Article

2022 Falcon Monitoring Season Starting Soon

January 2022 - The 2022 prairie and peregrine falcon monitoring season at Pinnacles National Park is almost here! It will begin officially on January 18th, when the park will implement its annual raptor advisories. The monitoring season corresponds with the falcon breeding season, and the monitoring-informed advisories help rock climbers and off-trail hikers avoid disturbing these amazing park predators when they are most vulnerable. The season and the advisories will last until June or July, depending on when the last falcon young fledge.

Line graph of prairie, peregrine, and total falcon fledglings, with a dashed line indicating there have been 27.3 total fledglings on average. Recent years were below average, but the lines shoot up in 2021 reaching a total of 40 fledglings. — Graph of falcon fledglings from 1984 to 2021. Note how high the 2021 count (40 total fledglings, including 31 prairie falcon and 9 peregrine falcon fledglings) is compared to the previous six years.

As the season nears, biologists, staff, and volunteers who help with the monitoring are all anxiously wondering what it will be like. Will it resemble the 2021 season, when the monitoring team recorded the third highest number of falcon fledglings in the monitoring program’s 35-year history? Or will it be more like the six years prior, when combined falcon fledgling numbers were below average in spite of exciting gains by the park’s returning peregrine population? Let the monitoring begin!