Falcon

by Helen Macdonald

  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.

  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 fa
lconry, 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.