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
Ornithologists Roger Tory Peterson and Richard Herbert at a Hudson River peregrine eyrie in 1948. Recreational egg-collecting took its toll on more accessible falcon nests in the early 20th century. Thankfully the practice is now far less common.
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 ea
rlier 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.
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.
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