06/08/2026
Not water but birds, something every boater enjoys.
In 1977, a captive-bred peregrine falcon was released on the Chesapeake Bay to help save a species that a pesticide called DDT had nearly wiped from the eastern United States. Instead of choosing a coastal cliff, she flew to downtown Baltimore and landed on the thirty-third floor of a skyscraper overlooking the Inner Harbor. Her name was Scarlett. She would spend the next seven years on that ledge, losing five mates to poison, cars, sh****ns, and bad luck before a wild male nobody planned for finally showed up and gave her the one clutch that mattered.
Her first mate was incompatible. Her second was incompatible. Her third ate rat poison and died. Her fourth flew away. Her fifth was shot with a sh***un, recovered, and was then hit by a car. Her sixth was Beauregard, and together they produced the first wild-born peregrine falcons in an eastern American city in thirty years. Then Scarlett died at age seven from a throat infection that starved her, and Beauregard cried from the ledge for days.
That is the short version. The long version starts in a lab at Cornell.
The Peregrine Fund bred Scarlett as a cross between a Chilean and a Tundra peregrine, dampening her migratory instinct so she would stay in the mid-Atlantic instead of flying south into latitudes where DDT concentrations were still lethal. She was released from Carroll Island near the Edgewood Arsenal in the fall of 1977 as part of the largest captive breeding and release program for any raptor in history.
By 1970, there were no known breeding pairs of peregrine falcons east of the Mississippi River. DDT had accumulated through the food chain into the falcons' tissues and disrupted calcium metabolism during egg formation. The shells came out too thin. The eggs broke under the weight of the incubating parent. The fastest animal on earth had been erased from half a continent by a chemical designed to kill mosquitoes.
The Peregrine Fund released captive-bred falcons at coastal cliffs and bluffs across the eastern seaboard. Scarlett was supposed to stay near the Chesapeake. In the spring of 1978, employees at the USF&G Building in downtown Baltimore noticed a falcon on their thirty-third-floor window ledge. They contacted the Peregrine Fund, who recognized her immediately from her band. She had left the coast and chosen an office building.
To a peregrine, a skyscraper is a cliff. The ledges are nesting platforms. The glass canyons create updrafts. The city below is full of pigeons and starlings that a peregrine can hit at two hundred miles per hour from three hundred feet above the street. Scarlett had found a cliff in a city that did not know it had one.
Five mates over six years. While she waited, scientists brought her captive-bred falcon chicks to raise. She adopted every one and raised them as her own on the thirty-third floor. She held that ledge through years of failure without abandoning the site.
Beauregard was wild-born, unbanded, untracked. Nobody knows where he came from. He was not part of the captive program. He appeared at the building in the early 1980s and stayed. Observer John Barber watched their courtship through the office windows. They soared together to two thousand feet above Baltimore Harbor, locked talons in midair, and dove in barrel rolls before separating and climbing again.
Four eggs on bare concrete. February 26 to March 4, 1984. All four hatched in the first week of April. Three females and one male. The entire eastern peregrine recovery had been building toward a moment like this since 1970. It happened on a window ledge in Baltimore because a lab-bred female refused to leave a skyscraper and a wild male nobody planned for decided she was worth staying for.
Scarlett's throat infection came later that year. She could not swallow. She starved on the ledge where she had spent six years refusing to give up. After she died, Beauregard called from the thirty-third floor for days until a banded female from New Jersey named Blythe arrived and paired with him. He sired another thirty-five falcons with Blythe and a later mate named Felicity.
The nest at 100 Light Street has been continuously occupied for over forty-five years. Craig Koppie, a USFWS raptor biologist, has maintained the site for most of his four-decade career. The building blocked off an entire room on the thirty-third floor so the birds could roost undisturbed. A we**am now streams the nest live.
Maryland's restored peregrines have spread to the Bay Bridge, the Key Bridge, and structures across the state, all tracing back through a recovery that started with lab-bred falcons released on coastal islands and one bird that picked a skyscraper instead.
Source: Chesapeake Conservancy / Audubon / Baltimore Sun / Baltimore Banner / AFA Watchbird.
