Environment
Birds back from the brink in the U.P., Lower Michigan
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By BRIAN BIENKOWSKI
Capital News Service
LANSING — Thirty years after vanishing from the Midwest, peregrine falcons are thriving in smokestacks, skyscrapers and cliffs. The numbers not only rebounded, but quadrupled from the 1950s and 1960s when pesticides, mostly DDT, destroyed peregrine falcon populations. DDT caused thin, easily broken eggs. “Historically, we didn’t have that much habitat or birds in Michigan,” said Ray Rustem, assistant to the chief of marketing outreach at the Department of Natural Resources. “They were pretty much only in the Upper Peninsula.”
And while the U.P. population has bounced back, there are also peregrine falcons in the Lower Peninsula, Rustem said.