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.
