06/23/2026
In 1991, a peregrine falcon that had been hatched in a laboratory and released from a plywood box on a cliff in Maine fledged three wild chicks off a rock face that had not held a peregrine nest in thirty-five years.
His name was Ganesh. The Park Service documented his full arc at Acadia National Park. He was one of twenty-two captive-bred falcons set loose at Jordan Cliffs between 1984 and 1986, part of a national effort to put the peregrine back in the eastern United States after DDT had killed off every breeding pair on the eastern seaboard. Surveys in the 1930s had counted roughly 500 nest sites across the East. By the mid-1960s there were none. The pesticide did not kill the adults outright. It moved up the food chain into their tissues and thinned the eggshells until the eggs collapsed under the weight of the parent sitting on them. The last known nest on Mount Desert Island was recorded in 1956.
The method for rebuilding the species was borrowed from falconry. The Peregrine Fund, started by the Cornell ornithologist Tom Cade, bred birds in captivity from stock gathered around the world.
Biologists took chicks at three or four weeks old and placed them in a wooden hack box bolted to a cliff ledge with a view of the landscape below. They fed the birds through a chute so the young would not learn to associate food with people. When the chicks were strong enough the box was opened and they flew. The gamble was imprinting. If the bird fixed that cliff in memory as home, it might come back years later to breed there. If it did not, or if it died on migration, which many did, the investment walked off the ledge and vanished.
Ganesh went out in 1986 and came back in 1987. He claimed the Precipice, the east-facing wall on Champlain Mountain, which is one of the biggest cliff faces on the island. He held it. From 1987 through 1990, adult peregrines returned to Acadia every spring and produced nothing. No eggs that held, no chicks that fledged. Bruce Connery, the park biologist, watched the cliff each season and waited.
Then in the spring of 1991 Ganesh and his mate laid eggs on the Precipice and the eggs did not break. Three chicks hatched, grew, and flew off that wall by summer. It was the first successful wild peregrine nest at Acadia since 1956.
Ganesh came back to the same ledge every year through 1999.
Other pairs filled in at Jordan Cliffs and Valley Cove. Nationally, more than 6,000 captive-bred peregrines were released after 1974, and in 1999 the American peregrine falcon came off the federal endangered species list. Acadia alone has fledged more than 150 young since that first 1991 brood.
Every spring now the Park Service closes the Precipice Trail and Jordan Cliffs Trail and posts rangers at the trailheads to turn hikers back. The peregrines are on the ledges again, incubating eggs in shallow scrapes they scratch into the rock with their own talons, which they have done somewhere on those cliffs every single year since a lab-raised bird named Ganesh came back to a box site he remembered and refused to leave.
Source: National Park Service, Acadia National Park / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / The Peregrine Fund.
