What makes the falcon so successful at hunting its prey?

The falcon is a hunting machine. Most often known as the Peregrine Falcon, they are slim birds with a small head. The male is about a third the size of the female.  Their bodies average fifteen to twenty inches long and weigh about two pounds.  The female weighs about 10.6 ounces more than the male. Their wings are thin and pointed, and span about forty inches, allowing for great manuverability in the air.

Adult Peregrines have blue-gray wings, backs, and heads, with white undersides marked with black bars across the chest. Their chin is white, contrasted with a black band directly under the eye. This feature works like football players’ black cheek paint to reduce glare against the sun. The eyes themselves have excellent vision. Falcons can spot a small animal up to a mile away, while flying or perched. The nose has lots of little air tunnels, like a sponge, to allow great quantities of oxygen through at a time. Almost all other birds would not be able to breathe if they reached flying speeds of the falcon, for lack of air.

Falcons are raptors (in Latin, "to seize") which are birds of prey and carnivores. They typically eat other birds, even ones as large as they are, such as sparrows, starlings, gulls, ducks, and pigeons. In regular flight they average around fifty km an hour. In a dive or "stoop", they can reach speeds over three hundred kilometers an hour. That’s triple the maximum speed at which we can legally drive a car! Once they spot prey, falcons use their unique way of hunting by dive-bombing their prey so that it is overtaken by surprise and caught in mid-air. The speed at which the falcon is flying is enough to instantly kill the other bird. A capture usually takes about two minutes from beginning to end, and need to eat about twice a day (about 70 grams).

In the city it has been observed that falcons don't like to land on the ground. Even if their meal falls to the ground, they will often not retrieve it. They don't usually fly lower than the level of their nest.

Adult peregrines have no almost natural predators except humans, from our use of pesticides, altering of landscape and habitats, egg collecting, hunting, and taking of the young for falconry. Baby falcons (eyases) are also a tasty meal for owls, racoons, and mountain cats.

Check out CBC Manitoba’s webcam in May 2009 to watch baby falcons in their own "wild" nest here.

-info originally retrieved here