Skip Ambrose has floated the upper Yukon River almost every year since Richard Nixon was President. Back then, in 1973, only 12 pairs of peregrine falcons perched at nest sites over a 180-mile stretch of river. Ambrose saw that number rise to more than 60 in 2012. The birds’ subsequent rebound from the effects of […]
Numbers of adult peregrine falcons on the upper Yukon River in Alaska have decreased by more than a third in the last three years, according to a scientist who has counted them there for half a century. Skip Ambrose is a biologist who has observed Yukon River peregrine falcons since 1973, missing only three years […]
YUKON RIVER — “She’s starting to wail,” Chris Florian says, referring to the worrisome shriek of a peregrine falcon across the river. Florian, her biologist husband Skip Ambrose and I are sitting on warm gravel a few steps from the river on a sunny summer evening. We just ate dinner, and Ambrose is repeating an […]
The upper Colville River is one of the quietest places on the planet, a land of cliffs and tundra and tangles of willow. Fashion Island is one of the most human-altered landscapes in America, where developers long ago replaced the native vegetation with a Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang’s. A female peregrine falcon born in […]