IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT THE SIGHT OF ROBINS DYING ON CITY lawns got people’s attention once the DDT sprayers had passed. Robins are ubiquitous and easy to love, a harbinger of spring, and about as close to nature as some city dwellers get.
But what about the peregrine falcon? It is not so easily embraced, except by those who know it well, and even some of them are conflicted. The peregrine’s colors are not spectacular. Adults are slate black and barred on the chest. Most Americans in 1968 had probably never heard of this solitary raptor. Those who had fell into several disparate categories: Bird-watchers who appreciated its dramatic aerial displays. Pigeon racers and duck hunters who despised it for taking their birds on the wing. Falconers who sought to tame it. Egg hunters who robbed its aeries.
Early editions of Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds carried this message in its index: “Peregrine. See Hawk, Duck.” The peregrine, was, of course, not a hawk at all, and the reference struck a pejorative note among some populations, duck hunters among them.
Authors who opposed a ban on DDT treated it with disdain. In the 1973 book DDT Myth: Triumph of the Amateurs, journalist Rita Gray Beatty made the case that the DDT battles were unduly influenced by uninformed citizen activists. She found it necessary to disparage the peregrine falcon, too, writing, “The unpleasant ecological fact remains that the peregrine falcon, throughout 90 percent of its worldwide range, is a weed species commonly called the duck hawk.”1
Her point: Even if DDT did impact some species, they weren’t worth the worry.
People like Frederick Ott, the Milwaukeean who used his connections to raise funds for the DDT hearing in Madison, had a different view of the bird. The peregrine had come within a whisper of extinction, but a few determined people sought to bring it back, and Ott was among them. By the time he died in 2008, the peregrine had been removed from the endangered species list. Greg Septon, founder of the Wisconsin Peregrine Society, credited Ott for the bird’s revival. “He loved peregrines and he loved being around when I was banding the birds,” Septon said. “He helped me get started early on and cut through the red tape.”2 The birds had been absent from the state for more than twenty years, but Ott died knowing that dozens of nesting pairs had been reintroduced in his home state, producing young each year.
Joseph Hickey’s affinity for the bird is well documented. Little wonder: what the bird lacks in good looks, it makes up for with aerial ability. About the same size as a crow, peregrines are recognized as the fastest-flying bird in the world, capable of diving speeds up to two hundred miles per hour.
It is a cosmopolitan bird species, one of the most widely distributed in the world. Its Latin name, Falco peregrinus, means “falcon wanderer,” and it is a good fit for a bird that is found on every continent except Antarctica. But despite this wide distribution, the falcon wanderer’s worldwide population has never been high. When its numbers began to tumble, the bird quickly edged near extinction. Hickey’s peregrine conference in 1965 drew attention to this imminent threat.
In earlier times, Hickey had reveled in the bird’s wild behavior. Having adapted well to the tall buildings that humans erected in their twentieth-century cities, the birds found new nesting sites but didn’t change their behavior. This, for a boy from the Bronx, provided some storytelling fodder.
Upon receiving the Audubon Medal in 1984, he regaled the crowd at the Grand Hyatt hotel in New York with peregrine stories.
Recalling his days with the Bronx County Bird Club, Hickey said, “The high point of New York’s birding in the late 1930s and early 1940s was the nesting of the peregrine falcon on Manhattan Island. About 20 different individuals overwintered each year in the city. In 1938 a pair took up year-round residence in mid-Manhattan. . . . Their main [aerie] was the Hotel St. Regis on Fifth Avenue where they nested in 1943, 1946 and 1947. The sight of the male peregrine racing down the avenue over the taxicabs and after a pigeon was one of the great spectacles of Atlantic Coast birding.”3
Then came an encounter with a movie star. “The excitement reached a peak in 1947, when a motion picture actress, Miss Olivia de Havilland, decided to take a sun bath on a balcony within a few feet of the peregrine nest full of half-grown young. You can readily visualize the pandemonium that followed. Our female peregrine falcon began to scream and attack Miss de Havilland, who retreated in panic and bewilderment. The management was called. The N.Y. Police Department followed. The Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was next brought in. Rosie Edge of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary was consulted. In the end, our Fifth Avenue babies were removed from the St. Regis, sent to Lehigh University and raised on top of the biology building there.”
Things took a drastic turn for the worse for the world’s peregrine populations about the time of de Havilland’s unfortunate sun bath.
While Hickey, Derek Ratcliffe, Lucille Stickel, and Dan Anderson helped solve the mystery of the bird’s rapid and nearly total decline, another name merits mention: Joseph Hagar. A Massachusetts ornithologist and longtime peregrine admirer and protector, he might well have been the first person on Earth to notice peregrine mating problems. At the time, though, he blamed predators.4
As a young man in the 1930s, Hagar organized a sanctuary system to protect Massachusetts birds of prey from egg collectors, hunters, falconers, and other humans. He kept a close eye on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s fourteen peregrine aeries, witnessing the male peregrine’s spectacular mating flights and other antics of the falcon wanderers under his watch.
Three decades later, Hagar was in Madison, at Hickey’s peregrine conference, telling scientists that no peregrines were to be found anywhere in Massachusetts. He had first noticed something was wrong in 1947.
Seeking to capture a photograph of a falcon family, he set up in a blind near an aerie that had produced four young hawks the previous year. He recalled watching the female scrape an indentation in the rocks on the rock ledge (peregrines are notoriously sloppy nest builders) and lay three eggs. One afternoon when he returned to the cliff, he saw that two of the three eggs were broken. The falcons courted again, and the female laid four more eggs. Only one hatched, and it died a nestling. The birds tried again in 1950, failing. In 1951, they returned once more, but did not mate. That was the last he saw of the pair.
Hagar had seen raccoon tracks near the broken eggs and decided they were the cause of the birds’ failure to reproduce. It would be another fifteen years before DDT was found to be the cause. By that time, peregrines had virtually vanished in many of the places they had inhabited for centuries.
The species’ low population numbers in the best of times and its preference for inaccessible nesting sites helped keep its decline a secret. Migrant falcons traveling routes from the Arctic tundra to the tropics also served to mask the decline, as did the adult birds’ relatively long life span, which was a buffer to an immediate population crash even if the birds weren’t reproducing.
As researchers from the United States and several European countries compared their findings at Hickey’s Madison conference, the truth about the thinning eggshells sought out Hagar. “I was more impressed [in 1947–1950] with the significance of the raccoons than I am now; it is wholly unlikely that they could have been the whole story, even in Massachusetts.”5
In a paper delivered at the 1965 Madison peregrine conference, Derek Ratcliffe—who later would play a major role in sorting out the cause of the decline—speculated on causes of the birds’ population decline, ruling out dwindling food supply, persecution (at the hands of humans), and other possibilities and focusing on what he considered two likely causes: “increase in radioactive fallout and in use of agricultural pesticides.”6 But he didn’t know how to compare eggshell thickness in the DDT era to that of earlier years. That’s when illegal collectors of eggs became part of the story.
In a 1970 New York Times Magazine article on peregrines, David Zimmerman wrote: “Nest robbing, for the purpose of building large collections of blown-out eggs, had long been a popular subcult of ornithology, and a persistent—and destructive—non-ornithological hobby. Immense numbers of eggs, of all species, were preserved in private and museum collections. An obsessive breed, many egg collectors carefully recorded the place and date they stole each egg. Now, one could compare the weight, size and shell thickness of eggs taken before 1946 with eggshells taken from current, unproductive English peregrine [aeries].”7
Following up on his hypothesis about agricultural pesticides, Ratcliffe traveled across England, from museum to museum, collector to collector, weighing and measuring blown-out eggs. He found a direct link between eggshell thinning and the use of DDT. Learning of this, Hickey quickly arranged to duplicate the study in the United States. That’s when he sent Dan Anderson on the great egg hunt.