From endangered to global celebrity: the story of Annie and the California Peregrine Falcon

The male at this site kept hitting me on the back the entire time I tied the cub to the nest, Groulx said with a laugh. And it hurts, which is not fun! These are probably the worst for me, but that’s just an indicator that I have to do this faster.

Glucs spent a lot of time cercling baby birds across California, but when the UC Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group first started, there were few baby birds available for cerclage. In 1975, the peregrine falcon population was so low that the organization’s sole mission was to reintroduce the falcons into the wild in the hope that they would survive.

Scientists first noticed the dramatic decline of birds, especially birds of prey, in the late 1950s. The 1965 Peregrine Falcon Conference brought together scientists and falconers to share their findings on the bird’s dramatic decline and theories about the culprits. A series of studies point to DDT. DDT, or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, becomes more destructive as it moves up the food chain, and birds that prey on other birds, such as peregrine falcons, absorb extremely high concentrations of the widely used insecticide agents, with devastating consequences for reproduction.

At its lowest point, only two pairs of peregrine falcons remained in California. In 1969, the Second Peregrine Falcon Conference asked the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States to protect these birds before they disappeared completely. In 1972, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency banned the use of DDT, and a year later, the peregrine falcon was listed as endangered under the newly enacted Endangered Species Act.

While rescues are necessary and welcome, the problem is there aren’t enough peregrines to recover.

Environmentalists have rallied behind the peregrine falcon cause. Tom Cade, an ornithologist and UCLA alumnus, founded the Peregrine Falcon Foundation in 1970 in an attempt to raise them in captivity and return them to the wild. Its success is uncertain, and historically only a handful of falconers have been able to breed them in the United States, some of whose records are disputed. Cade began his efforts in the Northeast, but the birds had been wiped out nearly everywhere, so no one team could finish the job. The UC Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group was established in 1975 to do this work specifically in the West.

Early on, falcon scientists noticed that peregrine falcons had evolved mechanisms that could aid in the recovery process.

Glucks explained that the Peregrine does some really cool things called dual-clutch or even triple-clutching. Therefore, if you remove the eggs early in the breeding season, they will go on to lay another clutch. Our team takes advantage of this by taking the eggs, artificially incubating them, and letting them lay another clutch of eggs so that we get double the reproductive value from that pair of eggs. We only have a few pairs left so it is important to raise a large number of chicks.

UC Santa Cruz has become a peregrine falcon egg factory, hatching after hatching on campus. It also became a study of nature versus nurture in animal behavior. Some chicks are raised by peregrine falcons or prairie falcons. But some, lacking the company of their parents, are kept in nests and fed by peregrine falcon puppets. Eventually, once they were old enough to hunt on their own, scientists moved them to release sites, where the birds learned to fly and hunt on their own. Glucs added that it was very successful. Apparently there’s a big genetic component to learning how to be a wild peregrine falcon.

Peregrine falcons were removed from the federal and state endangered species lists in 2006, and their subsequent rebound has found them dispersed across the country, often in urban settings where they had never been seen nesting before. California’s long, densely populated coast proved perfect for them.