May 15th is Endangered Species Day, a day set aside by Congress in 2005 to recognize the importance of protecting and preserving rare and endangered species worldwide. The peregrine falcon, once close to extirpation in North America because of DDT, has made a remarkable comeback over the last 25 years.
In the early 1990’s, a small group of dedicated falconers and scientists began breeding and raising falcons in captivity as part of a reintroduction program in North America. Their preliminary efforts were successful but limited to cities and areas where nesting boxes had been erected on skyscrapers and power plant smokestacks. Peregrines didn’t begin returning to their historical nesting sites on the Mississippi River in greater numbers until Bob Anderson, founder of the Raptor Resource Project in Decorah, Iowa, raised a brood of chicks in a box attached to a cliff in Effigy Mounds National Monument. In his essay, ‘Bringing the Duck Hawk Home,’ Anderson describes how he and his colleagues, “built a special chamber designed to look like a cliff ledge, in which eighteen young peregrines were raised in 1998 and 1999… [because] it was our belief that this chamber would imprint peregrines to rock face rather than man-made objects.”
In June of 2006, as part of my project to document the prairie restoration of Maiden Rock Bluff, I attended a banding of peregrine chicks organized by Bob Anderson of the Raptor Resource Project. Dan Berger, the falconer who recorded the last pair of peregrines to nest on Maiden Rock Bluff in 1954, joined Anderson’s team of volunteers that day. Three chicks were banded at this historic nesting site for the 5th year in a row. During the banding, a pair of adult falcons circled overhead.