1/2/2024 0 Comments Peregrin falcon sound barrier![]() The quest to save peregrines began around the same time-and Burnham basically grew up inside it. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, brought mass public attention to the crisis and helped spark the modern environmental movement. It weakened female peregrines’ ability to create strong egg shells: When they were able to lay eggs at all, they sometimes crushed them under their own weight. The chemical dispersed through the ecosystem and built up in the bodies of apex predators like peregrine falcons and bald eagles. Once widespread across North America, peregrine populations were devastated by the widespread introduction of the pesticide DDT in the 1950s. There are few greater environmental success stories than that of the peregrine falcon. “Over the next 10 to 15 years,” he says, “you’ll probably see one of them go extinct in the area.” ![]() Climate change is not only triggering a kind of slow ecological impoverishment, but also bringing very real, very fast invasions.īurnham is not optimistic about the contest between peregrines and gyrfalcons. But Greenland’s peregrine-gyr war suggests that the upheavals to come will be bloody ones. Global warming can sometimes sound like a passive phenomenon-as if wild animals just wake up one day to discover that the air is hotter and all their food is gone. The fight previews battles to come on a fast-warming planet. Now, the peregrines regularly attack and overwhelm the gyrs. Though it is specially adapted for high-Arctic life, and larger than the peregrine, this gentler and more conflict-averse bird is not prepared to compete with peregrines. Another bird of prey, the gyrfalcon, has nested on the same cliffs for millennia. Peregrine pairs began returning, summer after summer, to nest on the island’s northernmost cliffs. As climate change tempered the Arctic’s frigid summers, peregrines were expanding their range north-farther north, he found, than there were ever records of them traveling before. ![]() But about a decade ago, he began tracking something new. ![]() He studies falcons at the High Arctic Institute, in Orion, Illinois, and he has traveled to Greenland most of the summers of his life.įor many of those trips, he helped survey peregrine falcons that use western Greenland as a summer nesting ground. Kurt Burnham has spent the past decade watching the fight take shape. NUUK, Greenland-Far up the coast of this ice-dominated island-north of the Arctic Circle north of the glacier that spawned the Titanic-sinking iceberg and north of the northernmost American military base-two birds of prey are locked in a vicious battle for food and territory. ![]()
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