Peregrine falcons are incredible hunters, known to ambush prey at speed or drop down on them from above. In direct pursuit, the raptor can reach speeds of up to 69mph. In a hunting stoop or dive, it can reach speeds up to 200mph. It can also, apparently, hunt at 10,000 feet above the ground. So say scientists who discovered the feat entirely by accident. They'd fitted eight grey plovers with GPS tracking devices, hoping to learn more about their northward migration from the Wadden Sea to breeding grounds in the Arctic. But just after sunset on May 27, 2023, one grey plover went off course, then stopped moving altogether.
"At that point, we were just mostly sad about the fact that we lost one bird," Michiel Boom, a migration ecologist at the University of Amsterdam, tells the New York Times. But an analysis soon revealed the bird had sped up moments before changing direction, suggesting it had been attempting to evade an attacker, and that a predation event occurred at 9,455 feet of elevation—"much higher than the altitude birds of prey are known to hunt at," per the Times. "That was the first moment where we started to be like, 'Well, that's actually pretty insane,'" says Boom, who believes the data show the highest-flying predation event ever recorded.
Researchers suspect a peregrine falcon as the plover's remains were recovered from a rock quarry in southern Sweden, in an area just 650 feet from a peregrine falcon nest. Peregrine falcons are known to attack prey from the sides of mountains. But this indicates "falcons might hunt higher than we have imagined," Sissel Sjöberg, a behavioral ecologist at Sweden's Lund University, who was not involved in the research, tells the Times. In a study published this month in Ecology, Boom and colleagues note "information about predation risk during the migratory flight is largely lacking, especially concerning at what altitudes migrants are at risk." (More animal behavior stories.)
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