Protect and Enjoy: The Fastest Animals on the Planet Call Black Wall Home
A peregrine falcon flies in front of the granite cliffs of Black Wall. Photo by Will Richardson
When the Truckee Donner Land Trust protected Black Wall on the east side of Donner Summit in 2015, much of the attention was on protecting a popular climbing area. But climbers aren’t the only ones who frequent the vertical granite cliff overlooking Donner Lake.
Reaching speeds of more than 200 miles per hour in a dive to catch their prey, peregrine falcons hunt the canyons, forests and meadows of Donner Summit. Each spring a pair or two settle down on Black Wall to nest and tend to their young. While these raptors seem well established now, it was a rocky road back from the edge of extinction over the past few decades.
Peregrines were one of many bird of prey species gravely harmed by DDT, a pesticide that was concentrated as it moved up the food chain, resulting in eggs too fragile to survive. But bans on DDT and similar pesticides along with reintroduction efforts have seen the species steadily grow, re-populating past habitat, including the Truckee-Tahoe area.
“Their population really crashed and they became quite rare in the US,” said Will Richardson, executive director of the Tahoe Institute for Natural Science (TINS), who has a Ph.D. in ecology, evolution and conservation biology. “There were some reintroduction efforts that didn’t really work in the Tahoe area in the 80s, but as we’ve seen with other species, if you leave them alone and give them space they do well, and 20 years later they came back.”
Black Wall.
Black Wall is typically used as a nesting site for one or two pair of peregrine falcons each year starting in the spring, Richardson said.
“A pair of peregrines will mostly return to the same nesting site every year,” Richardson said. “If they have success at that location, they try to replicate that success.”
A peregrine falcon at Black Wall. Photo by Will Richardson
Donner Summit also offers good hunting grounds.
“All around Donner Summit there are loads of canyons for them to hunt any big bird like band-tailed pigeons, flickers, robins, jays, finches – we don’t know how widely they’ll wander to find food, but it’s entirely possible they’ll hunt pigeons in downtown Truckee,” Richardson said.
Peregrines typically hunt by soaring high above their prey, diving down at speeds around 200 miles per hour, hitting the other animal so hard that it breaks their neck. It’s an act of aerial acrobatics often compared with top gun jet fighters.
"Peregrine falcons were once commonly called duck hawks because they often hunt waterfowl – but now scientists have determined that falcons are more closely related to parrots than to other hawks and eagles, with the intelligence to go with that lineage," Richardson said.
Their seasonal nesting means seasonal closures of some climbing routes on Black Wall to give the birds some space, and the Land Trust has seen great cooperation from the climbing community to help keep the nesting birds safe.
Richardson, himself a climber, has been involved in checking in on the Peregrines at Black Wall.
“One year we were told by other climbers that there weren’t any falcons, so we decided to have a look and boom, there’s a mom with one chick and two eggs hatching that day,” Richardson said. “She was just sitting there, tolerating people climbing 20 feet away – it’s pretty amazing how sneaky a big noisy bird like that can be.”
Truckee Donner Land Trust asks the public to give these birds their space, but for those who would like to catch a glimpse from a respectful distance, Richardson said now is typically the best time to take a look (click here for directions to Black Wall)
“If you sit in the lower parking lot on Old Highway 40 and listen, you’ll almost always hear them before you see them,” Richardson said. “It needs to be a calm morning in May or June and you have to sit and wait, scanning the taller cliffs and snags – they like to be up high looking down on everybody.”
Elsewhere in the region peregrines have returned to the Tahoe Basin, near Glenshire and in another cliffed area south of Donner Summit. Just recently, Richardson has been monitoring a nest on Cave Rock on Tahoe’s east shore with four eggs – a notable amount – along with an interloping male who’s wound up at Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care with injuries from his attempts to challenge the nesting pair.
“We’ve really been learning a lot about our local birds these last few years,” Richardson said.
While it’s hard to say if the population will continue to expand, Richardson said that Frog Lake Cliff (recently protected by the Land Trust), the Truckee River Canyon toward Reno (with many Land Trust protected lands) and Castle Peak are all logical places for them to nest.
This story is part of an ongoing series planned over the coming months to look at the science, the history and the culture that make Land Trust lands truly special.
Want to learn more about an aspect of natural science on Land Trust lands? Or are you an expert who’d love to lend some insight? Please send an email to greyson@tdlandtrust.org with your idea.