For GSS Losing Biodiversity chapter 6. Excerpt: Not long ago,
Berkeleyside reader Patrick Hickey kindly sent in a photo of a beautiful
bird of prey, perched on a tall building near his home in downtown
Berkeley. ...Rusty Scalf, teacher and trip leader for the Golden Gate
Audubon Society, confirmed it: the bird was a peregrine falcon — the
fastest animal on Earth. In California, not long ago, it was also one of
the most endangered. ...“Many of us were looking at the extinction of
the peregrine in the 1970s,” said Glenn R. Stewart, director of the
Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group
(SCPBRG) . “It really looked like they were
going to be gone forever.” At that time, Stewart and other scientists
could find only two pairs of peregrine falcons in California. In the
eastern part of our country, peregrines were totally gone. ...The
pesticide DDT — widely used in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s— accumulated in
the fatty tissues of peregrine falcons (and also, bald eagles), causing
these birds to lay thin-shelled eggs that broke in the nest during
incubation. With the banning of DDT in 1972, and decades of impassioned
work by Stewart and the SCPBRG, peregrine falcons have undergone a
near-miraculous recovery. Today, an estimated 250 to 300 peregrine pairs
are living and nesting in California, a number that Stewart believes
approximates original pre-DDT populations. “The interesting part of the
peregrine’s tale is their adaptability to the urban environment,” says
Shirley Doell...a peregrine volunteer — a “citizen scientist”— who
ventures out at dawn nearly every morning in spring, plus some evenings,
to monitor pairs of peregrines on skyscrapers, high-towered bridges,
and tall industrial cranes in the East Bay. ...“Most endangered species
can only live in a particular niche in a particular kind of habitat,”
Doell says. “But the peregrines don’t seem to mind the bustle and noise
of the city, if there are tall structures and birds around for them to
catch.” ...In cities like Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco,
peregrines hunt pigeons for about 90% of their diet. ...“And living in a
place like downtown San Francisco, where there’s an abundance of
pigeons… it’s like living on a remote island in British Colombia with an
abundance of sea birds nesting. Only here, the cliffs happen to be
buildings, or bridges. The food happens to be nonnative pigeons.”....
See also San Francisco nestcam and San Jose nestcam. By Elaine Miller Bond. Berkeleyside. http://www.berkeleyside.com/2014/04/29/friends-in-high-places-peregrine-falcons-soar-above-us/ |
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