New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
The return of peregrine falcons
You can see peregrine falcons — dashing, regal, the world’s fastest bird — in Connecticut today. They nest on trap rock cliffs, near highway bridges and on office buildings.
They’re more typically found along the Long Island Sound than inland — they like open space rather than rolling hills and woods for hunting.
“I don’t expect to see them,” Angela Dimmitt said. “They live in Bridgeport.”
But Dimmitt has seen a peregrine swooping in on seabirds at Short beach in Stratford.
“When my husband worked in New York City, he’d have one sitting on the windowsill, 30 floors up,” she said.
They’re also absent from the Audubon Connecticut’s Bent of the River nature center in Southbury most of the year.
“But in the winter, we see them over the farm fields on River Road,” said Ken Elkins, the center’s director of education. “They may be northern birds coming down here to hunt.”
This is the age of miracles and wonders.
By any stretch of the imagination, ornithologists would have simply written off peregrine falcons for the eastern United States a half-century ago. The birds were extirpated — gone — from our half of the country and in steep decline in the west.
The last one seen in Connecticut was on the Travelers Tower in Hartford in 1940.
But with a rare combination of environmental regulations protecting the birds, and ornithologists and falconers joining forces, the peregrine did not disappear.
Under the direction of Tom Cadd at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., humans raised thousands of peregrine falcon chicks, then devised ways of carefully releasing them in the wild.
“They said you couldn’t hatch peregrine eggs,” said Charles Walcott, the lab’s former director. “They said even if you could, you couldn’t raise the hatchlings in captivity. And they said if you could raise and release them, the birds would just fly down to Mexico. They said the whole thing was futile.”
Instead, the birds thrived. Thousands of peregrine falcons are in the United States today. In 1999, they were dropped from the national endangered species list. In Connecticut they’re listed as threatened, not endangered.
“It’s quite extraordinary,” Walcott said.
“It’s huge,” said Patrick Comins, director of the Connecticut Audubon Society. “It’s like saving the whooping crane or the brown pelican or the bald eagle.”
Peregrine falcons are very striking, with bluegray feathers on their back, black and white feathers on their chest and a black “mustache” blotching their faces. Like many other raptors, they’re fierce-eyed and aristocratic.
They hunt from above. When they dive on their prey, they can hit speeds of about 240 mph.
“They’re like a rocket out of the skies,” said Margaret Robbins, owner of the Wild Birds Unlimited store in Brookfield.
“When I see them, I just think, ‘Oh my God,’ ” Comins said.
What was killing them was DDT. The pesticide made the shells of falcon eggs so fragile, it was impossible for the parents to hatch their young.
By 1969 — 50 years ago — researchers knew the harm DDT was doing to wildlife. It was banned in 1972.
Peregrine falcons were listed as an endangered species in 1970.
But because peregrine falcons were gone from the eastern part of the country, the collective of ornithologists, researchers and falconers joined together to replenish their stock. In all, they raised and released 6,000 birds, using specially designed cages and towers to feed the falcons until the birds were big enough to hunt on their own.
Connecticut did not receive any of these birds. But as falcon numbers multiplied, they spread. In 1997, a pair was back again at Travelers Tower in Hartford.
Like other species, peregrine falcons have learned to co-exist with humans. The urban landscape has office buildings like cliffs. And cities have pigeons aplenty.
Comins said some birders have even expressed some annoyance at marauding peregrines diving down and scattering the flocks.
“They have to eat,” Comins said, sympathizing with falcons over binocular-bearing humans.
If hope is a thing with feathers, the story of the peregrine falcon gives ornithologists an extra shot of encouragement. That bird was saved. Why not others?
Currently in Connecticut, the saltmarsh sparrow is under great stress because of climate change and overdevelopment of the shoreline. It is very endangered.
“Maybe the saltmarsh sparrow isn’t as charismatic as the peregrine falcon,” Comins said. “But if we can save the peregrine — and the whooping crane and the bald eagle — we can save the saltmarsh sparrow.’’