Global Range: (>2,500,000 square km (greater than 1,000,000 square miles)) Nearly cosmopolitan; breeds on every continent except Antarctica; absent from high mountains, desert regions of Africa, Asia, and Australia, and from most tropical forests; occasionally reaches Hawaii. In North America, much recovery of populations has occurred, but the large area extending from the western Cascades of Oregon and Washington to the eastern slope of the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming and Montana and north into the southern provinces of Canada still was largely unoccupied in the early 1990s (The Peregrine Fund 1992).