The fastest animal alive, and a pesticide made its eggshells too thin to sit on
The Falcon holds a 4.4 from nineteen hundred and twenty-six people, charges ten to thirty pounds, and the bird in the name is the fastest animal on earth.
The stoop
Which is the dive, and the figures are genuinely difficult to believe.
A peregrine climbs, folds its wings, and drops – and it has been recorded at speeds in excess of two hundred miles an hour.
Which is faster than anything else alive, by a very long way.
And it should not survive it
Because at that speed, air is not gentle.
The pressure of the airflow would, in a normal bird, damage the lungs – and the peregrine has small bony structures in its nostrils, called tubercles, which are widely understood to slow the air before it enters.
Engineers have looked at them with considerable interest.
And it has a third eyelid – a nictitating membrane – which sweeps across the eye to clear it and keep it moist without blinding the bird.
And it nearly went extinct
Which is the part that has to be said.
Because of DDT.
And the mechanism is one of the most instructive in environmental science, because it is completely indirect.
The pesticide did not poison the birds
It accumulated up the food chain – concentrating at each level, in the fat of the animals that ate the animals that ate the insects.
And the peregrine is at the top of that chain. It eats other birds.
So it received the accumulated dose of everything below it.
And it interfered with calcium metabolism – and the falcons laid eggs with shells that were too thin.
And the eggs broke under the weight of the sitting parent.
The bird destroyed its own eggs by doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
Which is the finding
Eight postcodes and thirteen hundred and twenty-nine articles.
You cannot police an incentive. You can only remove it.
DDT was banned – and the peregrine came back, and it is now nesting on tower blocks and cathedrals across London, because a cliff is a cliff and it does not care who built it.
There are peregrines on the Tate. There are peregrines at Battersea.
It came back because people stopped doing the thing. That is the entire mechanism, and there is nothing clever about it.
And Silent Spring did it
Which is one of the very few cases in this survey where a book changed a law.
Because Rachel Carson published it in 1962 – and she laid out the mechanism, carefully, with the evidence.
And she was attacked ferociously, and personally, by the chemical industry – who questioned her competence, her motives, and, repeatedly and pointedly, the fact that she was an unmarried woman.
She was dying of cancer while she defended it.
And she was right, and the ban followed, and the peregrines are on the Tate.
Verdict
Good pub, honest number on a large sample.
