• Columnists

Fastest bird alive makes a quick stop in Millersburg

• John Lorson: The Rail Trail Naturalist
• February 22, 2020
• 3053

While it’s true a great deal of my inspiration comes from the creatures, plants and natural phenomena I find while riding my bicycle back and forth to work, it should be noted my eyes remain wide open for interesting and unusual things even when I’m off the bike. If I find something worthy of exploration, you can bet I’ll take a moment to watch and wonder.

And while I’ve labored over the years to train my eyes more toward the ground (I’ve been working hard at learning my wildflowers in the past couple of years), my greatest focus has always been toward the sky.

In my early days, my sky-spotting abilities earned a coveted space in the duck blind alongside my much older brother and his big-gunned buddies. This, in turn, permanently cemented the idea that anything capable of flight is well worth watching. Ducks, geese, airplanes, satellites, the Goodyear blimp — if it’s up there, I’ll see it, and I won’t quit watching until I figure out what I’m looking at and where it’s headed. It was that habit of “always looking up” that led me to a fantastic sighting just the other day in no place other than downtown Millersburg.

I was walking the block from my office at Holmes Soil and Water to a meeting near the courthouse when I noticed the smallest of anomalies atop the letter “B” on the Commercial and Savings Bank sign four stories above the sidewalk.

While the downtown area has a healthy population of pigeons that seem to shuffle between the courthouse clock tower and a nearby church belfry, the birds rarely roost in other spots. And while that flock tends to draw an occasional Cooper’s hawk to the neighborhood for an easy meal, the bird-shaped “lump” on the narrow top of the big green “B” was no place for a Cooper’s hawk to hang out. I tried to get a quick photo with my phone, then hurried off to my meeting, resolving to check it out on my return trip.

Miraculously, when I returned nearly an hour later, the bird was still atop its perch, and a slightly different angle gave me the opportunity to capture another fuzzy image of what I was really hoping might turn out to be something special. I raced toward my office, hoping to grab the camera from my bike pack, but just as I got to the door, the bird left the perch and soared overhead and looped around the downtown for a few moments before finally alighting on the communication tower of Village Hall to strike a perfect pose, offering a wide-open view.

The pointed wings and “mutton chop sideburns” that extend down from a helmet of dark plumage was all it took to finally confirm what I’d hoped from the start: I was looking at a peregrine falcon — the fastest bird on the planet.

That the crow-sized raptor had crowded itself onto the narrow edge of a sign affixed to the tallest building in town made perfect sense. Peregrines are right at home on the edge. In their most natural state, the birds actually nest on small stone outcroppings along the shear face of high cliffs — an effective deterrent to four-legged attack from predators like fox and raccoon.

Such a spot also limits predation by owls and other larger birds of prey by denying a path for a sneak attack. Careful site selection is about all the effort peregrines put into nest building. Eggs are laid and incubated right there on the rock, and once the young are fledged, they’ve got a nice launch from which to try their wings.

The peregrine falcon’s greatest claim to fame, however, is its incredible speed. Circling high above other birds on the wing, the peregrine selects a target and pulls into a wing-tucked, teardrop-shaped, hyper-aerodynamic pose to plunge thousands of feet in mere seconds toward its prey. This dive, called a “stoop,” has been clocked at an astounding 242 mph. The peregrine’s prey often has no idea what hit it.

The most geographically widespread of the falcons, the peregrine lives on every continent with the exception of Antarctica. The species was nearly eliminated entirely from the eastern U.S. by 1964, however, and fewer than 40 pairs remained in the rest of the lower 48 as a result of decades of widespread use of the chemical pesticide DDT. (I’ll discuss the tragic decline and amazing comeback of “the fastest bird on Earth” in next week’s column. See you then!)

Write with comments or questions about the natural world to The Rail Trail Naturalist, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email jlorson@alonovus.com.