Flight Paths: A Field Journal of Hope, Heartbreak, and Miracles with New York's Bird People , 2016. Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. xii + 366 pages, B&W images and line drawings. ISBN 9781438459264. $24.95 (paperback). Also available as an e-book.
From the vantage point of 2016, it is difficult to imagine what the situation with Peregrine Falcons (Falco peregrinus) was like in the mid-1960s. These birds are now such a regular part of the local wildlife around Ithaca, New York, I rarely go a couple of weeks without seeing a Peregrine go rocketing past, chasing a shorebird, Rock Pigeon (Columba livia), or other prey, or perched on a building. It's easy to forget that we almost lost this remarkable species. From the late 1940s onward, the pesticide DDT spread through the environment like a deadly shroud, insidious and invisible, contaminating fish and bird species up and down the food chain—but the predatory birds, such as Peregrine Falcons, Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), and Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus), were hit the hardest because they absorbed the full concentration of all the contaminants in the tissue of the prey they consumed.
By 1965, when a special conference on the worldwide status of the Peregrine Falcon was held in Madison, Wisconsin, it looked to many researchers like it might already be too late to save the species. Not one active nest site could be found east of the Mississippi River in the contiguous United States and most peregrine nest cliffs in the western states as well as in Britain and across Europe also stood empty. The situation for Bald Eagles in New York State was not much better. Only one breeding pair remained in the state, and the birds didn't produce a single viable egg after 1973.
Although Darryl McGrath covers several other bird conservation topics in Flight Paths—such as mercury and lead contamination in Common Loons (Gavia immer), the effects of climate change on Bicknell's Thrushes (Catharus bicknelli), the loss of suitable habitat for Short-eared Owls (Asio flammeus), the countless birds killed by wind farms, buildings, cats, and more—the efforts to save the Peregrine Falcon and Bald Eagle are the primary focus of the book. They represent compelling stories of hard work and dedication by people who stubbornly refused to give up on these birds.
At the heart of the Peregrine story is Cornell ornithologist Tom Cade, the perfect person at exactly the right time to take on the task of saving the Peregrine Falcon. A lifelong falconer, he had studied Peregrine Falcons in Alaska as a grad student in the early 1950s, so he had experience observing them in the wild and caring for them in captivity. He developed an innovative captive-propagation and reintroduction program unlike any previously attempted. Cade and his team at Cornell began breeding Peregrines in 1971. Prior to that, only a handful of young falcons had ever been produced in captivity, and there was no way of knowing whether peregrine reproduction could be accomplished at a scale large enough to make a difference. And even if they could breed enough falcons, no one knew if the young birds could be released successfully without having parents to care for them and teach them how to hunt.
Cade took some professional risks in his work. McGrath writes: “The peregrine team skirted the standard scientific method of proving a hypothesis by observing results and then analyzing data; the team's flexible approach was more in keeping with wildlife management then scientific research. Some academics, including some of Cade's colleagues at Cornell, criticized the project, which was based at one of the world's most prestigious schools of ornithology but used techniques more commonly seen at chicken farms.” There were no controls and no way to set up controls. That did not matter. The important thing was to produce as many young Peregrines as possible and get them back to the wild. Cade believed that young Peregrines did not need their parents to show them how to hunt. They were hard-wired to do it, he said. However, they did need people to staff the release sites (which were sometimes in wilderness areas), providing food unseen by the young falcons and watching them closely so they could help if they got in trouble.
Cade used a centuries-old falconry technique called “hacking” to introduce the young captive-bred falcons to the wild. In traditional hacking, a falconer would place some young falcons in an artificial nest or “hack box” at the top of a pole, safe from ground predators, and set out food for them there each day. The birds would fly around the countryside, getting exercise and learning how to hunt while returning to the hack box each day to eat. It was important for the falconer to catch the young falcons before they became self-sufficient hunters or they would eventually fly away, but Cade took the process one step further and allowed the young falcons to disperse naturally, at their own pace. It was the perfect “soft release” technique for captive-bred falcons that did not have parents to raise them.
The team faced many obstacles with the Peregrines. In the East, some of the young falcons released at traditional nest sites were being killed by Great Horned Owls (Bubo virginianus) and, in the West, by Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), so the team began releasing birds on tall buildings in Manhattan and other urban areas, which had numerous suitable high places on which to nest and plentiful food in the form of Rock Pigeons. And it worked. As they reached maturity, the young peregrines paired up and began producing their own young both in the cities and at natural sites that they began to reoccupy.
“The skeptics had thought that the Madison conference attendees could have just as easily written the obituary for these irreplaceable birds,” wrote McGrath. “But Cade had never felt that way, and neither had the small group that had worked with him to bring peregrines back from the brink.” Throughout the decades, “Cade's love for the birds had remained steadfast, and he had never doubted that he would live to see their return.”
The story of the Bald Eagle recovery McGrath presents is equally inspiring. By 1975, only one Bald Eagle nest remained in all of New York, at Hemlock Lake. Pete Nye and Mike Allen, who were assigned to the Bald Eagle Restoration Project in the newly formed Endangered Species Unit at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), set to work attempting to boost the number of eagles in the state. It was a monumental task as the researchers and their team began placing eagle chicks in the Hemlock Lake nest for the adults to raise, and later releasing young eagles taken from nests in Alaska (where the birds were still plentiful) from hack towers.
The goal was to release 20 to 30 eagles a year until the state had 10 breeding pairs. By 1988, when the release program ended, the DEC had released 198 young Bald Eagle chicks in the state. The results exceeded all expectations. As of 2014, New York had at least 300 territorial pairs of Bald Eagles. Eight other states, in addition to the Province of Ontario in Canada, began Bald Eagle release programs inspired by the success in New York.
Thanks to these massive reintroduction efforts (and the banning of DDT in the United States in 1972), Peregrine Falcon and Bald Eagle populations soared. By 2010, New York had 76 nesting pairs of Peregrine Falcons—“in locations ranging from the High Peaks region of the Adirondacks to midtown Manhattan.” Both species were removed from the federal Endangered Species List: the Peregrine Falcon in 1999 and the Bald Eagle in 2007.
Darryl McGrath is a career journalist, and it shows. The book is exhaustively researched, but written in an engaging style that fully captures the intensity of the efforts to save the Peregrine Falcon, Bald Eagle, and other species. The human stories are wonderful—like McGrath's profile of Tina Milburn, who spent weeks at a time camping without running water or other facilities to monitor a Bald Eagle release site at Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge and who was the first person “ever to undertake the field work of hacking young Bald Eagles.” Or Lois Goblet, an eagle hack-site attendant in the Adirondacks, who camped 14 miles from the nearest road, without any telephone or radio contact with anyone, and no weapons, despite the many bears in the area.
McGrath does not sugarcoat the dire threats birds face in the years ahead, but the juxtaposition in the book between the environmental problems of today and those of the past do help temper our feelings of gloom and doom. Dedicated people from all walks of life did step up and do what was necessary, at great personal sacrifice, to save these birds from sure extinction. They serve as an example for all of us. At a state level, few now realize what an important role New York played in the recovery of these species—a role McGrath hopes will continue: “This is the state's heritage, and one of its greatest accomplishments: a history of decisive environmental leadership, and a proud and exceptional role in the protection of birds.”
