By the 1960s the peregrine falcon was vanishing from much of North America, its eggshells thinned by DDT until they cracked under the parents' weight. In 1970 Tom Cade, an ornithologist at Cornell University, founded The Peregrine Fund to breed peregrines in captivity and release their young, and in the decades that followed it put thousands of falcons back into the wild. In 1984 the Fund moved its breeding program and headquarters to a 580-acre hilltop south of Boise, drawn by Morley Nelson, the Boise falconer who had spent his life filming the raptors of the Snake River canyon and sat on its board. When the peregrine came off the endangered species list in 1999, the celebration was held in Boise.
The work moved on to rarer birds. Aplomado falcons have been raised here for release in the borderlands of Texas and New Mexico, and since 1993 the center has kept breeding barns for California condors, the largest land birds on the continent, which fell to fewer than thirty in the 1980s. Condors hatched in Boise are released on the Vermilion Cliffs of northern Arizona, where the Fund manages the wild flock.
The public side is the interpretive center, where live falcons, eagles and owls are shown up close, and the Herrick Collections Building, home to a research library and the Archives of Falconry. The cliffs along the Snake where Nelson first filmed the birds, now the national conservation area that carries his name, are within an hour's drive south.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour