So picture this: You’re a pigeon.
You’re a pigeon and you’re whizzing along a hundred feet above an open area. You’re whizzing along and you notice a speck in the sky two thousand feet above you. You notice a speck and then you notice that it’s dropping toward you. It’s dropping toward you and when it turns out to be a peregrine falcon, you are so screwed…
If there were some trees or brush to drop into you might be okay, but that’s not where peregrines hunt. There is nowhere to fly to and nowhere to hide, and it seems so unfair, because you’re a pigeon, for God’s sake, you’re one of the strongest fliers on the planet. You can sustain forty miles per hour in level flight, which that peregrine up there couldn’t dream of doing, but even as that thought crosses your mind, the peregrine crosses the hundred mile per hour mark because she’s tucked, she’s in a vertical dive, plummeting at you like a bullet and still accelerating. You pour it on, but as you’re approaching your top sprint speed of sixty miles per hour the peregrine breaks a hundred and fifty. Nictitating membranes shutter across her eyes to shield from the screaming wind. You see a distant grove of trees but you know you won’t make it. The peregrine breaks two hundred miles per hour. At two-forty she opens her wings ever so slightly and starts to pull out of her dive behind you, making a sound like canvas ripping, pulling twenty-seven G’s and briefly weighing fifty-nine pounds, and then she flashes into you still doing almost two hundred miles per hour, but she doesn’t grab you.
She hits you.
* * * *
The pigeon is killed instantly and painlessly, though that’s not always the case with a peregrine kill. The impact is like being hit by a high-speed projectile and it shatters the spine at the base of the skull. As the pigeon tumbles lifeless through the air, the falcon slows to a sane speed, circles around with a couple of flaps, and snags him in mid-air, then flies off to find somewhere safe to eat.
Susan and I chat about cheery things like this all the time, and as we were remarking over cocktails last night about how amazing peregrine falcons are and how much it must suck to be a pigeon, I brought up that remarkable technique they have of hitting their prey instead of grabbing it, and Susan asked a great question. The question went like this:
Hit it with what??
With their head, for God’s sake? With their breastbone? What could they possibly hit it with? They don’t carry a club or a mace. How the heck do you hit something—at two hundred miles per hour—without both of you becoming lifeless puffs of feathers?
I had no clue, and Susan doesn’t let me make stuff up, so I had to dig into this a little. I managed to find it, and of course along the way I learned some amazing stuff I hadn’t known about peregrine falcons, so a Ranger Randy article was warranted. Here you go:
First of all, to answer Susan’s question, they hit them with—if you’re ready for this—a clenched foot. I kid you not. They hit them with their fist. At least that seems to be the prevailing opinion, though there’s still argument. One fairly auspicious scientist (and falconer) named Tom Cade absolutely insists that they strike with an open foot, even claiming that they rake the rear talons across the back of the bird, but most of the world including me finds that hard to picture. I just can’t imagine a falcon retaining possession of all his toes for very long if he went around doing that. (It’s delightful that we still don’t know this conclusively—falconry has been a sport for four thousand years.)
But what absolutely flabbergasted me was that number up there—that three-digit one. That’s a confirmed number. There’s a guy named Ken Franklin in the San Juan Islands in Washington state who is a falconer and a pilot and a skydiver and the husband of an ornithologist, making him probably the only person on the planet who could have concocted a way to clock a peregrine in a dive. He affixed a tiny altimeter to a feather shaft on the rump of his female peregrine falcon and took her up in a light aircraft to 15,000 feet, then falcon and falconer both jumped out of the plane. He then dropped what falconers call a lure, which is a leather-covered weight with some feathers involved so it looks a little like a bird. The falcon went into her dive, which is called a stoop, and she achieved two hundred and forty-two miles per hour pursuing that thing through the vaults of sky. (You can watch the Youtube here.) Now, let me just hazard a few comparisons regarding that number: That wind speed will peel the skin off an airplane if it has some missing rivets. The most intense hurricane on record, Wilma, in 2005, only had winds of 185 mph. My brother Gary is going to take me up flying in a few weeks, and the top speed of the Cessna aircraft we’ll be in is only 188. The closest I’ve come to feeling those kinds of winds was 110 miles per hour. That was a skydive, and it was a fight to keep my cheeks on my face.
The posture of a peregrine falcon during a stoop has been called hyper-streamlined. They are a heavy, compact, small-winged bird in the first place, and when they go into their stoop, they assume a perfect teardrop shape, like a tiny torpedo. I’m not built as well for that kind of thing, so wind resistance held me to a pokey 110 mph, but some physicists did a study testing the flight physics of an “ideal falcon” and calculated that terminal velocity for them is 250 mph at sea level (confirmed by Ken Franklin’s experiment). At high altitude, they figure maybe 390.
That’s half the speed of sound.
When they kill smaller birds like songbirds they can just overtake them and grab them like any other hawk, but the larger ones they will hit. They often hit something too large to carry, and in that case they will follow it to the ground and chow down there. If they were only able to stun or disable the bird, they dispatch it with a special adaptation to their beak shape called a tomial tooth, designed to quickly sever the spine. They have been observed killing birds as large as a sandhill crane, which is a wading bird that stands as tall as your chest.
They prefer not to eat on the ground, though, because they do have their own predators. Raptors like the golden eagle or some of the larger hawks will drop on the peregrine in their own stoop if they catch her on the ground, and the peregrine is not the fastest bird in level flight. With the tables turned, she will not be able to escape. This might explain the mean streak they have where large hawks are concerned. A peregrine will kill a red-tailed hawk given the opportunity. The red-tailed is too big for her to kill outright, but the falcon will come streaking through from out of nowhere and break one wing. The hawk will spin to the ground, crippled, where he will probably die a very slow and painful death by starvation, without even the hope of a merciful killing by another predator. As Robinson Jeffers says in his wonderful poem, Hurt Hawks, “There is prey without talons.” This is probably what befell the hawk he writes about.
Peregrines like to hang out on extremely high perches above open areas with little cover, so they’re fond of bluffs above bodies of water. We have a pair here in Monterey, California who hang out on the “E” of the lighted sign on the top of the Embassy Suites high-rise, above a nice lake with lots of waterfowl. If there’s not a high perch around they will circle as high as three thousand feet above the hunting ground, so high they’re not even visible to creatures like us. They have incredible eyesight. Their eyeballs are huge, they just don’t look like it, because unlike us, only the iris and pupil are exposed. Their eyeballs actually take up most of their skull, leaving little room for other sundries like a brain. (That’s also why owls don’t owe their survival to their intellects—a barred owl has a skull the size of a golf ball and two human-sized eyeballs in it.)
Peregrines were once a very successful bird with a world-wide range, but we almost managed to kill them off completely by dumping the “harmless” pesticide DDT into our environment for three decades. The poison magnified up the food chain and the falcons took a bad hit. It robbed them of their calcium and the eggshells would all break before the chicks could hatch. In a rare example of doing something right, we outlawed the stuff in the nineteen-seventies, and peregrine falcons rebounded, and are back off the endangered species list, a conservation success story. It can be done, when we have the will.
So that’s the news on the peregrine falcon. Fastest creature on the planet, proud and noble, but also with a mean streak. Oh, and they’re fastidious: Before they eat their prey, they pluck it.
Now you know.