Peregrine Falcon print

Wings folded, body turned to a blade. Falco peregrinus in its stoop, the hunting dive that makes it the fastest animal on Earth.

Recorded speeds exceed 320 kilometres per hour. At that velocity the bird breathes through baffled nostrils, a specialisation that has no parallel in other falcons, and uses a slight rolling S-curve in the descent to keep prey in the line of sight. The stoop ends with either a closed-fist strike at impact speed, or a raking talon. The notched tomial tooth on the upper bill is used to sever the spine of anything that survives the initial hit. The whole sequence, from tip to strike, is one of the most mechanically refined behaviours in vertebrate life.

The slate-blue back, the dark hood, the barred cream breast, the wide moustache stripe dropping from beneath the dark eye: in this plate, those field marks are held in the instant of commitment. The wings are not yet open again. The prey is below, not yet visible.

By the 1970s, DDT had eliminated the Peregrine as a breeding bird across the entire eastern United States. Captive breeding programmes and protected nest sites over roughly 30 years brought it back. In 1999 it was removed from the US Endangered Species List.

The stoop worked for millions of years before the pesticides and after them. This plate holds one moment of it.

In the tradition of Audubon, on archival paper, for the wall.