Females weigh about 2 pounds with a wingspread of 40 to 46 inches, while a male will weigh in at about 1 ½ pounds and span just 37 to 39 inches, roughly the size of a crow. Peregrine falcons are heavy, compact birds with the female being significantly larger than the male. The remarkable tale of the regeneration of the Peregrine falcon in the United States is one of human persistence and species adaptability to a new environment, 50 stories up. In fact, with some fanfare, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt removed the Peregrine falcon from the Endangered Species List on August 20, 1999, at a ceremony at a raptor research facility in Boise, Idaho. The future of this elegant and feisty bird seemed grim.īut this is not a story about the extinction of a species. In 1964, virtually all Peregrines in the upper midwestern U.S. By 1960, the population was nearly wiped out on the East Coast of the United States and in decline elsewhere in its range. By the time Rachel Carson published her oft-reprinted book Silent Spring in 1962, it was almost too late for the Peregrine falcon. As the birds accumulated the toxins in their fat reserves, the shells in their clutches thinned and broke easily, or never hatched. A widely used, persistent pesticide that worked its way up the food chain, DDT and its metabolic end product dichlorobis (dichlorophenyl) ethylene, or DDE, pushed populations of birds of prey in North America to the brink of extinction by the mid-century mark. The use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloro ethane, or DDT, ended in the United States in 1972.
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