In 1970, an
improbable team of scientists and falconers that became known as the Peregrine
Fund banded together at Cornell University in upstate New York to bring back the
birds. Under the guidance of ornithologist Tom Cade, they planned to breed the
birds in captivity and then release them into the wild after DDT had been
banned, which it was in 1972. Because so few of the native falcons were left in
the wild in the continental United States, they gathered peregrine falcons from
around the globe, creating an avian immigrant story. They used the few members
they could find of the subspecies that had dominated the United States,
Falco peregrinus anatum, but added a handful of other birds—of
the F. p. pealei subspecies from British Columbia and
peregrinus from Scotland, brookei from Spain and
cassini from Chile, tundrius from arctic Alaska and
macropus from the southern reaches of Australia. While some people
objected to the mixing of lineages, the scientists knew their options were
limited. They also made the argument that hybridization could actually be a boon
to a species that was facing a genetic bottleneck if they survived at all. “A
peregrine is a peregrine,” Cade told me. Give the new generation of peregrines
all the world’s genes, the logic went, and at least some of the birds will be
fit to replace America’s lost peregrines—to traverse the fields of this region,
live off the bounty of its airborne harvest, nest along its rocky
cliffs.
The Peregrine Fund started with a small team of
staff and volunteers who skirted building codes as they lived illegally in the
peregrine breeding barn, cooking on a two-burner hot plate and bathing with a
garden hose through upstate New York winters – anything to be with the birds
24/7 during the tenuous process of raising the vulnerable chicks. Using both
natural and artificial insemination, breeding began in 1971, and just two years
later, the Peregrine Fund newsletter announced a “bumper year.”
“In 1973, we raised 21 young from three fertile
pairs,” Cade told me. “That clinched it in our minds that we could do this. We’d
need dozens of falcons, but not hundreds.” With 30 breeding pairs, they could
repopulate the eastern United States. Starting in 1974, the Fund began to
release fledgling birds in prime peregrine habitat, wild places from New York's
Adirondack Mountains to Maine's Acadia National Park.
Then the birds reappeared, against all
expectation, in the largest city around. A peregrine released in New Hampshire
in 1981 showed up on the Throgs Neck Bridge in New York City two years later,
the beginning of the abundance we see today. Over the course of nearly two
decades, more than 3,000 young peregrines were released across the United
States. Thousands of pairs are now breeding in the wild in North America, and
the birds were taken off the federal endangered species list in 1999, although
they remain listed in New York State, where 160 birds were released. Something
shifted upon their return. Their old cliffside nesting sites along the Hudson
River Valley and elsewhere still existed, but many falcons chose the city
instead. Immigrant birds had come to the city of immigrants.
From the observation platform, we continue to
watch songbirds pass high above us as crowds of tourists maneuver slowly along
the perimeter, taking photographs and pointing, speaking in French, Japanese,
Italian and other tongues. Some pause by our group, eavesdropping, as DeCandido
points to where peregrines have come to nest in the city—on the nearby MetLife
building, the New York Hospital, the Riverside Church, the George Washington
Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge and the 55 Water Street building. They nest 693 feet
up the distant Verrazano-Narrows Bridge that’s lit up in a twinkling string of
green sparkles and have taken over an osprey nest in the darkness of Jamaica
Bay.
At least 17 breeding pairs live within the borders
of the five boroughs, the densest known population of urban peregrines in the
world. The new generation adapted to the concrete canyons, towering bridge
supports and steel skyscrapers of Gotham, redefining falcon habitat. It was as
though we had built them a new world, with perfect nest sites—high, adjacent to
wide expanses of open flyways for hunting and populated with an endless,
year-round food source in the form of pigeons, another cliff-dwelling bird that
finds our urban environment so pleasing. A biologist from the New York City
Department of Environmental Protection makes annual rounds to the peregrine
sites, banding young and building sheltering boxes wherever they have chosen to
nest.
The Empire State Building granted peregrines the
additional gift of a nighttime hunting perch, smack in the middle of one of
North America's busiest bird migration routes. The building's lights were the
brightest continuous source of artificial light in the world when they were
installed in 1956. Today, the illumination makes it easy for peregrines to spot
their migrating prey. It’s happening elsewhere. Peregrine falcons have been
observed hunting at night in England and France, Berlin, Warsaw and Hong Kong,
and off brightly lit oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Many bird populations are
plummeting because of habitat loss and other environmental threats, but
peregrine falcons are thriving, brought back from the brink, returned,
reintroduced and reimagined back into existence through science and
passion.
*
DeCandido didn’t start coming to the Empire State
Building in search of falcons, though. He came to count songbirds—dead ones.
Generally, birds get the sky and we get the earth, but sometimes there’s a
mix-up, and the two territories overlap. One morning in 1948, 750 lifeless birds
were found at the base of the Empire State Building. “Mist Bewilders Migrators…
Tiny Bodies Litter 5th Avenue,” announced The New York
Times.
That was a record night, but every day, dead birds
are found at the base of buildings. A recent study by New York City Audubon
estimated that 80,000 birds perish each year in the five boroughs because of
collisions with buildings. Ornithologist Daniel Klem of Muhlenberg College, who
has studied bird collisions for more than 20 years, estimates that hundreds of
millions of birds die each year from striking glass windows—more avian deaths
than are caused by cats, cars and power lines combined. Compared with building
strikes, peregrines and other avian predators barely make a dent in overall
songbird populations.
DeCandido first went to the Empire State Building
in the fall of 2004, prepared to witness migrants crashing into windows.
Instead, over 77 nights, he and his team of volunteers found only four dead
birds and discovered a miraculous New York nighttime bird-watching site. They
checked off 10,000 birds on their clipboards that fall—Baltimore orioles and
gray catbirds and black-throated blue warblers. Chimney swifts and common
nighthawks. Great egrets and night herons. Gulls and geese. A saw-whet owl and a
short-eared owl. And other flying creatures, such as little brown bats and red
bats, snatching moths and dragonflies. On more than half of the nights, they
were accompanied by a peregrine falcon, hunting by the bright lights of the big
city.
DeCandido’s work confirmed what Klem, the Audubon
researchers and others were finding—that most bird fatalities happen at the
lower levels of structures, especially when glass reflects landscaping and
creates the lethal illusion of a resting spot. Landscape architects are
beginning to take placement of ornamental plants into consideration to minimize
this deception while design firms continue to develop a type of glass that looks
to a bird, in one architect’s words, “as solid as stone.”
*
Fifteen minutes after our first sighting, the
falcon returns to lie in wait on the northern side of the spire, with a clear
view of incoming bird traffic. A few minutes later, a small form approaches with
the flap-flap-glide movement of a songbird. As it appears within our halo of
light, the falcon charges from its station, circling wide and then closing in
fast on the unsuspecting creature. The peregrine comes down hard on the bird,
which drops straight down as though injured, but the falcon swerves off, talons
empty, returning to another perch overhead. The smaller bird, DeCandido
explains, folded its wings and dropped to escape.
The falcon has speed, but this alone doesn’t
secure dinner. Persistence is a requirement as well. Every few minutes, the
falcon launches itself after a weary migrant, but each time, the hunter misses
its quarry. Then DeCandido declares a faraway, lit-up speck to be an approaching
rose-breasted grosbeak. The small bird veers east as the peregrine rises, for
the sixth time, both disappearing behind the spire. We lose sight of them on the
far side, gauging their speed and waiting for them to emerge on the other side
of the tower. They don’t. Just the falcon appears, landing briefly back on its
perch. “Did he get it?” someone asks, necks straining, eyes glued to binoculars
in a hard squint. And then the falcon lifts off, and we can see the limp bird
held tightly in its grasp as it drops down to the northwest, toward the
Riverside Church perhaps, wings arched, gliding down to some favorite plucking
post to eat.
The peregrines have returned. To North America,
and—unexpectedly—to many of the cityscapes of the world. When it comes to bird
habitat, humans have destroyed more than we have created, but for the falcons we
have inadvertently made a nice home. Songbirds pass overhead as the night goes
on, but the small beings can no longer hold our attention. It’s not even 9 p.m.,
early for us city folk, so we return to the sidewalk realm of humans and down
farther into the subway tunnels below, leaving the secret avian superhighway
above to carry on its mysterious motions of life and death, the top of the food
chain that has returned, reigning over all.
