About Falcons
9 Conservation
Lauren Weiss
Conservation
Conservation is the act of protecting nature so it will be around in the future.
This is important when talking about peregrine falcons, since they were endangered for many years and were even extirpated, or wiped out, from eastern North America during the mid-1900s.
DDT
The reason peregrine falcons became endangered was DDT. DDT, or dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, is a synthetic chemical, which means that it was made in a lab.
It was first synthesized in 1874 by Austrian chemist Othmar Zeidler, but it wasn’t until 1939 that Swiss chemist, Paul Hermann Müller discovered DDT’s use as an insecticide, a substance that could be used to kill insects. Since there were a lot of diseases people were getting from insects, such as malaria and typhus, this was an important discovery. DDT was used in the second half of WWII to limit spread of these insect-borne diseases among civilians and troops, and was made available to the public in the United States by October 1945, where it was promoted for use as agricultural and household pesticide. Müller actually won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 for this seemingly very useful discovery.
DDT and the Environment
Although DDT did seem to help with controlling the insect population, it actually did a lot more harm than good. When DDT was sprayed on farmers’ crops, marshes, and other areas to control insect infestation, small birds would eat the DDT-contaminated insects, and then larger birds would eat those smaller birds. As a result, the amount of DDT in each step of this food chain became more and more concentrated. This is called biomagnification.
Biomagnification of DDT affected peregrine falcons and their ability to lay eggs. Since DDT prevented the falcons from getting enough calcium, the shells of the eggs they laid were too thin and broke before hatching. This happened to many birds of prey, including eagles, condors, and ospreys, and caused their populations to decline rapidly. By the 1960s, peregrine falcons had completely disappeared from the eastern US and large areas of the western US.
Opposition to DDT
Rachel Carson was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist who realized the harm that DDT was doing to the environment. In 1962, she published Silent Spring: a book that documented the harm that synthetic pesticides like DDT did to the environment and humans. She did a lot of research for this book, speaking to farmers, scientists, and government workers, and concluded that pesticides must be used responsibly and as little as possible. She also accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation and propaganda, and public officials of agreeing with it, so that people would not know that pesticides were harmful; that way, the public would continue to buy the companies’ products.
Once the book was published, it brought this problem to the attention of the public in a widespread way that had not been done befo