The photographs in this book depict the peregrine falcon in all its grace and beauty. Peregrines are among the most widely distributed of birds, at home on six continents. Never plentiful, they are now among the rarest of living creatures. The cause of their decline, in the 1950s and 1960s, was the contamination of their food chain by pesticides, primarily DDT. As author Candace Savage warns, DDT and other persistent pesticides, long banned in developed countries, are still manufactured in chemical plants and exported to the Third World, while chemical compounds currently used in Western countries may be almost as deadly to the birds. Candace Savage is the author of Wolves and Grizzly Bears.