The fastest Animal on Earth!

Did you guess it right? No it is not the Cheetah….running in excess of 100 kmph. Infact, there are quite a few birds which move faster than the cheetah. However, none of them are any match to the Perigrine Falcon. This is a bird of prey of North America. When it swoops down on its prey from great heights it reaches incredible speeds nearly 4 times that of a cheetah!!!

Surprised….?!!! Yes, as on date the highest recorded speed of a Perigrine Falcon is 389 kmph! (242 mph). Because of this gift from nature, it can sight its prey from great heights.

Once a group of people decided to take a look of this feat of the falcon more closely. They boarded a plane and reached a altitude in excess of 10,000 feet. They carried alongwith them, a Perigrine Falcon which had been trained to catch an object. The object was held in the hand of a researcher. He also held with himself a speedometer to read their actual speed. He clung to the shoulders of a seasoned skydiver and the falcon rested on the fist of another person standing closeby. The stage was all set. With final counts and checking, lo…….the researcher clinging to the skydiver jumped off…

Falling freely under the gravitational pull, they were accelerating extremely fast. The Perigrine Falcon was let off immediately after their jump. The bird, trained as it was to follow the object held by the researcher, started to chase them. Remember, the bird was not falling under gravity, it was actually swooping down as it would do to a prey it had spotted below.  Initially the distance was quite a big but started to close in comfortably fast. Meanwhile the speedometer in the hands of the researcher was showing their speeds going up nearly at the rate of 10 metres per second square. Despite the huge acceleration of free fall, the Perigrine Falcon was comfortably catching them up. At last their speed peaked at 180 kmph and thereafter it stagnated at this terminal velocity. The bird comfortably came close to them and started to move around them as if playing with them.

Having been through this for sometime, it was time to open the parachute as the ground was nearing. So they did it and soon after they landed softly on a grassy field. The Perigrine falcon which was flying with them slowly came to them and the researcher patted it and handed over the object it had been seeking for. While people converged to them to congratulate them for their feat and to find out the details of their adventure, the falcon sat nearby merrily toying with the object it had sought for from such great heights.

It was a great experience for everyone present there. But for the falcon, it was just too mundane. It had been challenged to only half of its maximum speed recorded ever!

It is Nature’s one of the great creations. Even the second fastest animal on the planet ‘The Golden Eagle” has clocked only 320 kmph i.e. 200 mph. A distant second indeed!