My watermark is the Pembina River, Alberta.

We're on the Pembina River, which is about 100 kilometres west of the city of Edmonton. We take young, captive-born captive-raised Peregrine Falcons, that are born in a breeding facility; when they're about 35-40 days old, we take them from the barn where they're raised by their parents and we put them in what is called a hack box. When the birds go in there, they're fed every day, they're left with a plethera of food, they become familiar with their surroundings because they can see through the bars, they become comfortable eating there, sleeping there, learning how to hunt, learning how to fly, building muscle, (and) gaining confidence on the wing.

Primarily, what we hope for is just to get these birds out, have them flying around long enough to learn the skills that they need, take the free quail as long as they need to, and ultimately go independent and disperse without losing them to predators like Great Horned Owls. Peregrine is Latin for wanderer. Since the initiation of the program in 2011, we've seen Peregrines beginning to show up on the North Saskatchewan, the Brazeau River, the Brazeau Dam, the Pembina here, a few different places they weren't prior. We are seeing the North Saskatchewan and tributaries repopulate with Peregrines.

It's virtually impossible to find Peregrins nesting anywhere on the planet that they're not fairly close to some type of waterbody, whether it's a river, or a lake, or an ocean. Not only because water tends to carve the planet into these nice cliffs that they like to nest on, water is important for the entire ecosystem. They don't drink a lot of water or bathe a whole lot themselves, but the species that they eat are really closely tied to waterways, and by default, that makes them tied to the waterway too. It's important: if there was no water here there would be no Peregrines, there's no way at all.