Falcon (15 page)

Halcyon days were had by hawk-shooters in inter-war 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 Massachussetts, 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 excite- ment 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

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
20
th century. Thankfully the practice is now

far less common.

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
ele- mental
thrill, and I have done for you that in which all the lesser feathered folk have failed and I am satisfied.
¹
2

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 arti- cles of Captain C.W.R. Knight revealed a very different kind of falcon. Knight was a hugely popular lecturer of the period; fal- coner, talented filmmaker, dedicated naturalist, raconteur and natural showman, his stage appearances with his trained gold- en 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, wan- dering 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 pre- dation 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 valu- able role for raptors in the reconstruction of post-war Britain. ‘Carefully contrived introductions’ of birds of prey, he sug- gested, 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 dif- ferent 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 racoons 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 puz- zled. 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.

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.

The large, dark, eastern North American
anatum
peregrine. A few years after this photograph was taken, pesticides had wiped out this entire race.

A chillingly jolly and wholly inaccurate early advertisement for
ddt
.

Ironically, this government survey had been spurred by com- plaints from racing-pigeon owners that there were too many peregrines in modern Britain. Hardly. The figures were shock- ing. 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.

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 chem- ical 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 tis- sues 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 prod- uct 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.