These are birds with a special charisma. Fierce, proud, the supreme athletes of the bird world, they never fail to thrill. Part of their appeal comes from their rarity for, like all predators, they can never be very numerous. However, after years of decline almost all of Britain's diurnal birds of prey are thriving.
T ake the peregrine , for example.
Then the number of breeding pairs fell to only 385 and many of these were laying thin-shelled or infertile eggs. The peregrine's future looked bleak but the persistent organochlorine pesticides, such as DDT, were banned and the peregrine population slowly recovered. T oday some 1300 pairs of peregrines breed in Britain. P igeons are the peregrine's favourite food and in inner cities this hardly creates a problem. Not so elsewhere in the country where racing-pigeon fanciers report that the falcons are decimating their flocks of homing birds.