The World's Fastest Animal

Still on Day nine, July 23rd, 2024, after our walk where we viewed the rough-legged hawk nest, we returned to the shore and had lunch on the gravel beach. A peregrine falcon nest had been built halfway up the red cliffs on one end of the beach, and, from it, several large white chicks were watching the world. Flying high above, their parents shrieked that we were a little too close to their nest for comfort. We were in fact quite far away, and did not move any closer, but I was able to get some good pictures using the powerful zoom on my Canon camera.
Humans usually consider themselves the apex of the evolutionary process, but the superbly engineered peregrine falcon gives us a run for our money. It has a notch in its beak that facilitates severing the spinal cord of prey birds. Small bony tubercles on its nostrils are thought to guide airflow away from its nostrils during high-speed dives, and although its breast and throat are white, black bands under its eyes reduce glare from sunlight so it can see better. During its high-speed hunting dives, it has been clocked at 389 kilometres per hour.  Can any other animal match that?
It is shocking that only a few short decades ago, the high-flying peregrine nearly fell over the brink into extinction. Many of them nest in the pristine Canadian Arctic, but they fly to the more polluted south for the winter. Pesticides, especially DDT, reduced the calcium in their egg shells, and the young could not hatch normally. 
We embarked and continued through the dramatic Firth River Canyon, but then, suddenly, the canyon was behind us and everything was different. We were on the tundra. We stopped after several more kilometres and set up camp. Ruth and I put up our tent on a small pile of sand some distance from the river. The wet ground all around our tent was pockmarked with the imprints of thousands of caribou hoofs. The porcupine herd had obviously been through here not long before we arrived.
After a break, we all walked a kilometre or two across the tundra to Engigstciak, a very intriguing small mountain that we will need to discuss further!