[Background music plays throughout]
Yeah my name is David Payer, I work for the
National Park Service based in Anchorage Alaska.
And I'm out here working on a Peregrine Falcon survey along the Yukon River between the international
border above Eagle and Circle, Alaska.
You know, they nest on cliffs.
Primarily cliffs along large rivers.
There's a lot of excellent habitat along this stretch of the Yukon River.
They're typically right along the river, but in an area like this, we're here at the Nation Reef.
The mouth of the Nation River is just downstream over there.
We have some ridges out in the distance, but in front of that is some lower lying country,
there's probably wetlands and small lakes back there potentially.
You've got the river habitat down there, the clear water coming in.
And so there's this diversity of habitat out here that provides foraging opportunities
for the peregrines.
The adults can go several miles in their search for prey.
Peregrines are a top-level predator, and so they eat primarily other avian prey, so small birds,
songbirds in the forests around here, waterfowl as they come migrating up through.
And so this is a really nice setting for nesting Peregrine Falcons.
[Peregrine Falcon Call]
There was this emerging environmental movement
in the 1960s, and sometime in the 60s or early 70s DDT was banned for domestic use, due to
public outcry over the effects and the growing awareness of some of the side effects of that
otherwise very effective pesticide.
Not long after, 1973 I believe it was, the endangered species act was passed and peregrines
were added to the endangered species list.
And so then they had full protection.
And really they are one of the poster children I think for the effectiveness of the environmental
legislation that was passed primarily in the 1970s and the endangered species act.
So, surveys began to be done here in the mid 1970s on, 1975 and then again in '77 and annually
since then, There have been surveys of this stretch of river.
So the nice thing about this survey is that it's been going on for a while, so we have
all these established territories with photos and any eyrie that we find is circled and
then we can correlate the photo with the bluff and look at the eyries and then we also have
micro-drawings of the eyries so we can find them easier.
[Sarah] This!
They're like more detailed notes like this one: lighter colored rock, or a grassy ledge
or something like that.
So it's not just like trying to pick out one ledge out of a bunch of them, it makes it
a little bit more narrowed down.
[Patrick] I think what's special about this survey in particular is that we're watching
a peregrine falcon population that is naturally rehabilitating itself after they were so decimated
by the DDT and the DDE.
Whereas in the lower 48 they had to 'hack' a native subspecies back into the wild.
So it's really good that we're getting this data how they're, getting themselves back
up to status without any interference on our part.
That's documented very distinctly the sharp increase in their populations over that time.
And now it seems to have leveled out at carrying capacity for the environment.
So we appear to have a very healthy, or at least a full population of Peregrine Falcons along this river.