BTO - Breeding Birds of the Wider Countryside: Peregrine Falcon

PEREGRINE FALCON
Falco peregrinus

Peregrine Falcon © Tommy Holden

• Population
changes

• Productivity
trends

• Additional
information

Conservation listings

Europe: no SPEC category (favourable conservation status in Europe, not concentrated in Europe)
UK: amber (European status)

Long-term trend

UK, England: increase
Northwest Scotland: decline

UK population size

1,283 pairs in 1991 (Crick & Ratcliffe 1995: APEP06); 1,400 pairs in 2002 (Banks et al. 2003: BiE04)

Status summary

The UK population size, distribution and breeding performance have all largely recovered from the detrimental effects of organochlorine pesticides in the 1950s and 1960s. Populations and breeding performance have declined recently, however, in northwest Scotland and the Northern Isles (Crick & Ratcliffe 1995), and nest record information for the UK as a whole shows a significant decline in clutch size, although samples for the first ten years are small. The number of UK breeding pairs has been censused every ten years since 1961 by BTO/JNCC/RSPB/Raptor Study Groups, and has been estimated as follows: 1961 – 385 pairs; 1971 – 489 pairs; 1981 – 728 pairs; 1991 – 1,283 pairs (Ratcliffe 1993). The National Peregrine Survey 2002 found 1,402 breeding pairs, a further 10% increase overall since 1991 but with declines in north and west Scotland, North Wales and Northern Ireland (Banks et al. 2003). Similar increases across Europe have resulted in a downgrading of conservation listing from 'SPEC 3 (rare)' to 'secure' (BirdLife International 2004).

Population changes

Annual population changes are not monitored for this species

Productivity trends

Insufficient data on laying date
available for this species

Insufficient data on CES
available for this species

Additional information

Distribution maps for this species are not currently available online (see Atlases species help)
BirdFacts page on species biology


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This report should be cited as: Baillie, S.R., Marchant, J.H., Crick, H.Q.P., Noble, D.G., Balmer, D.E., Coombes, R.H., Downie, I.S., Freeman, S.N., Joys, A.C., Leech, D.I., Raven, M.J., Robinson, R.A. and Thewlis, R.M. (2006) Breeding Birds in the Wider Countryside: their conservation status 2005. BTO Research Report No. 435. BTO, Thetford. (http://www.bto.org/birdtrends) Pages maintained by Susan Waghorn and Iain Downie: Last updated 28 April, 2006