Urban Peregrines

Ed Drewitt is a professional naturalist, wildlife detective, and broadcaster for the BBC. He has been studying urban Peregrines for over 15 years, and specialises in colour ringing their chicks, and identifying what they have been eating.

This detailed account of urban Peregrines, focusing especially on city-dwelling birds in south-west England, is timely in view of the species’ continuing inclination to nest in built-up areas. The book also provides a much wider overview of the Peregrine’s biology as a whole. The author is well qualified to do just that, having studied zoology at Bristol University.Urban Peregrines contains a great deal of information, in easily readable form, on the peregrine’s way of life in our towns and cities, with much attention given to its prey selection and hunting and feeding there. The author touches on the recent decline in the British uplands, due to killing on grouse moors but apparently also to decline in avian prey species elsewhere in the hill country. Thus he flags up the growing importance of the lowland segment of the species’ population, nesting on manmade structures and clearly very much at home there.The book is well-endowed with an excellent selection of photographs, in most cases usefully placed on the same pages as the relevant text and in themselves telling us much about the Peregrine’s place in the natural world. If there were to be a second edition of this work, it would be useful to have a table setting out succinctly the known population levels of urban Peregrines in different parts of our planet. My only question mark on the book’s content is the assertion that Peregrines in Scotland may start to show some signs of concern due to people disturbance from a few miles away.Urban Peregrines is to be highly recommended, not least for its relevance to the ebb and flow of the bird’s fortunes in the first part of the 21st century.

• Preface 1. The Peregrine 2. What is an Urban Peregrine? 3. How to Spot a Peregrine 4. A Year in the Life of an Urban Peregrine 5. Food and Feeding 6. How to Study Peregrines 7. Ringing Urban Peregrines 8. Myths about Peregrines 9. Changing Threats and the Future of the Urban Peregrine 10. People and Peregrines 11. Where Next? Further reading Index