Falcon (16 page)

The year 1962 saw the publication of Rachel Carson’s impas- sioned exposé of the pesticide industry and its products,
Silent Spring
, an incendiary tract that enraged the chemical industry and alerted a whole generation to the horrors of pollution. In exquisite prose, Carson detailed the new pesticide compounds and their effects on habitats, communities, animals and people. The amount of ddt being used was extraordinary. In eastern us orchards, for example, repeat applications left as much as 32 lb of the stuff per acre. The dark-hooded eastern
anatum
American peregrines that hunted prey over such orchards were hardest hit of all. Their decline in the 1940s and ’50s had been unex- pected, unprecedented, almost unobserved, and in some areas almost complete. They were soon to be extinct. Environmental journalist David Zimmerman decided later that ‘the peregrine declined unnoticed because it is not adorable, a woman’s bird, easily kept track of on lawn and feeder – and easily missed. It is a man’s bird, a strong, silent, solitary raptor.’
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proof and panic

As
Silent Spring
hit the bookstands, the eminent American ornithologist Joseph Hickey heard that not a single one of these ‘strong and silent’ raptors had fledged in the whole eastern us that year. ‘I think I assumed’, he later said, ‘that falconers – real and would-be – had been very, very busy. I did not realise that most of the eyries in this region had by this time been actually

and mysteriously deserted.’
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Alarmed, he organized a pere- grine survey and so appalling were the results – all of the hundred or so eyries surveyed were abandoned – that he con- vened an international conference on the peregrine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1965. The delegates heard news worse than anyone had imagined. As the reports came in, a terrifying picture emerged. This was not a local problem: it was a transcontinental, perhaps global one. It seemed the pere- grine might disappear forever.

Derek Ratcliffe’s conference presentation was persuasive. It maintained that pesticides had caused this decline. Ratcliffe had also solved the mystery of falcons eating their own eggs. While handling eggshells from a recently deserted British eyrie he noticed that they seemed thinner than those of eggs from old museum collections. Following up his hunch he discovered modern eggshells were 20 per cent thinner than pre-war shells

– thus they were easily crushed during incubation. And once inadvertently broken, female peregrines did what they’d always done with broken eggs – ate them. The same thinning was occurring in us peregrine eggs. And later, two government laboratories, Monkswood Experimental Station in Britain and the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, finally supplied experimentally tested proof that peregrines were accu- mulating large loads of ddt in their bodies by preying on contaminated birds. Poisoned peregrines either died outright, or, because the metabolites of ddt affected calcium uptake, they laid thin-shelled, unviable eggs.

As the plight of the peregrine came to the public eye, those old parallels between human and hawk achieved a startling new significance. To a public suffering from extreme Cold War para- noia, a public who had lost trust in technological fixes, lost trust in governments, who had suffered scares over Thalidomide,

Strontium-90, fallout, oil spills and nuclear oblivion, pesticides were one more nail in the coffin of institutional science and the myth of progress. The falcon became ‘a distilled essence of wild- ness’ as
Defenders of Wildlife
magazine put it.
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And it became a human analogue, too. Parallels between radiation sickness and pesticide poisoning were graphically traced: again and again the public stared at neat little pyramidal diagrams showing how radioactive fallout fell onto grass, was eaten by cows, accumulated in their milk and finally ended up sequestered in the bones of nursing mothers. These bioaccu- mulation diagrams were almost indistinguishable from others showing the build-up of ddt in the tissues of another top pred- ator, the peregrine.

Suddenly, falcon and human were fellow-sufferers of the industrial disease, both at the tops of their respective food chains, and the fate of the peregrine became a parable of the effluent society, an ominous foreshadowing of the fate of mankind itself. Disney’s tv nature-biopic
Varda, the Peregrine Falcon
revolved around the ‘dark and unhappy environmental threat to the Peregrine’s survival’ and became the highest-rated show of 1968, with 60 million viewers.
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British Prime Minister Harold Wilson toured the toxic chemicals unit at Monks Wood Experimental Research Station in 1970 and stared gloomily at a

Prime Minister Harold Wilson meets a dead peregrine on a visit to Monks Wood Experi- mental Research Station.

dead peregrine in front of the photographers. The white heat of the technological revolution had had unfortunate side effects.

clinical ornithology

What could be done? Protecting the peregrine was essential – and legislation duly followed. But persecution wasn’t the prob- lem. Pesticides were. Many delegates at Hickey’s conference wanted to do something
now
. Many were falconers, practically minded obsessives horrified by the possible extinction of the peregrine and aghast that they might never again be able to fly the species.

In Britain, a hard-won voluntary ban on some of the persist- ent pesticides had been achieved, and the decline of peregrines seemed to have slowed. But in the us things were critical. Thirteen of the Madison conference delegates formed the Raptor Research Foundation under the leadership of falconer Don Hunter. The rrf saw itself as a clearing house to assemble and coordinate information on raptor ecology and captive breeding – at heart, it was a crash programme, an all-out effort to stop the extinction of the peregrine. Its meetings were ardu- ous, intense. They ran from 8 o’clock in the morning until 10.30 at night: passionate brainstorming sessions on possibilities, strategies, techniques.

These individuals pioneered radically manipulative and intrusive conservation techniques far from the ‘protect and con- serve’ ethos of hands-off environmentalists. David Zimmerman described this new applied science as ‘clinical ornithology’: active human interventions in the life cycles of endangered birds. It was an unremarkable methodology for falconers and aviculturalists familiar with the practical aspects of handling captive birds. So, they thought: why not rescue thin-shelled

eggs from eyries and hatch them in artificial incubators, later returning the young to the nest? How about cross-fostering young peregrines into prairie falcon nests for the prairie falcons to rear? Most radical of all, would it be possible to breed falcons in captivity and release the young into a cleaner future wild? These plans required untested skills and techniques. Was it pos- sible to mass-produce falcons in captivity? If so,
how
? Would it work? What did you need?

For many commentators in the early 1970s, mass-producing falcons in captivity was unthinkable. How could one expect a doomed, distilled essence of wildness to breed in a pen like a chicken or pigeon? Faith McNulty wrote in the
New Yorker
that falcon breeding was a feat ‘so difficult that it cannot repopulate the wild or provide birds for fanciers’.
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But she was already being proved wrong. Backyard falcon breeders had taken up the challenge across North America, building a vast assortment of pens and aviaries, and all praying that their peregrines, prairie falcons, lanner falcons and other raptors would breed. These private efforts coexisted with several large institutional projects,

Domesticated quail are an excel- lent food source for captive-bred falcons. A female peregrine stares down the photo- grapher before feeding her three young eyasses.

the origins of which can all be traced back to that first rrf meeting: a Canadian Wildlife Service facility run by Richard Fyfe in Alberta, California’s Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group and the Raptor Research Center at the University of Minnesota.

But whether falcon enthusiasts keeping a pair of falcons in a modified shed or a whole team of phds watching peregrines on cctv, everyone shared data, reports and skills. The question
How does one breed falcons?
was all that mattered. And gradu- ally things became clearer. You didn’t need a huge aviary to breed a falcon. They liked relatively enclosed aviaries. They liked a choice of nest-ledges. If you removed a first clutch of eggs for artificial incubation, the pair would lay another clutch, vastly increasing their productivity. Young birds taken as nestlings were far more likely to breed in captivity than birds trapped at a later age. And so on.

the peregrine fund

In the us the falcon-breeding facility at Cornell University rap- idly became the most successful and famous project of all. It was the brainchild of Tom Cade, Director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Cade had been a falcon aficionado from the moment he’d watched a female peregrine cut down a coot over San Dismas Reservoir in California as a boy. ‘We heard a sound, a whistling sound like a six-inch shell passing overhead. It was a peregrine’, he recalled.
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Cornell’s 230-foot-long falcon building was so well-appointed that it became known as the peregrine palace. It housed 40 pairs of large falcons, largely donated by falconers, in spacious, experimental breeding chambers under constant cctv surveil- lance. The project aimed to mass-produce peregrines for

falconers, for scientific study and, most crucially, for reintro- duction into the wild, and it soon became incorporated as The Peregrine Fund, Inc. This was conservation ‘big science’, a vig- orous, proselytizing effort, and one requiring serious funding. The funds came from diverse sources – the National Science Foundation, ibm, the Audubon Society, World Wildlife Fund, us Fish and Wildlife Service, even the us Army Materiel Command. The Peregrine Fund’s proactive attitude to publicity leant it a high media profile and it received thousands of private donations from a concerned and willing public; from the us Army to the proceeds of schoolyard and cookie sales, every dol- lar counted.

By 1973 the Peregrine Fund was producing 20 young from only three fertile pairs of peregrines, and in Alberta Richard Fyfe’s project was also producing young – as were many breed- ers across the us. And Peregrine Fund co-founder Bob Berry had pioneered a new technique to breed even more falcons: artificial insemination. A standard technique for present-day falcon breeders, it requires considerable – and unusual – skills. If a young falcon is reared by humans, it will ‘imprint’ upon them, responding to them as if they were falcons themselves. The task of an imprint handler is to build a pair-bond with an imprinted falcon, mirroring the behaviour of a real falcon: bow- ing like a courting falcon, making ‘chupping’ courtship noises, bringing it food. Eventually the falcon – if male – will mate with its handler, copulating on a specially designed latex hat. The imprint handler then collects the falcon semen with a pipette and uses it to inseminate an imprint female falcon. It’s all in a day’s work. These–bird human ai relationships tend to evoke mild discomfiture or sniggering from the general public. Imprint handlers soon learn not to discuss the ins and outs of their profession with their non-falcon-breeder friends.