor that no amount of speed could have done for it.

Clocking the Stoop

A wild falcon in a long dive moves too fast to film precisely. That is why a 2014 study in PLoS ONE by Benjamin Ponitz and colleagues used trained falcons instead, flying them down the face of a 60 meter dam past a stereo high-speed camera system that tracked their flight paths. Over that drop the birds peaked at about 80 kilometers an hour.

The study was after the aerodynamics of the dive, and 60 meters is a short drop. But it puts the famous figure in its place: the 320 kilometers an hour belongs to longer dives than anyone has yet pinned down on camera, and it should be read as an estimate.

A stooping falcon also keeps its head straight and flies a curving line, because the sharpest part of a raptor's eye points about 45 degrees to the side and turning the head would cost speed.

What the Day Marks

World Falconry Day is November 16th. The International Association for Falconry set it to mark the date in 2010 when UNESCO inscribed falconry on its lists of intangible cultural heritage. The nomination took more than six years of work by 11 countries, led by the authorities in the United Arab Emirates.

The listing has grown since. After its latest extension in 2021 it covers 24 countries, from Morocco and Saudi Arabia to Mongolia, Kazakhstan, the Republic of Korea, Ireland and Spain. The United States and Canada are not among them, which is a small irony given what falconers' birds did for the peregrine in both countries. UNESCO describes falconry as more than 4,000 years old, practiced with falcons and sometimes with eagles, hawks and buzzards, and passed on through mentoring, families and training clubs.

The IAF's stated aims for the day include raising falconry's visibility and showing the conservation work falconers do. In North America that second aim has a specific case behind it.

The Crash

The peregrine's decline had one primary cause, DDT. Falcons carrying the pesticide laid thin-shelled eggs that broke during incubation, so clutches were lost before they could hatch. The Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT in the United States in 1972, ten years after Silent Spring.

By 1970 there were 39 known pairs of peregrines in the lower 48 states. The species was gone east of the Mississippi River and was reported to be 80 to 90 percent gone in the West. Across North America as a whole, the low point came in 1975 at 324 nesting pairs.

The bald eagle went down to the same pesticide at the same time, and both birds needed the ban before anything else could work.

The Falconers' Birds

A captive breeding program needs breeding stock, and with the eastern population gone there were no wild birds there to take. Tom Cade, at Cornell University, asked falconers to send their few remaining peregrines to his project to build one. They did, and the effort Cade started grew into The Peregrine Fund.

The first successful hatches came in 1973, producing 20 young, and the first releases followed in 1974. Over the next 28 years The Peregrine Fund released more than 4,000 captive-raised peregrines in 28 states. Across all programs in the US and Canada the federal count passed 6,000 falcons reintroduced since 1974.

None of it would have held without the ban. With the poison gone and new birds going out every year, the population came back to at least 1,650 breeding pairs in the US and Canada.

The Department of the Interior removed the peregrine falcon from the endangered species list on August 20, 1999.

A Falcon Over the City

The peregrine that came back nests on tall cliffs and on urban skyscrapers, and the city birds have adapted well, hunting the pigeons and starlings that live around the buildings.

The other birds downtown notice. Crows, for one, give a different alarm call for a hawk overhead than for a predator on the ground, and the crows that hear it look up. The falcon they are looking up at was gone from half a continent in 1970, and part of the reason it is back is a set of birds that had spent their lives on a falconer's glove.

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Sources & Further Reading