four
Threatened Falcons
SNOW LEOPARDS. Giant pandas. Peregrine falcons. Bengal tigers. All are rare and spectacular animals, icons of environmentalism, stars of the small screen. Their faces are familiar from magazine covers and their lives are favoured subjects for nature writers. These are species bathed in an aura denied other, commoner creatures. Put bluntly, they’re celebrities. They exist in the wild, but they live in glossy magazines. And the peregrine is right up there on the ‘A-list’, along with a select few other icons of extinction. Rarity is a slippery concept. Separating its biological from its cultural meanings is a difficult task. Animals on that A-list seem made of rarity, an identity-characteristic almost impossible to ‘think round’ to get to the animal itself. Just as the decline in house sparrows in Britain in the 1990s was masked by the species’ presumed ubiquity, so upturns in the fortune of celebrity endangered animals often fail to register on popular consciousness. In 2004, for example, a BBC webpage described peregrine falcons as being ‘now rare enough to share the same protection as the Giant Panda’, even though peregrines are commoner today in Britain than ever before.1
How does one become a celebrity animal? Both pandas and peregrines got their A-list status during the 1960s and ’70s. Pandas sent as diplomatic gifts from China were Cold War icons; their sex lives in Western zoos had ramifications far beyond their conservation value. And peregrines? The threat to the peregrine in the 1950s and ’60s was real. An entire race of peregrines – the huge, dark anatum birds of the eastern US – became extinct and across a vast swathe of North America and Europe peregrine populations plummeted to frighteningly low levels. This disaster mightily increased a series of symbolic attributions previously accorded peregrines – ones relating to wilderness and primitivist glamour – and transformed the peregrine falcon into a supreme icon of environmental destruction, a symbol of how science and technological progress had betrayed its promise to build a better world.
Traders selling saker falcons in Beijing, 1909. These may have been destined for falconry, but, despite government protection, falcons are still eaten in parts of China.
PARADISE LOST
Part of the compulsion of the falcon conservation story as it is generally told is derived from its mythical structure. It’s a familiar one – a biblical one. Once, in a distant, Edenic past, it explains, humans lived in harmony with falcons, accorded them reverence. They were worshipped as gods or messengers to the gods. Later, they were treasured as falconry birds, the consorts of kings and emperors. Then came the Fall. Our bond with the wild was lost, and the downturn in the symbolic and biological fortunes of falcons was vast and desperate, first with the massive nineteenth-century raptor extermination campaigns, and second with the calamitous effects of pesticides on falcons in the 1950s and ’60s. But this is an Edenic story with an upside, of course, for we are telling it to ourselves: enlightenment and redemption have already occurred. A gradual understanding of the importance of these birds to natural ecosystems, coupled with a new attitude towards predators and nature as a whole, drove US to save them in the nick of time. Once again, it seems, humans understand and protect these special birds.
The Eden story is a powerful legitimating myth. It can be a force for good, energizing conservation action and promoting consideration of the ethics of human relations with the natural world. But like all myths it is a partial reading, obscuring facts that get in the way of the story. Falcons were indeed worshipped as manifestations of divinity in ancient Egypt. But the massive trade in live falcons for mummification ‘falls out’ of the story. In early modern Europe, falcons were certainly the birds of kings. But what of the innumerable falcons that perished as they were shipped across continents by falcon traders? And while falcons were protected by law in the Middle Ages, with harsh punishments for commoners who dared to catch falcons or take their eggs, such laws evidence the exercise of power, not concern for the welfare of falcons. We should be wary of ascribing an enlightened view of nature to medieval kings simply because they wished to protect their own symbolic capital. And crucially, the Eden myth masks clear and present conservation dangers. It would be crazy not to celebrate the return of the peregrine falcon after the dark DDT era, or fail to applaud the passionate hard work of those individuals and institutions that helped this happen. But delight should be tempered with a realization that we are not wholly redeemed; this is not the end of the story; habitat loss, pesticides and falcon smuggling are still endangering falcon populations across much of the world, as the end of this chapter shows.
But the Edenic mythical structure of the falcon story is, however, rooted in historical reality. This story can only be told at all because the cultural history of falcons has been indubitably marked by spectacular, vast changes in their symbolic fortunes.
THE FALL
By the nineteenth century, shooting held the sporting capital once accorded to falconry. ‘Shooting flying’ had become the test of the true marksman, the pursuit of elite sporting society. Shotgun retorts, not falcon bells, rang across European moor, crag and manor. Estate owners competed with each other to provide record bags of game for invited guns. And any animals that threatened to compete with guns for game were persona non grata. No longer the consorts of kings, falcons had become the worst of vermin. And so began an era of vast raptor extermination campaigns:
Sportsmen early learn that this hawk is exceptionally obnoxious to the amusement . . . it is a remorseless marauder and murderer, killing for amusement after satisfying its hunger completely. No man should be accounted a genuine sportsman with the gun who does not instantly slaughter the Duck Hawk [peregrine] on sight.2
Killing birds of prey was a condition of employment for nineteenth-century British gamekeepers. On one Scottish estate, for example, new keepers signed an oath that they would use their ‘best endeavours to destroy all birds of prey, etc., with their nests, wherever they can be found therein. So help me God.’3 Fallen falcon corpses were hung on gibbets, or sent to taxidermists who transformed them into trophies for display in domestic spaces: the bird of kings reduced to a bundle of bones and feathers swinging from a tree, or cured with arsenic and set behind glass. ‘Alas!’, wrote British falconer-naturalist J. E. Harting in his 1871 guide The Ornithology of Shakespeare, ‘that we should live to see our noble falcons gibbeted, like thieves, upon the “keeper’s tree”.’4
A recently mounted peregrine falcon, from Montagu Browne’s 1884 Practical Taxidermy. The cords, cards and pins were removed after a few weeks.
A few balked at the slaughter. Scottish keeper Dugald Macintyre was, unusually, a falconer; he saw falcons as natural sportsmen sharing the skills, mores and spoils of his world. Wild peregrines, he explained, timed their stoops at quarry ‘just as a great shot times the arrival of his shot-charge at a distant flying target’,5 and he thought they dispatched grouse far more humanely than humans. But viewing falcons as natural sportsmen didn’t preclude their killing. In many cases, it simply made them a more tempting target for the nineteenth-century sporting gentleman. Shooting a falcon granted him an opportunity to pit his wits against an opponent that possessed sufficient commonalities with his own self-image to make the battle a worthy one. A duel, say. A shot peregrine sent to Roland Ward, taxidermist of Piccadilly, and then displayed in one’s house, was at once a trophy, a guarantor of one’s prowess and a metaphorical extension of oneself. The imperilled peregrines of Henry Williamson’s 1923 nature-fable The Peregrine’s Saga clearly demonstrate this continuing alignment of falcon with modern aristocrat. Williamson’s peregrines are mirror images of a fading British aristocracy dealt a double blow by the First World War and harsh new tax regimens. Blood-lineages, power, history and nobility are what Williamson’s peregrines are made of: one peregrine family, ‘the Devon Chakcheks’, was ‘a family haughtier and more feared than any other in the West Country’; an ‘ancient and noble house’.6 Indeed, an ‘English King’ had once conferred an earldom on an ancestor of one of Williamson’s falcons.7
In the 1900s US Government scientists showed that not all raptors were game-bird slaughterers; some preferred to eat mice and frogs. Raptors could now be seen as either beneficial or pernicious, as having ‘good or bad habits’. Depression-era bird enthusiasts seized upon this with glee. They circulated leaflets that described hawks as ‘soldiers’ waging war against enemy rodents that ate American crops. ‘Protecting hawks’, they wrote, ‘will help prevent starvation’.8 But the peregrine’s American common name of ‘Duck Hawk’ won it no favours from hunters in this period, however, and nor did the large falcons gain much from the results of economic ornithologist’s examinations:
Gray Gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus rusticolus); 5 stomachs; 4 contained field mice; the other, remains of a Gull. Prairie falcon (F. mexicanus); good and bad habits about balanced; takes game birds and also pernicious rodents . . . Duck Hawk (F. peregrinus); harmful to water birds and poultry; takes also small birds; feeds to some extent on insects and mice but on the whole more harmful than useful.9
Killing ‘bad’ birds of prey was considered a morally and biologically responsible act. The view was to persist well into the twentieth century. America’s foremost bird conservation organization, the Audubon Society, shot birds of prey on their bird sanctuaries in the 1920s; in many European countries, bounties were still paid for dead raptors in the 1950s and ’60s. Conservation’s roots in game management were reflected in the policy of many organizations and governmental bodies. In 1958 a delegate at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature told Phyllis Barclay-Smith that she couldn’t be a bird preservationist if she advocated the protection of birds of prey.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT?
Halcyon days were had by hawk-shooters in interwar America. So many of them congregated to shoot migrating raptors from Blue Mountain in Pennsylvania that their spent brass shells were collected and sold for scrap. But times were changing. Alerted by horrified bird lovers, Rosalie Edge bought the mountain in 1934, renamed it Hawk Mountain, and ushered in a new era; crowds now came to watch raptors, not kill them. In Massachusetts, ornithologist Joseph Hagar posted hawk wardens to guard each peregrine eyrie from egg collectors, gunners, falconers and other disturbances. Watching peregrine eyries brought other benefits, too: sublime sights of flying skills surpassing those of the world’s greatest aviators; Hagar’s excitement at the spectacle of one ‘diving, plunging, saw-toothing’ displaying tiercel peregrine is palpable. The tiercel ‘fell like a thunderbolt . . . described three, successive, vertical loop-the-loops’ and then
roared out over our heads with the wind rushing through his wings like ripping canvas. Against the background of the cliff his terrific speed was much more apparent than it had been in the open sky. The sheer excitement of watching such a performance was tremendous; we felt a strong impulse to stand and cheer.10
Hagar’s passage hints also at another changing symbolic milieu for falcons. The ‘ripping canvas’ is a clue: the passage is drenched in the language of air-age evangelism. Falcons were symbolically made anew by the craze for aviation and its themes of aerial heroism, wind, speed and power that swept the nation in the inter-war years.
Surges of environmental nationalism, spurred in part by increasing tourism, were increasingly promoting animal species as living examples of America’s wild past.11 Animals were now serious entertainment, ‘stories’ of American history to be read by the citizen. Field ornithologist Arthur Allen pleaded for mercy for the peregrine by writing a ‘bird-biography’ in a young person’s bird-study magazine that presented the peregrine in terms of a thrillingly romantic primitivism. He wrote it in the voice of the peregrine – the voice of a thousand boy’s adventure magazines.
I and my story are not for the faint hearted . . . let me arouse in you only those feelings known to the savage breast: the joy of physical combat, the thrill at physical destruction and the fall of the adversary. Let me but give you one elemental thrill, and I have done for you that in which all the lesser feathered folk have failed and I am satisfied.12
Absorbing such wonderfully primitive falcon qualities no longer necessitated shooting them. Now you could ‘capture’ them on camera, or commune with them through telescopes or binoculars. Or through training them: falconry had a strong renaissance in this period. The films, lectures, books and articles of Captain C.W.R. Knight revealed a very different kind of falcon. Knight was a hugely popular lecturer of the period; falconer, talented filmmaker, dedicated naturalist, raconteur and natural showman, his stage appearances with his trained golden eagle Mr Ramshaw in the US and UK were legendary. Knight promoted falcons as swashbuckling adventurers, yes, and brave fighters, but also good mothers and fathers. These falcons weren’t villains: they were model citizens.
Energetic young falconer-naturalist twins Frank and John Craighead built on Knight’s legacy with a series of popular books and photo-essays. They saw their own adventurous selves mirrored in the falcons they studied. Here, Frank Craighead exchanges looks with a wild female peregrine:
Those eyes revealed her nature, and in them I could see her life. I could see love of freedom, of wild unconfined spaces. I could see the spirit of adventure, the desire for thrills, an appetite for daring. I could see the roving, wandering lust of a Ulysses of the air, a vagabond that was out to see the world and to challenge it.13
The Craighead twins described their trained raptors in terms previously reserved for traditional family pets; these falcons were loveable, characterful birds. The ‘gentle intelligent look [of] recognition and friendliness’ of their young peregrine, Ulysses, changed for the better as he grew into adulthood, his puppy-like curiosity maturing into a powerful independence and reserve: witness here how the falcon traces the culturally sanctioned trajectory of American youth.14
The Craigheads themselves matured; years later, in the 1950s, they published a monograph on predation ecology that promoted raptors as guardians of ecological order. Raptor predation balanced prey populations with each other and with their total environment, creating a mean, a middle path. And intriguingly, new, scientific understandings of falcons often coincided with much earlier understandings of their natural roles. Across the Atlantic, ecologist Harry Southern saw a valuable role for raptors in the reconstruction of post-war Britain. ‘Carefully contrived introductions’ of birds of prey, he suggested, would reduce the populations of rodents that blighted agricultural production and prevented ‘the regeneration of our national forests’.15 For Southern, raptors were allies; scientific co-workers in large-scale ecological experiments for the public good. And just as a well-functioning society was founded on different human roles and professions, contemporary ecologists saw each species as having its own role and profession in the society of nature. And the role of falcons? As ‘invulnerable species’ at the top of trophic pyramids. This characterization of falcons as top of the food chain, as the terminal focus of energy in a wildlife community, strengthened their long-standing alignment with high social status. The falcon was seen as the romantic ‘embodiment of true majesty’, but now this familiar notion could be guaranteed by science itself. Such a conflation of ecological theory and popular cultural symbolism appears to have informed the final sentence of Southern’s article, in which he proposed that ‘vanishing or lost birds of prey should be encouraged to re-enter into their kingdoms’.16
EXTINCTION
But falcons were doing precisely the reverse. Quietly, and almost invisibly, they were disappearing. Despondent falcon enthusiasts were the first to note that their local falcons were failing to breed, but had no idea why. Nor did they have any inkling of the wider picture. In Massachusetts, for example, Joseph Hagar blamed raccoons for the year-on-year failure of his local peregrine eyrie. When the parent birds finally disappeared from their historic cliff in 1950, they left a history of four strange years of sick chicks, shell fragments and vanishing eggs. Across the Atlantic on the rocky, surf-buffeted coast of Cornwall, British peregrine enthusiast Dick Treleaven was similarly puzzled. He reported that only one of six eyries he observed had successfully raised young in 1957 and in 1958 all of them failed. Such ominous reports by amateur naturalists were not so much discounted by mainstream scientists as simply missed. For example, Treleaven reported his findings in The Falconer, the journal of the British Falconers Club, a publication outside the purview of academic ornithologists.
The large, dark, eastern North American anatum peregrine. A few years after this photograph was taken, pesticides had wiped out this entire race.
And so, in 1963, British ornithologists were stunned when the results of a national population survey of the peregrine were published by Nature Conservancy biologist Derek Ratcliffe. Ironically, this government survey had been spurred by complaints from racing-pigeon owners that there were too many peregrines in modern Britain. Hardly. The figures were shocking. Britain’s peregrine populations were in free-fall: they were less than half of their pre-war level. Only three pairs were left in the whole of southern England. Historic eyries were empty; hardly any young were being reared; and sinister reports were coming in of female peregrines eating their own eggs.
A chillingly jolly and wholly inaccurate early advertisement for DDT.
Ratcliffe suspected that pesticides were causing this decline. There had been a public outcry over dramatic kills of farmland birds in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and a new generation of agricultural chemicals were the known culprits. These chemical agents – aldrin, endrin, dieldrin, heptachlor and the US military’s wonder-agent, DDT – were being heavily used across agricultural areas of Britain, western Europe and, most heavily of all, in the eastern USA. They were stable compounds that did not break down after they were applied. They persisted, became concentrated in the food chain, gradually building up in the tissues of predators to lethal or sub-lethal levels. The evidence for a pesticide-related peregrine decline mounted: Ratcliffe had already found that one addled Scottish peregrine egg contained four different pesticides, including DDE, the breakdown product of DDT. And the peregrine’s disappearance could be correlated with agricultural land use: peregrines had declined fastest in arable farming areas, and the speed and spread of the decline seemed to match the pattern of insecticide use in post-war Britain.
The year 1962 saw the publication of Rachel Carson’s impassioned 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 unexpected, 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.’17
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.’18 Alarmed, he organized a peregrine survey and so appalling were the results – all of the hundred or so eyries surveyed were abandoned – that he convened 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 peregrine 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 that 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, Monks Wood Experimental Station in Britain and the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, finally supplied experimentally tested proof that peregrines were accumulating 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 paranoia, 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 wildness’ as Defenders of Wildlife magazine put it.19
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 bioaccumulation diagrams were almost indistinguishable from others showing the build-up of DDT in the tissues of another top predator, the peregrine.
Prime Minister Harold Wilson meets a dead peregrine on a visit to Monks Wood Experimental Research Station, 1970. |
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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.20 British Prime Minister Harold Wilson toured the toxic chemicals unit at Monks Wood Experimental Research Station in 1970 and stared gloomily at a 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 problem. 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 persistent 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 arduous, 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 conserve’ 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 possible 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’.21 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, 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 gradually 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.
Domesticated quail are an excellent food source for captive-bred falcons. A female peregrine stares down the photographer before feeding her three young eyasses.
THE PEREGRINE FUND
In the US the falcon-breeding facility at Cornell University rapidly 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.22
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 surveillance. The project aimed to mass-produce peregrines for falconers, for scientific study and, most crucially, for reintroduction into the wild, and it soon became incorporated as the Peregrine Fund, Inc. This was conservation ‘big science’, a vigorous, 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 lent 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 school-yard and cookie sales, every dollar 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 breeders 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: bowing 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 imprinted 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.
Sexually imprinted on humans, this tiercel peregrine is copulating with a specially constructed hat. Beneath the hat is Peregrine Fund falcon breeder Cal Sandfort.
BENEVOLENT SCIENCE
Scientist-conservationists such as Tom Cade and Richard Fyfe fascinated the media. Lacking falcon obsessions themselves, journalists and writers wondered what drove such people to save the peregrine. David Zimmerman attacked the question with high-psychological relish, assuming that individual endeavours to save animal species reflected a deep, personal desire for immortality. Saving a species is an ‘act of immortal salvation’, he explained; the ‘mortal who assists in this act . . . transcends his own mortal being . . . here indeed is a potent human motive!’23
But the efforts of the Peregrine Fund and similar institutional projects could be seen as a salvation for science itself. In the new climate of the 1960s science was no longer routinely perceived as a progressive force for good, or as a disengaged, ideologically neutral intellectual pursuit. Public distrust of the scientific enterprise and its white-coated practitioners was at an all-time high. Cade and the Peregrine Fund were different. Cade was presented in the media as a heroic figure, strong, caring, passionate and deeply moral. A new breed of scientist was uncovered to a world that had lost faith in the benevolence of institutional science. And these new scientists were heroes. The Peregrine Fund became bathed in the mythical light shared by Kennedy’s White House. ‘In retrospect,’ Cade recently wrote of those early years, ‘I believe it was a kind of Camelot – a special place, at a special time, with very special people who were totally committed to restoring the Peregrine in nature.’24
RELEASING FALCONS
These ‘very special people’ were nearly all falconers. And the thousands of years of what Cade called the ‘evolved technology’ of falconry provided a ready solution to the conundrum of how to release captive-bred falcons into the wild. The technique of hacking had been used for centuries to improve the flying skills of falcons taken as nestlings. Placed outdoors in an artificial eyrie known as a hackbox, they were fed and cared for by humans until they learned to fly and hunt like wild falcons, a process that might take many weeks, as D’Arcussia explained in the sixteenth century: ‘All May and a few days of June will have passed before the youngsters have learnt their lessons and can take a perch, fly into the eye of the wind, and hang like lamps in the sky.’25 At this point, the young falcons were trapped by the falconer and trained.
After hatching in artificial incubators, young falcons are hand-fed with minced quail for a few days before being returned to their parents. At this early stage they’re extremely delicate and need constant warmth.
Hacking seemed the perfect solution. The only difference between conservation hacking and falconry hacking was that in the former you failed to recapture the young. Where to site artificial eyries was the next question. The urge to repopulate historic east-coast cliff eyries was strong; geographical nostalgia entwined with conservation praxis. The young would become ‘imprinted’ on the eyrie, and thus might return once they were grown, perhaps to breed. Those who worked at the Peregrine Fund had seen falcons nesting at these very cliffs; they wanted to restore the ecological plenitude of vital local landscapes they’d seen destroyed in their own lifetimes. Hack-site attendant Tom Maechtle explained that his job gave him a deep understanding of the ‘ecology of the cliff. Falcons once completed that ecology; when the falcons died, the cliffs were dead. To see young falcons flying from the old eyries is to see nature put right again.’26
However, the first major restocking experiments didn’t go quite as planned. Without the presence of aggressive adult birds to guard the young released at historic cliff eyries, recently fledged birds were often killed by great horned owls as they slept. Five were killed in this way in 1977. ‘There’s not much we can do about owls except avoid them,’ opined Cade.27 Falcons hacked from eyries built on towers in untraditional sites were much more successful. Birds fledged successfully from towers in New Jersey’s salt marshes, and from a 75-foot-high ex-poison-gas-shell-testing tower on Carroll Island. These highly publicized releases went well. By the early 1980s the Peregrine Fund was releasing more than 100 peregrines a year, both in the eastern US, and, with the opening of a second facility in Colorado, to much of its former range in the West. The reintroduction schemes of the Peregrine Fund and other dedicated organizations have succeeded to such an extent that the peregrine has returned to breed over much of its former American range; a landmark recovery in the history of conservation biology.
HOW WILD IS A CAPTIVE PEREGRINE?
The release of these captive-bred falcons was, however, controversial. Was it right to release these birds into the wild? If the extinct east-coast anatum peregrines had been the last native fragments of a primeval past, what were these new birds? They had not evolved here. These were mongrel birds of mixed genetic and geographical origin, their parents hailing from as far afield as Scotland and Spain. They were not the falcons that had evolved over millennia in the eastern US. And how ‘wild’ were they? Surely, the distilled essence of wildness, by its very nature, should have been reared on rocks and cliffs. Is a peregrine less wild for having been incubated in forced-air machines, reared between walls?
The debates over the provenance of the released peregrines illumine deep and divisive arguments about natural value that course through conservation biology. One current in environmental philosophy values organisms or ecosystems through an appeal to their history. In this tradition, the intrinsic value of an animal or habitat is relative to the naturalness of the process by which it came to exist. No replanted prairie or rainforest is as valuable as one that naturally evolved, it contends. ‘Wild’ or ‘untouched’ ecosystems possess greater intrinsic value than those that have been affected by human activity. In this view, because they were not the natural inhabitants of the east-coast environment, these peregrines were a travesty; alien, ‘man-made’ birds. Better no peregrines than the wrong peregrines, their arguments ran.
Cade and his congeners had no truck with this attitude. Their version of nature was dynamic, inclusive, and involved deeply emotional ties to bird and landscape that supplanted naïve nativist concerns. Not only, they argued, would these new birds evolve to suit the new, less primeval landscapes of the east coast, but they also restored local historical and ecological continuity. Full of peregrines, the rocky cliffs and the sheer blue skies above them would once again be ‘live’. Young Americans could once again watch the heart-stopping stoop of the peregrine, as much a part of the American sublime as the Grand Canyon or Delicate Arch. As Cade movingly wrote of one released tiercel,
A baby Peregrine Fund falcon and a crowd of fascinated Boy Scouts. Educating the public is a prime concern of the Peregrine Fund and similar organizations; A young Peregrine falcon peers from its recently opened artificial nest, or hackbox. Great horned owls and golden eagles were often a danger at natural release sites like these.
I tell you truly, I cannot see a difference with my eyes, nor do I feel a difference in my heart, which pounds against my chest with the same vicarious excitement when the Red Baron stoops over the New Jersey salt marshes, as it did in 1951 when I first saw this high-flying style of hunting performed by the wilderness-inhabiting peregrines of Alaska.28
Ultimately, Cade shows that in terms of function and aesthetics, wild and captive-bred falcons admit no difference. Genetic and taxonomic distinctions fall in the face of the animation of an entire landscape with the exhilarating flight of the falcon.
SUCCESS FOR THE FALCON?
Exuberant celebrations attended the decision to de-list the peregrine from the US Endangered Species Act in 1999. Al Gore issued an statement praising the ESA. ‘Today, more than 1,300 breeding pairs of peregrine falcon [sic] soar the skies of 41 states,’ he enthused, ‘testament that we can protect and restore our environment even as we strengthen our economy and build a more liveable future.’29 All was well; some ecological integrity had been restored; the peregrine had been saved. It was a conservation triumph. But the story is far from over. Chemical contaminants still threaten falcon populations. Researchers in Sweden, for example, find high levels of flame retardants such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDES) in peregrine eggs. Moreover, the chemicals involved are often depressingly familiar. While legislation on pesticide use is tight across Europe and North America, agricultural chemical corporations have ready markets elsewhere. Pesticides have brought local extinction to lanner falcons in some African agricultural regions, and American peregrines that winter in South America and Mexico return to breed in the US with high DDE levels.
And full-scale ecological catastrophes still occur, though they rarely make news in the West. Mongolia is the largest stronghold of the saker falcon. There, its populations wax and wane with the population cycles of voles. Because high vole years denude steppe grassland, making life harder for nomadic herders, the Mongolian government has recently been treating vast areas of steppe with rodenticide. In 2001 the government air-dropped poisoned grain with a concentration of the rodenticide Bromadiolone a hundred times higher than ther recommended levels. Bromadiolone is prohibited for outdoor use in the US, the country that holds the patent. A drastic decline in the populations of sakers and other Mongolian raptors has consequently occurred.
Habitat loss, too, threatens falcon populations in many countries. With the collapse of collective farming, nomadic herders no longer graze large areas of falcon habitat in Central Asia, and the resulting development of scrub and woodland on what was once grassland has reduced the populations of susliks, the saker’s main mammalian prey in some regions. Mongolian sakers have also suffered from the littering of steppe grassland with non-biodegradable plastic twine and rope; many nesting sakers are killed by becoming entangled in such materials. The fall of Communism and the opening up of vast tracts of Asian steppe have also brought serious problems for Saker populations in these regions in the form of organized gangs of falcon smugglers and the attentions of local people desperate to make money from the Arab falconry market. A terrible fragmentation and reduction in the range of this species has occurred; once found from Europe right across to China, saker populations have been split into two, and both grow smaller year by year.
A dead saker falcon at its nest in Mongolia, killed by entanglement in artificial twine. Deaths of adult, breeding birds have a disproportionate effect on falcon populations. |
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A growing realization of the scale of this problem has led to the creation of falcon identity databases for tracing falcon movements throughout the Gulf States; many governments there are moving toward official agreements for the biologically sustainable harvest of wild falcons. Organizations such as the Environmental Research and Wildlife Development Agency in the UAE and the National Commission for Wildlife Research Conservation and Development in Saudi Arabia have been instrumental in shaping these policies. These organizations work on other problems associated with Arab falconry, such as the traditional falcon-trapping techniques in Pakistan that exert a heavy toll on lugger falcons, used as barak or decoy birds to trap peregrines and sakers. And they work too on the population ecology and conservation of that most traditional quarry of Arab falconry, the houbara bustard, which is under intense pressure from falconry in much of its range.
And while it is now illegal to kill falcons in much of the world, they are still shot, trapped and poisoned. In Britain, recent peregrine declines in Scotland, Northern Ireland and north Wales have been seen as due to direct persecution. Some gamekeepers, watching their grouse stocks dwindle, see falcons as directly challenging their livelihoods. Some racing-pigeon owners living near peregrine eyries despair of the toll on their flock: to them, falcons are genuinely malevolent killers. Both are baffled by the untouchable cultural status of the falcon. After all, corvids and foxes also kill grouse and pigeons, and they can be legally controlled. Even bird protection societies destroy them on their nature reserves. What makes a falcon different from a crow or a fox? they ask. Such a question is baffling to bird conservationists whose idea of falcons as wildlife icons seems unshakeably and self-evidently true. And so conservation discourse characterizes those who call for falcon control as either misguided or evil – and dialogue between the two sides becomes almost impossible. Certainly the story is an unhappy one, and the questions it raises about the battles over ownership of the meanings of nature are troubling for policy-makers, bird-lovers and falcons alike.
