Three Seasons in the Wild with Peregrine Falcons

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Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School

2002

Release : three seasons in the wild with peregrine falcons.

Clara Sophia Weygandt The University of Montana

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Recommended Citation Weygandt, Clara Sophia, "Release : three seasons in the wild with peregrine falcons." (2002). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 5793. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/5793

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Release: Three Seasons in the Wild with Peregrine Falcons.

By Clara Sophia Weygandt B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz. Presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science The Unversity of Montana 2002

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Weygandt, Clara Sophia, M. S., May 2002 Environmental Studies

Release; Three Seasons in the Field with Peregrine Falcons

Director: Don Snow

When I was twenty-five, I returned to school. Initially interested in a degree in wildlife biology, I spent a summer re-introducing peregrine falcons in California. The experience was pivotal; it opened up the world of nature and possibility. With personal narrative I have tried to bring the reader into the world I encountered. The time-line follows my stumbling beginnings and recounts the various sites I worked each season. At each site the goal was the same; to keep three juvenile peregrines alive while they learned to fly and hunt. At each one I learned more about the birds, nature, and myself. At each one the way we succeeded was different. Along with my perceptions I bring in the natural history of peregrine falcons, the reasons they were endangered, and some of the techniques used to augment the population in California. Chambers. I see my first peregrines in the breeding chambers of the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Group. I find out why the peregrine falcon is endangered, and what is being done to prevent extinction. Muir Beach. My first réintroduction site, located on the California coast. I le am bird identification and the day to day of field work. I fall in love with the birds and the process. Hetch Hetchy I. A difficult site in the Sierras. How landscape, weather and personnel can effect the situation. Hetch Hetchy II. The beginning of my second season. Experience counts for something, but not everything. The best intentions can still lead to failure. Call. A site near Mt. Lassen in my fifth season. A coalescing of knowledge and luck. There is always something unexpected to be discovered.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ü

Acknowledgments iv

Chambers 2

M uir Beach

Hetch Hetchy I 53

Hetch Hetchy II 90

Call 104

Bibliography 117

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have so many incredible people to thank that they may not make it in. Suffice to

say that if you have known me during any of the experiences that I relate here, and during

the writing of this thesis, then you have been in some way instrumental to its creation.

Even if you are not mentioned by name, you have contributed. Thank you.

The Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group, with special thanks to Janet

Linthicum for keeping me accurate and informed.

To my committee: Don Snow, who managed to be both supportive and challenging,

the combination being exactly what I needed to become a better writer and bring this project

to fruition. Bill Chaloupka, who bravely waded through messy versions and guided me

when I was lost. Dick Hutto,

who immediately told me the weight of a sparrow when 1 asked.

My friends: Meagan Boltwood, who made my first year of writing this a joy and a

constant discovery. Susan Watrous, whose kind encouragement got me here in the first

place. Mark Oatney for being there when I needed help. David Escobar for providing love.

Marilyn Pratter, for letting me always remember the creative life. Shelly Truman, who let

me see what working artist is. Tom Jessor for correspondence and support. Russell

Johnson, who gave me exposure. David Strohmaier, who by example made me believe I

could do this. Everyone in the Teller writing workshop of May, 1999. My writing group in

Santa Cruz, who have been with me since the beginning, and my writing group in

Missoula, who continued the process.

My parents, who have always let creativity be their guide, and who painstakingly

read every version of this thesis. I have learned so much from you. I can never thank you

enough. And my sister, who was right.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAMBERS

When I first drove down the dirt road to the Bird Group, I'd never known there

was an old quarry here, a granite and dirt bowl scooped out of the grass-covered hills. I

certainly didn't know about the funky conglomeration of trailers and temporary buildings in

the bottom. They represented the entire West Coast peregrine recovery effort: breeding

facilities for peregrines and quail, housing for researchers, and the offices of the Santa

Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group.

My path crossed with the peregrines because at twenty-five I wanted to tie knots.

Tie knots, hike, build fires and climb rocks. A climber I dated showed me the figure-eight,

a bomber knot used to secure the climber to the end of a climbing rope. He did it with flair:

a complex twist of the wrist and the knot appeared like a rabbit popping out of a hat. I

learned it. I learned the grapevine, the prusik, the figure-eight, the water knot. I practiced.

For the first time in my life I went back-packing. I went into the Sierras. I climbed granite.

I got blisters. I pumped water. It was more wonderful than I'd imagined.

I realized that my life needed more trees, more granite, more quiet. With this in

mind I returned to school to get my degree. It was because of granite and mountains that I

decided to explore wildlife biology.

Mainly, I wanted to work outside in the wild and get paid for it. But I knew that the

theory of something and the practice of it are different. I might have done well in biology

classes, but would I enjoy the work? I determined to try a job in the field before I

committed myself further.

I didn't particularly care about birds, I was indifferent to peregrines. But because

I'd climbed in Yosemite, I knew that there were routes on El Capitan that closed every

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. spring because of peregrines. They were on the North American Wall, an inaccessible

overhanging monster with a huge area of dark rock that looked like the North American

continent. The routes on this wall were only for the most dedicated or most insane

climbers, taking upwards of twenty-two days. They were not nearly as popular as The

Nose or The Zodiac, so climbers respected the closures. When talking about El Cap

peregrines often came up in discussion, as their nest was close to El Cap tree, a large pine

growing out of the granite about eight hundred feet above the valley floor.

Time on a big wall is measured in days, not hours. It's a whole different world up

there. And the peregrines claimed that rock as theirs with the surety of nature. An easy

inhabitant, they flew, hunted, bred, nested, made the wall their home every spring. I more

impressed that they lived on that incredible piece of rock than with any other attribute. A

climber I knew was majoring in wildlife biology and he'd done something with peregrines.

If I talked to him, perhaps he could suggest work where I might have an "in." I called him

and he told me to call the Bird Group and ask for Lee Aulman.

"They're always looking for people during the summer." he said.

Later I found out that was something of an understatement. When the Bird Group first

started, they’d hire anyone who breathed.

As I drove up and parked next to a couple of beat-up Toyota trucks I wasn't even

certain I was in the right place. I took a deep breath and made my way up the three stairs of

the wood deck at the front of the building. I entered a cramped entrance hall, which only

seemed to connect the rooms in the building with the door. A woman behind the desk in the

room on my right raised her head.

"I'm here for an interview with Lee Aulman. Am I in the right place?" I asked.

"Just a minute." She pressed a button on her phone and spoke into it. "Someone to

see you," she said. I stood awkwardly in the doorway until a wiry blond man appeared at

the end of the tiny hall.

"I'm Lee," he said. " C’mon back here. "

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I took three steps into a back room crammed with two desks, bookshelves, and file

drawers. Piles of papers and books were everywhere. The windows looked out on the

rocky dirt of the quarry. On the walls were a series of maps—California, Oregon,

Washington—and a riot of photos: a cliff-face, falcons, close-ups of piles of feathers and

bones, of nests and eggs and a few far-away shots of blue sky with a black shape in the

middle.

"Here, have a seat." He moved a stack of file folders off a chair, and I sat down.

Lee sat at his desk. "So, you want to be a hack attendant?" he said and looked sharply at

me.

"Yes," I said. I was nervous. I'd been a musician, a Bohemian, working in

coffeehouses, restaurants, and boutiques and rehearsing at night. Now I was working on

my undergraduate degree at a community college. I didn't see how any of that would help

me be a scientist. But I’d always been good at biology. In high school, my friend Molly

and I would study together at her house the afternoon before a test, then I'd sleep over, and

we'd giggle into the night. The next morning we'd take the test. I'd get A's and she’d get

C 's.

"And you know Rob Ramey," Lee said, looking at some papers on his desk—my

job application, I assumed. Rob was my "in."ssss

"Yes. We have a mutual friend and that's how I met him."

"He’s a great guy. He's done some really good work for us," Lee said.

"So what do you know about peregrines?"

"Nothing," I replied. "I don't know about birds. But I'm thinking about a degree in

wildlife biology, and I thought I better get some hands-on experience. Rob is the only

person I know who does this kind of work, and he recommended you. I have rock

climbing experience, I love being outdoors, but I don’t know anything about birds."

Lee glanced at me, then looked at my application. I looked at his desk. Piles of

papers. Rolls of maps. Pens, paper clips. Feathers of all kinds were stuck in the spaces

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between books, along the window ledge, and even behind some of the photos on the wall.

Later, I found out about a game that Lee played with everyone at the Bird Group. He’d find

a feather in the field, then pull it out later and say: What is it? If you were good, you could

I.D. the bird and the kind of feather: primary, secondary, tail. There was a scientist in

Santa Barbara who analyzed the prey remains from peregrine nests for the Bird Group, and

according to Lee had near-legendary abilities and could supposedly identify the sex, age,

and species of a bird from a single feather.

Lee looked up. "To be honest with you, for this kind of work," he flicked his

fingers against the application in his hand, "you don't need to know about birds. You just

need to stay. It's hard—twelve, sixteen hour days, all sorts of weather. It can be really

boring, but we need you there. You live at the site, and everything you do is around those

birds. If you are at a site, you are at the site. You can't decide you can't take it anymore and

quit. Once you are in, that's it. This is not just a job. You are the parent to those young

birds. They need you. They can't make it without you. You need to stay for however long

it takes for them to mature and disperse." He glared at me through his hawk-like eyes, and

I felt like a mouse caught out in the open.

"I understand that," I said, "and if I decide to do it, I'll stay. I have a question,

though."

"Yes?"

"Why is the job for a hack' attendant? What does that mean?"

Lee nodded, like this was something he was used to answering. "It refers to a

board. In Medieval times, when a falconer was training a young hawk, he would put food

out for the birds on a light colored board, so the young would see it more readily and then

fly in and feed. The board itself was known as a hack board’. It's actually a dialect variant

on the word hatch,’ which in those times referred to one of those doors that have a top and

a bottom that open separately. W hen young birds were in the process of learning how to fly

and hunt on their own but still being fed by a falconer, they were said to be ’at hack.'

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. We’ve used a lot of the same techniques in designing our réintroduction strategy, and so

we use hack' to refer to a site where human attendants are the surrogate parents. It’s an

homage to falconry and the contributions it's made to this effort. Now," he continued, "we

can teach you everything you need to know. The main thing is that you stay at the site, that

you stay the course. It does get easier as time goes on, but you really need to stay for the

entire site. That can be for six to eight weeks."

"Why six to eight weeks; why the difference?" I asked.

"The females mature more slowly than the males, and depending on the different

sexes that are being released, you may have to stay longer. "

"Oh. Well, if you want to teach me, I can learn. And, as I said, if I decide to do it.

I’ll stay."

We looked at each other for a minute. Lee, I’m sure, trying to see if I was

bullshitting; me, trying to look sincere. The fact I was sincere helped.

"Okay," he said, tilting his chair forward with a little bang and standing up

abruptly, "would you like to see the birds?"

"Sure." I said, getting up. I wasn't certain what the "okay" was about. Did that

mean I was hired? Did it mean he was still thinking about hiring me and was taking me to

the next phase of the interview? I had no idea, but I wanted to see a peregrine, so I agreed.

I followed Lee through the tiny hall, onto the deck, down the stairs and crunched

across the gravel parking lot toward the big warehouse-looking building. There was a door

facing us, but Lee continued along a dirt path along the side of the building to the back.

"These are the chambers." He waved at the wall we were passing. "It's where we

keep the breeding adults and the young that are going to be going to hack or cross-foster

sites."

"What's a cross-foster site?" I asked. We’d reached another door at the back corner

of the building, and Lee stopped.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "At a cross-foster site we put peregrine downies into a wild prairie falcon nest.

Prairies aren’t endangered, but they are closely related to peregrines. We climb into a

prairie nest, remove the young, and replace them with peregrine chicks. The female raises

them as if they were her original brood."

"What happens to her young? The ones you took out?"

"We move them to a prairie nest that doesn't have many young. When possible, we

try to foster them near their hatch site. A lot depends on how many peregrine eggs we have

to cross-foster. It can get pretty complicated. " Lee momentarily looked down, as if tracking

the complications of cross-fostering and fostering in his mind. Later, I'd find out just how

chaotic the breeding season was for the Bird Group. I could smell the faint tang of the bay

trees tucked up against the western edge of the arroyo. Lee looked back at me.

"Okay, now before we go in here, it is important that you be quiet. We try to keep

down any unnecessary disturbance of the birds. The adults are here in the back, and the

adults with young are in front. So, you’ll see some of the breeding adults first and then

adults with young."

"All right," I said.

Lee opened the door and ushered me into the building. It was dark and dusty. After

the bright sun outside, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim. We were in a narrow

corridor with plywood walls and concrete for a floor. And KGO—the AM talk radio station

out of San Francisco—was playing at a fairly loud volume. What was that about? Didn't

Lee just tell me to be quiet?

I followed him down the narrow hallway. This was not what I expected, exactly. I

had a half-formed idea of open cages, or large aviaries, from visiting zoos. Dark

claustrophobic hallways filled with a man's booming voice were not it. We reached the end

of the corridor and turned left into another hall.

"Now," Lee said softly, leaning towards me, "these are the adults in here. There are

peep-holes that you can look through, but there's a proper way to do it. Peregrines are

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. predators—they completely focus on movement. You don’t want them to see you—you want

to minimize your movements. So when you go to look through the peep-hole, block it with

your finger first. Leave it like that for about a minute. Then move your finger and look

through. Like this." He put his finger over a small hole in the plywood wall, waited, and

then brought his eye close to his finger and slowly moved his finger away. He looked

through the hole for a bit, then stepped back and motioned for me to try it.

"So, why do you think your husband is cheating on boomed you!" the radio.

I put my finger against the peephole. The plywood felt rough against it. I waited.

"He just doesn't come home when he's supposed to anymore. He's always

working late..."

I put my head close to the wall, slowly moved my finger back, and looked through

the hole. I saw a room filled with light. The entire ceiling, though covered with a large wire

mesh, was open to the sky. Pea gravel covered the floor. At the back of the room was a

shelf lined with Astro turf—sort of like a ledge—and on the shelf was a bird. It wasn't

looking at me, so I must have done okay with the peep-hole.

" Maybe he's working late so he can afford the mortgage on that new house you've

got."

The bird was absolutely stunning. A black helmet of feathers, a back that was blue

to slate gray and a buff-colored breast that glowed with an internal warmth like the last

remnants of a sunset. The bird was the size of a crow, sleek and compact. Its eyes were

sharp and dark and the feet a startling yellow.

"Wow," I thought. I could be working with that? And how had such an amazing

bird become endangered anyway? This bird obviously didn't belong here. It belonged on

the side of a cliff rising a thousand feet or more, or on the wrist of a Medieval king.

I turned from the peep-hole and the bird. I looked over at Lee in the dimness of the

corridor. He smiled at me and began to move away. I was amazed that there were more

chambers in here, all with birds as magnificent as the first one. I caught up to Lee.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Use Preparation H —the formula more people trust."

"Why the radio?" I hissed.

"It masks any noise we might make and keeps the birds from getting stressed."

I got it. White noise. Sound to drown out other sounds. It made sense, but why

KGO and not something like classical music was beyond me.

"Plymouth, Chrysler, Dodge Bonanza!" the radio boomed.

We continued down the corridor, past several closed doors. I assumed these led to

more chambers. Lee stopped at another peep-hole.

"This is where the juveniles are. We keep them with an imprinted female who feeds

them until they are ready to go to a hack site. The birds you're going to see won't be ready

for about another week, but the ones you'll be taking care of will look a lot like them." He

did the peephole thing again, then stepped back and gestured for me to look. Mindful of

what I'd Just learned, I blocked the hole with my finger, counted to about forty-five,

couldn't wait any longer, brought my eye close, moved my finger, and looked.

This chamber was the same as the other one, except a board covered with Astro-turf

angled out from the Astro-turf ledge—for extra perch space, I supposed. Same gravel, same

open ceiling. But there was more activity here. The adult female perched on the ledge was

just as stunning as the other adult. But the young didn't have the adult plumage. They were

chocolate brown, with light-colored breasts, and dark stripes. There was down sticking out

from beneath their feathers, on their wings, under what I guessed were their armpits,

around their legs, under their tail, and a dollop of down hobbled on top of their heads,

which made them look silly as well as lumpy. One was on the board looking at its siblings

on the ledge, shifting its feet, and bobbing its head. The other two were perched together

on the other side of the ledge from the adult. The one that was on the board raised its wings

and started to flap hard, and I expected it to take off, but it didn't. It just flapped like a

maniac for about ten seconds and then stopped. This set off one of the others because it did

the same thing. Through all this, the adult remained perched, quiet but watchful.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I stopped looking and turned to Lee, my mouth open for a question. He silenced me

with a finger to his lips and moved away down the hall. I followed. When we'd gone about

10 feet, he stopped and looked at me.

"Why do they flap like that?" I asked.

"It's exercise. A precursor to flying. You'll see a lot of that. It's sort of like

children crawling before they can walk. Young birds flap before they can fly."

That made sense, I’d just never thought about it before. But then. I’d never really

thought about birds at all. My only experience with birds was when I was twelve. A baby

bird had fallen out of one of the huge Monterey pines in our front yard. I’d stayed up all

night feeding it with an eye-dropper every two hours. It would grow up and return to our

yard year after year to visit me, recognize me and perch on my shoulder. Despite my

assiduous feeding it died on the second day. But this was different. I wasn’t going to have

to feed these birds with an eye-dropper. And I’d have help. Lee continued down the hall,

opened the door at the end and we stepped out into the bright sun of an April afternoon.

"So, what do you think?" he asked.

"Very impressive. I had no idea they were so elegant, ” I said.

"Do you think you could work with them? It’s hard. You’ll have to get up really

early. Four, four-thirty most mornings," he warned. I winced. Four-thirty sounded like the

middle of the night. I thought about those awkward juveniles and the enchanting adults,

and how I’d better try some wildlife work to be sure I’d like it.

’Td be thrilled to work with these birds, ” I said.

"Okay, well, let’s get you some reading."

W e walked back to the office, and Lee—after some rummaging in the stacks of

paper—handed me the Hack Manual, which I could keep, and a copy of Behavior of Young

Peregrine Falcons by Steve Sherrod, and a video of peregrine falcons, both of which I had

to return on "pain of death." Then he got a phone call, and I left. I drove carefully out of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the quarry, past the trailers and sheds, out of the arroyo on the dirt road, and turned back

onto the main road off campus.

After being in that little quarry and the chambers, I was more aware of light, of the

glorious view across the bay to the mountains above Monterey. The familiar was somehow

different, because I knew something I hadn't known before. There was a sense of

anticipation and adventure.

At home I read everything, watched everything. I learned that peregrines eat

primarily birds. They hunt by flying so high they become a mere speck. Then when a bird

isolates itself over water or a meadow,—some place where it cannot take cover—the

peregrine dives. This dive is known as a stoop. They’d been clocked at speeds of more

than 200 mph. They hit their prey in an explosion of feathers and, as it falls to earth, they

grab it. Later a falconer said to me ; "Other birds flap. Peregrines fly." On the video I heard

the birds wail, the sound they make when they want food, heard them cack, a loud repeated

call of agitation. They do it at other raptors, at each other, at anything that might harm

them. The young do it, the adults do it. It’s a loud rapid, ringing call: Cack-cack-cack-cack.

I saw the adults eating their prey, holding it with those strong feet, their beaks smeared

with blood, their crisp wings folded behind them, no hint of what they could do in the air.

The video didn't really show me what they could do in the air, either. The camera would

follow this fast moving dark speck, and sometimes it looked like there might be some loop-

de-loops, but it was blurry and hard to follow. I learned why the birds were in trouble,

how the population had crashed in the 60 s and 70 s, how The World Center for Birds of

Prey in Boise, Idaho, and the Bird Group had coordinated to try to boost the Western

population with more birds. Birds whose bodies had not been contaminated by DDT.

Peregrine falcons are a global species. There are local populations, and several

subspecies, but the name "peregrine" means "foreigner." Traveler. Peregrination means

wandering. There are records of peregrines flying from the Arctic to South America. When

the population crashed, it crashed everywhere.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I once picked up and thumbed through a used copy of a Sunset Garden book from

1962, the year I was bom. The recommendations for any kind of garden pests were the

same: Earwigs? DDT. Snails? DDT. Aphids? DDT.

In two decades, populations of bald eagles crashed. Brown pelicans. Peregrine

falcons. When a population declines this rapidly, there is reason for alarm. Extinction is the

dying out of a species, and also the process of bringing about such a condition. The

peregrine was not extinct, but it was rapidly sliding down the slope toward extinction.

What was happening in the peregrine's bodies was a process known as

biomagnification. According to one biological dictionary, biomagnification is the

"...increase in the concentration of toxic chemicals with each new link in the food chain."

Peregrines are predators at the top of the food chain, which means they get the maximum

concentration of toxins. At a 1991 conference on peregrines Brian Walton, the director of

the Bird Group put it quite well by stating: "The peregrine is an incredibly efficient

accumulator of pesticides."

The effect of chemicals on the peregrines' reproductive success is complicated. I'm

using the present tense, because even though DDT was banned in the United States, it is

still used in many third world countries. Some peregrines migrate, and even if they don’t,

the birds they feed on do. A peregrine on the coast of California can catch a bird migrating

up from South America, and get a decent dose of pesticides. In addition, further research

has shown that DDT is not the only chemical factor. It's more of a cocktail of DDT,

PCB’s, (a.k.a. polychlorinated biphenyls) and dioxins. However, for the sake of clarity.

I'm only going to talk about DDT.

These chemical effects are an intricate and complex puzzle that has been teased out

over many years. For the sake of illustration let's say it works like this: It's 1962, and you

put about four ounces of DDT in your garden to kill insects. The DDT works great. But a

flock of sparrows comes along and eats some of the insects before they die. Maybe they

take a dust bath, and get DDT on their feathers which enters their system when they preen.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DDT is not water soluble. It is fat soluble. This means it will not be flushed out of the

animals' system, but will remain stored in fat of the body of the animal that ingests it. To

get an idea of how this effects a peregrine, lets say each sparrow does this in enough

gardens to have about one unit of DDT in its body. And lets assume that one unit equals a

sub-lethal dose of DDT. At this point I need to point out I am not talking about any kind of

actual amount. The actual amounts are so small that when people talk about them, I have

trouble conceptualizing them. So I'm taking the liberty of talking about a fictional unit in

order to keep this understandable.

Okay, we've got some sparrows with a unit of DDT each in their bodies, (very

polluted, but not lethal) Then a peregrine comes through. A peregrine can easily eat four

sparrows a day. And it does this for a week. That's four times seven units of DDT in the

peregrine's body. That's twenty-eight units a week. 112 per month. 1,134 units per year.

Biomagnification.

In reality. The amounts of DDT ingested in an animals' body are very very small.

Minute. So small that scientists talk about them in the terms of parts per million or ppm .

The amount of toxicity is in relation to the whole animal.

To conceptualize this, let’s pretend that a female peregrines' body is represented by

a typical back-yard swimming pool. In addition, let's say that the smallest amount of DDT

that it takes for a female peregrine to produce non-viable eggs is .1 ppm, that is one-tenth

of a ppm. A back yard pool holds approximately one hundred cubic meters. A sugar cube

is about one cubic centimeter. To get a toxic level o f . 1 ppm all you need to do is toss ten

sugar cubes into your pool.

Because DDT doesn't break down in water it remains stored in an animals' body.

Yours and mine too. If you're alive, you have DDT in your tissues. This is known as

bioaccumulation, which is "the accumulation of toxic chemicals in living things." Actually,

I'm not great at chemistry, and I’m simplifying a bit. DDT does break down, but it doesn't

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. get any less toxic. It turns into DDE, a byproduct of DDT, and what DDE does is mimic

estrogen.

Hormones, especially sex hormones, pack a lot of punch in a tiny package. A

small shift in a hormone level can cause big shifts in the body of the animal affected. The

problem with DDE is that it is NOT estrogen. But it mimics estrogen just enough to cause

some serious damage. Imagine that in the complex endocrine cycle of an animal one

hormone is a key that opens a door. When that door is opened, it triggers the rising or

lowering of a different hormone. This change opens another door, which triggers another

hormone, and so on throughout the cycle. When DDE mimics estrogen, the key gets put

into the lock and broken off. The door does not open. The process is stalled. The complex

dance of biology stumbles and trips and down the line things go very wrong.

In peregrines DDE interferes with the hormones in the female peregrine and

interrupts the process that lays down the calcium layer of the egg. As a result the eggshell is

considerably thinner than normal. When the mother snuggles the eggs between her body

and the bottom of the scrape, the eggs crack and die. There are no young.

I thought this was awful, that these birds would be extinct if chemicals and

pesticides were still being used at the deadly rate that they once were. I was taken with their

beauty, motivated to try to make a difference. Motivated, but not necessarily organized or

effective. Later a friend told me his first impression of me was that I was earnest to the

point of being scattered. When I went out to my first site, I forgot my binoculars. Lee told

me later that he thought I was a complete numskull. (Actually, I think it was "numb-nuts."

It didn’t matter to him that gender-wise I couldn’t be a numb-nuts.) Lee cared about the

birds and he did not suffer fools. I found out later he'd only hired me because he was

desperate. There was no one else.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. According to the Hack Manual, in a perfect world, an ideal hack site would go like

this: A large plywood box (about the size of two refrigerators laid side by side,) is

constructed and placed on the side of a cliff. Not a sheer cliff, but a steep one where the

box can be reached to feed. The front of the box—a combination of bars and wire—can be

removed. The juvenile birds are confined in the box about a week before they are ready to

fly. At this point they are usually between thirty-five and forty days old. The birds that are

hacked come from different places. Some are from eggs that were laid by captive bred

birds. Some were collected from wild nests. They are not genetically related and the only

criterion for being hacked together is that they are close in age. Peregrines are behaviorally

hard-wired. At forty to forty-five days of age, they start to fly. They naturally begin to

chase birds after they get comfortable in the air, and then they start to hunt. No one

"teaches" them these things. That's part of the reason that a hack site can work. The birds'

behavior is somewhat expected and predictable. When the birds are in the box they look out

the front, and get used to the view while being safe and protected. The open front faces

out, mimicking the feel of an enclosed cliff ledge. A piece of plywood angles across one

corner of the box. If a predator shows up the birds can retreat behind this "blind" and feel

safer. After the birds have been in the box for a week, the lead biologist from the Bird

Group comes to the site, attaches telemetry transmitters to each bird and the front of the box

is taken off, allowing the three young inside to venture out. At this point they are just ready

to fly, like a 15-year-old with a learner's permit.

While the birds are being fitted transmitters the attendants take the front off the box.

Then they get to their observation points—places where they are far enough away from the

birds not to disturb them, but still have them in view—and spend the rest of the day

watching the birds. Observation points are where the attendants will spend most of their

time. In site-speak, observation points are almost always referred to as O. P. 's.

Juveniles have bouts of furious wing flapping. And then one day they become

airborne. The first flight of a young bird is called a fledge. A bird that has just learned to fly

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. is a fledgling. It's a beautiful word: fledgling. Fledglings are birds that look mature, but

don’t land very well. They may vocalize a lot when they fly; something about their

movements is awkward. Like all young animals, they stumble. They crash land the first

week or so. It's not intentional. Often, after that astonishing first flight and crash landing,

they will sit still for hours, taking it in.

If all goes well, the birds fledge on the first or second day after release, return to the

hack box within twenty-four hours and eat. This is the single most critical aspect of a site.

Once this happens, the site is over its biggest hurdle. The birds now know where food is

and they will return to the box when they are hungry.

Juvenile peregrines are brown and tan, and more closely resemble an adult prairie

falcon than an adult peregrine. Even though they are young, they are the same size as the

adults.

During the first two weeks, the birds stay close to the box and interact with each

other. They do perch-to-perch flights, from box to ledge, to snag, to box. Like a kitten that

hides under the couch the first few days in a new place and slowly ventures from there into

the other rooms of the house, the peregrines use the box as their center as they explore the

world. They return for food and shelter, but slowly radiate farther and farther out. After the

first week, they often sleep somewhere else. They return for food until they've learned to

fly, learned to hunt, and then they are gone. As an attendant, you've kept them fed and

protected and your parenting days are over; at least until the next site.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. M UIR BEA CH

When you first have an experience, you have no comparison. You only know what

other people have told you. If they have said: this will happen, and it happens, you are

perhaps not sufficiently grateful, or cognizant of your luck, because you have no idea of all

the things that could possibly go wrong.

At my first hack site I was lucky. It went like a textbook on peregrine

réintroduction. In retrospect, I was grateful. At the time, I just tried to keep up.

I got the call in the beginning of May. I'd be going to M uir Beach and work with a

falconer. Bring stuff to camp out, and food for two weeks. Meet Lee at the Bird Group on

June 5th, and I could follow him to the site when he delivered the birds. I was excited and

anxious. Who was the guy I’d be working with? What if we didn't like each other? Where

was Muir Beach? I'd never heard of it. I got out a map and found it in the Golden Gate

Recreation Area just north of San Francisco. The Recreation Area once was ranches,

military bases, dairy land. It was steep grassy hills rolling to the edge of the continent

where they gave way to jagged cliffs dropping into the Pacific. Along this coast, beaches

occurred where creeks lined with willows and eucalyptus ran into the ocean. There were no

trees on the hills, however, and not many bushes. It was mainly grass that by June had

dried golden and invasive thistles, taller than the grass, that formed impenetrable thickets of

spines.

Muir Beach was both the beach and an enclave of houses nestled into the hills

northeast of the beach. Our hack site was on the hills and the cliffs south of the beach

proper. I first got there driving with Lee and Bill Oswald, a park biologist, along an access

road from Tennessee Valley. We’d met Bill at Tennessee Valley where there was a bam

with a freezer for the quail, a phone and a shower. Muir Beach was approximately three

miles north, and as we bumped along the dirt road it seemed like even the sound of the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. truck was muffled by fog. In Santa Cruz, the fog came in at night, in the evening,

obscuring the sky, blurring the outlines of everything. The air had the scent of saltwater.

There was something both active and sensual to it. Wrapped in a cloud, everything

changes, becomes more cozy and muffled. Some people think fog is spooky, but I never

did. There was a seven-year drought in California when I was growing up, and seven

years is most of a childhood. I was left with a deep appreciation for water—whether the tiny

misting of a heavy fog or the deluging rains of an El Nino.

Lee and Bill discussed the logistics of the site. Lee explained to both of us that

Brent Hetzler, the other attendant, wouldn’t be showing up until later. He was doing some

work at Point Reyes. As Lee and Bill started discussing site finances, the agencies involved

and various sources of funding, I looked out the window. This was a landscape of subtle

colors; grays, golds and browns. Even the trees by the creeks looked washed out by fog. It

was like being inside a watercolor. The edges of everything softened and were difficult to

see.

When we arrived, the fog was starting to burn off. As we drove up, I saw the hack

box perched on a narrow ridge 150 feet above the water. The white boards were a stark

contrast to the dark rock around it. I'd already read about the hack box in the hack manual

and seen a demonstration box at the Bird Group, a mock-up used to help other agencies or

biologists involved in the réintroduction of other raptors. At the time, the box really didn't

seem like much of anything to me. Just a plywood box. But now, seeing it perched on the

ridge, I saw how big it was. I didn't even want to think about how they had mounted it out

there.

There was a truck parked at a flat spot just off the road. A tall blonde man in his

twenties watched us approach. He had round gold rimmed glasses and his strong jaw and

regular features reminded me of a man in uniform. But he was wearing jeans and a green

sweater. He did have what I would later recognize as the birder's uniform; a pair of

binoculars hanging around his neck, and a watch on his wrist.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. W e pulled up and got out. Lee made introductions.

"Clara, Matt Nixon. Matt, Clara Weygandt. M att is an ornithologist with the Bird

Group and he'll be staying here for a few days until Brent Hetzler gets here. And you all

already know Bill Oswald..." Evidently everyone did.

"Okay, " Lee continued, "lets get this show on the road." He opened the camper-

shell at the back of his truck and handed Matt an apple box. I heard a little scratching noise

from inside. I realized with surprise that this was how he transported the birds. I’d thought

that he would use something like a dog carrier, but I was wrong. Peregrines are visual so

you need to deprive them of visual stimuli to keep them calm. This is one of the reasons

that falconers hood their birds.

Lee handed a box to Bill and kept a box for himself. I got to carry the quail. I later

discovered there is a hierarchy to carrying the birds to the hack box. Well, not a hierarchy

exactly, but if one of the people representing the agency that has given money for the site is

there, that person gets to carry a bird. It's a perk. Give us $15,000 for a hack site and carry

a peregrine to the box! O f course, I didn’t know that then; I assumed that because I was the

least experienced. I'd carry the quail. As they started along the trail to the ridge, I grabbed

the quail from the bed of the truck. The dark brown, wet, feathery lumps were in a clear

plastic bag. These were Japanese quail that were raised at the Bird Group. Fed strictly on

organic feed it was cheap and insured that the peregrines started their life pesticide-free.

I opened the bag and counted the lumps. 1, 2, ...6 . Would that be enough? I

supposed so. Every female got two per day, so even if we had three females, there was

enough. Females got two, males got one. As I counted, I realized I didn't know the gender

of our birds.

I ran a bit to catch up, feeling like I did in kindergarten, the first day, when I didn't

know anyone, and everything was strange. I caught up with them, and we started slowly

down the ridge. I was struck by the formality of what we were doing. Something about the

situation rang of presentation, of bringing fealty to a lord or king. I felt like I should be

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. leading a charger, or carrying a silk pillow coddling a golden pear, to be eaten by the

princess under a spell that had kept her imprisoned for a thousand years.

But really, I was carrying a bag of dead quail behind three guys with apple boxes

towards a big white plywood box on the edge of a cliff. W e were a long way from the

times when falcons were used to hunt birds, used world-wide by kings and commoners

alike. A good falcon has always been valued; there are records of land trades, treaties, and

agreements made with the inclusion of a number of falcons.

Lee told me that one of the things I had to watch out for was people trying to steal

the birds. "It probably won't happen," he said, "but you need to be aware of it. One of

these beauties could easily be worth several thousand dollars to the right buyer, both here

and in the Middle East. So keep an eye out."

Getting to the box was no picnic. It was about 100 yards down a crumbly ridge,

with a steep rocky hillside to the east, and a 200 foot cliff on the west. The thought that I'd

be clambering down this in the dark made me pause. I hoped I’d be familiar enough with it

by then not to make too many mistakes. Ahead of me everyone seemed solemn and sure

footed. I was glad my only responsibility was the quail.

Once we got to the hack box—I hung back and watched as Lee knelt by the little

door in the side. Matt handed him an apple box and Lee carefully maneuvered it into the

hack box with the upper half of his body in the box, his knees on the dirt and rock outside.

He'd do something in there, then come out with an empty apple box and shut the door.

He'd put the empty cardboard box on the roof of the hack box, and he repeated the process

until all three birds were in the hack box. Matt and Lee collected the cardboard boxes and

climbed up to where Bill and I waited a little above.

"Why don’t you take a look," he suggested. And we did. One by one, we

clambered carefully down to see the birds. When it was my turn, I put my finger over the

peep-hole and waited. As I did, I looked out at the view, the steep drop, the ocean, and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tried to imagine I was a peregrine. I thought about the hack box being my home. But I was

too excited to really feel that. I wanted to see the birds. After a minute, I looked.

There they were. One in front of the box, already looking out the bars, one perched

on a small rock in the middle, and the third hidden behind the screen, where I couldn't see

it very well. They were brown and lumpy with down. Their eyes were deep black and

alert. They looked almost identical to the juveniles I'd seen in the chambers. I knew they

were older, but they looked the same to me. On their right legs was a permanent metal

identification band. On their left a leather cuff with a dummy telemetry transmitter attached.

The dummy transmitter was about a half-inch long by a quarter-inch wide, with a twelve-

inch wire attached to it. The reason for the dummies was to get the birds used to having a

transmitter on their leg. Lee would put real transmitters on them on release day. As I

watched, the bird on the rock lifted its foot, and started biting the leather cuff.

Telemetry is an interesting thing. It's incredible at tracking animals—especially large

ones—throughout their ranges. Even though catching an animal for radio collaring can be

traumatic for the animal, the overall information about their movements, territory and

habitat use is phenomenal. Better electronics means that the telemetry unit itself is less and

less invasive. But all that aside, for our purposes, this is how it was done.

Before the young were put in the box for the first week of acclimatization, they

were fitted with dummy transmitters at the Bird Group. These dummies were the same size

and weight of the real ones, to get the birds used to having this thing like a metal almond

with a long tail on one of their legs. The real transmitter was attached with a small leather

cuff fastened by a single stitch of cotton thread. The thread rotted through ten days to two

weeks after release, and the transmitter dropped off. We didn’t need to track the bird

beyond that, and by that time the transmitter had usually stopped transmitting. We let them

fuss with the dummies for an entire week while they were in the box so they wouldn't rip

off the real transmitters.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. It was funny. Some of the birds I'd helped release would shake their feet, and look

at the transmitters initially, sometimes biting at the cuff, trying to get it off; but as the week

wore on, they would stop. Others would shake their feet the first day or so, and then be

fine with it. At one site, there was a female which we named Wire-biter. We got her name

from how she treated the transmitters. She not only bit the wire off of her dum my

transmitter in the box, but also off the transmitters of her two siblings. Within three days

after release, she'd bitten the wire off all the real transmitters as well ! Luckily it was a

coastal release, where eagles were not a threat. Tracking was relatively easy, so the fact that

our telemetry wasn't working well wasn't as critical as it would have been at a more remote

site.

Not that telemetry was fool-proof. There was, of course, Murphy's Law of

Telemetry, which stated that the transmitter on the bird you were most worried about would

fail; sometimes within the first day or two. Always. Well, maybe not always, but it

certainly seemed that way.

The way radio telemetry works is this; There's a receiver, and any number of

transmitters. The transmitters are programmed to transmit a radio pulse at difference

frequencies. The receiver picks up these different frequencies, where they appear as a

series of beeps. Each frequency has a different tone and pulse. The receiver is a small metal

box with a speaker, a couple of dials, and a large aluminum antenna that looks like a old

1950’s TV antenna. W hen you take a reading, you hold the box in one hand, and the

antenna in the other, and sweep for the signal. The antenna is attached by a fairly long

cord. Usually the higher up you are, the better you can pick up the signal, so often we'd

get on top of a ridge, or if we were lower, we'd climb on top of something—a boulder, a

truck—and sweep.

Telemetry can also bounce. The signal can hit a cliff or a tall building and bounce

off it and you pick up the bounce rather than the actual signal. To get a cleaner reading, it is

always wise to triangulate your signal. This means you must take your readings from three

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. different locations, about a quarter mile away from each other, and if all three line up on

one spot, that's most likely where the transmitter is.

It’s important to remember that all the telemetry tells you is where the transmitter is.

It does not necessarily mean that is where the bird is. It does not tell you anything about the

condition of the bird, whether it is dead or alive, or badly injured, although with some

telemetry now, researchers can infer this. Sometimes the signal is faint, or fades in and out

rapidly, and that can mean that the bird is in flight, but not always.

Telemetry is a good tool, extremely useful, but it is a ball park tool—accurate, but

not precise, capable of giving you solid information, but with limitations.

******

During that first week, I learned the difference between a raven and a red-tail. I

learned what a turkey vulture looked like, and I started hearing about the uneasy alliance

between falconers and biologists.

The way I heard the story, the falconers first noticed that the peregrine population

was not what it had been. Falconry is an old sport, dating back to at least the Medieval

period in the West, even further back in the Middle East and the Orient. There are several

ways to obtain a bird, but this one is the one that lead to the techniques used at a hack site.

A falconer locates a mating pair early in spring. He keeps an eye on the nest, and when the

young have hatched, he climbs to the nest and takes one. He rears it by hand, feeding it and

getting it to imprint on him as the source of food. When it reaches 35 to 42 days of age, he

takes it out and lets it learn to fly in the wild. He tracks it, however, and lays out meat on a

light-colored board for the bird to return to and feed. The bird will naturally pursue prey,

and once it has learned to hunt, the falconer re-traps it and uses it to hunt. The process of

letting the juvenile bird go and then re-trapping it is called hacking. Juvenile birds in this

process are said to be "at hack. "

Today, falconers in California are licensed by both federal and state wildlife

officials. Initially you must apprentice under a Master falconer for a total of two years. You

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. have a license, but you can only fly a kestrel or a red-tail. If you continue, you become a

General falconer and can own two birds. If you are a Master falconer you can own three.

Falconers fly every kind of raptor. They still collect birds from wild nests, with permits

from the state. Which is why, in California in the 1960's, they noticed that many peregrine

nests were failing.

Matt the ornithologist told me a lot of the history of peregrine recovery during that

first week at Muir Beach. He also filled me in on the tension between biologists and

falconers. Both groups worked together towards the same goal, both recognized the

importance of what they were doing and were almost always in agreement about how it got

done, but the tension showed itself mainly in their attitude towards the birds.

I learned falconry terms from Brent. Matt didn't like it. He'd warned me about it

before Brent got to the site.

"You'll be hearing Brent using some terms that are not biologically correct. He's a

falconer, and falconers have a different way of referring to the birds. I'm not saying that's

bad, but you need to be aware that there are two different ways of looking at what we are

doing "

"Okay," I said. This was new to me, and it was interesting to find out about points

of contention.

"Falconers, well, they tend to regard the birds as theirs. There's always a tendency

to want to control or confine the birds. Not the birds that we have here, but birds in

general. Biologists don't want that. They tend to want the population to be back to what it

was because of the bigger ecological picture. There are also words and terms that you'll

hear used in falconry that are not used in biology," he continued. "For example, falconers

refer to the female as 'the falcon' and the male as the tiercel.' It’s a word that means third'

and it's because the male is approximately a third smaller than the female."

"Why is that?" I asked

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "That's the million dollar question." he replied. "We don’t know. In most species

when there's a difference in size between male and female, the male is the larger one.

That's known as sexual dimorphism. In raptors, often it’s the female that is larger than the

male. This bucks the trend, so it's called reverse sexual dimorphism."

"And it isn't known why that happens? " I pressed.

"Not in raptors, it's not. Sexual dimorphism is easier to explain. Males need to

defend the females from other males, defend territories, things like that. But with raptors,

the advantage for the female being larger isn’t as obvious.”

"Okay. So, if in falconry you say falcon and tiercel, what do you say in biology?"

"Female and male."

Sometime later at the site Brent told me about rehabilitating a red-shouldered hawk.

It was sort of a drag to fly, he explained, as it kept going after snails. Brent did not find

this exciting prey. But to a bird that had been injured, perhaps snails were the easiest

source of food for the least amount of energy. Or it could have been what it was used to

eating. W hat 1 found interesting was the judgment, the separation in perception, the

difference between being dissatisfied with snails and thinking it was pretty damn smart of

the bird to go for that prey item.

* * * * * * *

Various philosophies, mainly Eastern, talk about the concept of detachment. Of

being in the world, but not of it. It's one of those slippery things that sounds like a simple

thing to practice, but it's not. How are you close and caring and still detached? How do

you love and let something go? How do you subsume your neuroses and desires, and try

to see things from a larger perspective?

I got into peregrine work for completely selfish reasons. The desire to help an

endangered species made me look good. Peregrines were on of the charismatic megafauna,

a phrase used to describe a species, usually a large one which everyone agrees should be

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. saved. Peregrines had a history with man, they were beautiful, sexy and romantic, and

perhaps some of that would rub off on me.

All that is true. But this is true as well: that I kept doing the work because I fell in

love. Because it wasn't just the peregrines that I encountered with immediacy and intimacy.

It was the pocket gopher by the observation point at Muir beach, the goldfinches pulling at

milk-thistle down to reach the seeds, the soft feel of fog in the morning and the orange and

gray beetles in my tent. It was the warm dry winds of afternoons in the Sierras, the

occasional rattlesnake, the Townsend's solitaire that sang from a snag above one camp, the

bats and cricket that sang a symphony of counterpoint at dusk. It was the sweet pace and

the unnecessary generosity of the natural world. I kept getting taught things I didn't even

know I had to learn. Because, ultimately, I had to care deeply and let go. That was my job.

The falcons, all they had to do was be wild.

I've met falconers who had no use for conservation beyond peregrines, and

falconers that worked tirelessly throughout the field season and were raging

conservationists. I've heard biologists call any bird that was not a peregrine "prey species"

and seen them climb into nests on dangerously crumbling cliffs. There was respect and

selfishness on both sides of the fence.

On my second day Matt started teaching me about birds. We headed for the shore

below the box, as Matt thought there might be a raven nest nearby. We walked down the

fire road that led to the beach when suddenly a large bird appeared over the brush covered

field to the east.

"Okay, what's that?" asked Matt.

The bird was big and dark.

"Eagle?" I ventured.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "No, no, but it is big. No, that's a turkey vulture. You don't have to worry about

them, because they won't bother our birds. You'll see plenty of them; they're all over."

We watched as the vulture soared over us. I could see its little red head.

"That's a nice sighting," Matt commented, "but you may not always get such a

good look, so how do you tell it's a TV right away."

A what? Had he just said TV? Didn't he just say it was a turkey vulture...oh.

"Short for Turkey Vulture." Matt explained.

"I know, I just got it." I replied.

"So, how do you tell a turkey vulture when it's far away, like over that ridge?" He

pointed to a hill at least a mile away. I couldn't imagine being able to tell a bird from that

distance, but Matt was an ornithologist, he knew the mysteries of birds.

"I have no idea," I said earnestly. This seemed impossible to me.

"You look at the silhouette of the bird and the way it flies. Both those together will

get you to TV. First, the silhouette. Turkey vultures have a very steep wing angle,

especially compared to other birds their size. No other bird that size will have that wing

angle. " Matt put his hands out, palms down, fingers together, everything flat. "Eagles have

a very flat profile, like this..." He moved his hands so the palms were up, and formed a

"V." "Turkey vultures have a profile like this, even when they aren't flapping. On top of

that, they tilt when they soar. It makes them look unstable, but they aren't." Matt took the

V of his hands and tilted it sharply, then righted it. "Like that."

I looked at his hands, and then over to the ridge. The bird had disappeared. I must

have looked disappointed because he said, "Don't worry, you'll be seeing a lot of them."

We resumed walking. I had my binoculars, but I kept forgetting to use them.

Suddenly Matt stopped, and put his bins to his eyes in one fluid motion. I looked where he

was looking. A black speck. Oh geez, a speck.

"Okay, " Matt said, "take a look at that. You might need your binoculars," he added

helpfully.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I looked at the speck and, trying to imitate the master, I brought my bins to my eyes

in one smooth motion, still looking at the speck. Blue. All I saw was blue. I moved the

bins a little. More blue. God, I was such a doofus. I moved them some more—nothing but

sky. I took my bins down and looked for the speck with my bare eyes. I looked where

Matt was looking with his binoculars—oh, I saw it. 1 tried again and this time I got it. The

speck became a black, flat silhouette, about as big as the TV.

"Eagle?" I ventured.

"No. Red-tail hawk. You'll see a lot of them, too. But your instincts are good, its

silhouette is more flat—like an eagle. But it's much smaller, and its fingers are not so

pronounced."

Smaller than an eagle? How was I supposed to know that? I had nothing to

compare it to. And what was that "fingers" remark?

"Also," Matt continued, "it has the classic buteo silhouette, and it does have a red

tail, but not always. Red-tail hawks are notorious for having different color morphology,

so that's not a good way to i.d. them. The really solid way is by their armpits. They're

black. RTH's are the only buteo with black armpits."

Oh God. I had been afraid of this. This always happened with nature stuff; people

started talking and suddenly I didn't know what they meant. They'd rattle on and I'd have

to stand there and remind myself that I was intelligent, and not only that but they were

supposedly speaking English. And birds had armpits?!

"Back up." I said. " You lost me at buteo, and the color morphology didn't make

anything any clearer, and then you tossed in armpits, and I am so lost, it's not even

funny." Matt threw back his head and laughed.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I forget how it sounds in the beginning. Buteo is a

description for a certain kind of raptor body shape. Raptors have different silhouettes,

different body shapes that reflect how they hunt. " He hunkered down and smoothed out the

dust of the fire road. "This is a buteo silhouette." He sketched a bird with wings

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. outstretched. It looked like a bird to me. He smoothes a bit more. "This is a falcon. And

this is an accipiter. See how the falcon's wings are like a boomerang and they have a

narrow tail.? The accipiter has oval wings, and a narrow tail? The body shape reflects how

it hunts." I looked again at the buteo shape. It looked spread out; wide wings, wide tail.

"This looks more spread out." I said brilliantly, pointing to it.

"You got it," he said. "We'll draw all the shapes in your field notebook when we

get back to camp. That way you can refer to them and start to tell the difference. Don't

worry if you don’t get it right away, you have time."

"So how do they hunt? " I asked as we continued down the hill.

"Buteos tend to hunt in open areas. They ring up—you've seen that, a bird circling

without flapping its wings—and watch the ground for prey. They have wide wings and a

wide tail that allows them to soar and hover while they hunt. They eat a fair number of

mammals and reptiles. Red-tails, rough-legged, black, Harris’, red-shouldered, they're all

buteos. You'll probably only see red-tails and red shouldered here. Maybe a rough

legged."

"Okay," I said, trying to concentrate. I was a little overwhelmed.

"The accipiters you'll see here are most likely sharp-shinned and Cooper's. I doubt

you'll see a goshawk. W e’re not in their range. Accipiters like forested areas. They tail-

chase their prey, and they have more oval shaped wings and a long narrow tail that enables

them to maneuver in the close quarters of a wood. Falcons ring way up and isolate their

prey over water, or an open area. Then they dive on it, and kill it with their feet. You'll

most likely only see kestrels here. They're the smallest North American falcon. You might

get a merlin blowing through, but that's it."

I nodded. My head was spinning with goshawk, sharp-shinned, and merlin. I

hoped I could keep it all straight.

At the bottom of the hill, we veered west and walked onto the beach. There was a

small creek that disappeared into the sand. In front of us the Pacific tossed fiercely in the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sun. There were some rocks on the north end of the beach. Matt pointed to one particularly

large dark one. "Beyond that is the unofficial nude beach," he said. Growing up in Santa

Cruz I was used to rocky north coast beaches being clothing-optional. Somehow word got

around, and the people who wanted to take their clothes off did. They’d huddle up against

the cliffs and when the sun made a brief appearance, strip and lie in the sun. I had no

objection, but it looked cold as hell to me. Not an enjoyable way to be naked. The beach

itself was like all Northern California beaches: rocky; churning water that you couldn't

really swim in. Even if you took the cold, it was much too rough. The technique was

mainly dip and then run rapidly out of water. There was always fog, or if not, a cold wind,

so you bundled up good, and just your feet were bare.

W e continued along the south edge of the beach. I looked up. The ridge rose

steeply above us. I saw a bird fly overhead. It was big and jet black.

"MATT!" I exclaimed, "Is that a boo ..boo...you know, one of those birds?!" He

glanced at it.

"Nope. Good try, the silhouette is similar, but see, that's not even a raptor. "

"It's not? "

"Corvid. It's a raven."

Oh. It seemed my ignorance was glaringly apparent every time I opened my mouth.

But I cheered myself up by thinking that at least I’d sort of recognized the silhouette.

"And how do you say that word again, boo..."

"Boo-tee-oh. Buteo." he replied.

"And we just saw a raven, and it's a what?"

"Corvid. It means it's in the crow family."

"And how do you say that other word? Ah..." I couldn't even fully remember it,

not even enough to butcher the pronunciation.

"Ak-sip-ah-ter. Accipiter. There's buteos, accipiters, and falcons."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I nodded. I sort of wanted to ask how he knew it was a raven and not a crow, and I also

wanted to know what other birds where in the "crow family" which sounded large, but I

was afraid I'd get another big explanation with a lot of names that I couldn't remember.

As we got closer to the water I smelled the familiar smell of the limestone cliffs,

soft and chalky mixed with the pungent tang of seaweed piled on the tide line. We walked

to the edge of the sand and as I looked out, I realized what I was seeing. Seagulls. LOTS

of them. And they were birds, not just part of the landscape like they had been before. My

heart sank. I'd forgotten about them. And I was here with an ornithologist, and there was

undoubtedly something complicated and tricky about them as well. They all looked alike,

however, so perhaps it wouldn't be too hard.

"I know what these are," I said, like a kid showing off. "They're seagulls,"

Matt winced. "Don't say that," he said.

"Say what?"

"Seagulls. It's very improper."

"It is?" I was astonished. "Why is it improper?"

"They are 'gulls'. There is no such bird as a 'seagull.' It's sort of snobby, I know,

but in ornithology, you display your ignorance immediately when you say seagull. "

I guessed I wouldn't tell him about my favorite pun on the packages of frozen

bagels my mom used to buy when I was a kid. "When is a seagull not a seagull? When it's

a bay gull!"

"Oh," I looked out at them, flying, perching on large rocks just offshore, standing

in groups on the sand. I thought there must be at least two different species; one species

was gray and white and black with yellow bills. Their plumage looked crisp. Sort of like a

uniform. The other species was sort of a gray-brown-white mixed together, kind of

muddy. "I bet there's more than one kind here too, isn't there?"

"I'd say there’s at least five species here. Don't worry about it too much," he added

quickly, seeing my face. "You don't have to know the difference."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Well, what’s the difference between those two main species?" I asked.

"What are you talking about?" He looked at me quizzically.

"Those ones that are gray and white, and neat looking, and then those sort of

muddy-looking ones."

Matt frowned out at the gulls standing at the waters' edge, then his face cleared.

"Oh, oh, I get it. No, those aren't two different species, even though it seems like

they are because of the plumage. No, the neat' looking ones are the adults, the 'muddy'

ones are the first years." He looked at me. "And there are still at least five different species

here."

This was getting worse and worse. Those were the juveniles? There were tons of

them. There were five different species? But they were all alike !

I must have looked crushed, because he said, "Don't worry about it. Gulls are tough. Just

work on identifying raptors."

I was relieved to be off seagull duty. No, "gull" duty, I corrected myself. I felt like

my ignorance was apparent enough without making it worse by saying taboo things like

"seagull."

We headed south, scrambling over slick rocks exposed by low tide. Our goal was

to get to the shoreline below the box, and see if there was any danger to the birds from that

direction. Part of our duty as hack attendants was to assess potential dangers to the birds.

The rocks were a dark gray that reminded me of slate. There were tide pools, but no

colorful anemones or starfish. There were some prehistoric looking things on the rocks,

though. They looked like big sow-bugs to me. They were hard and clung tightly to the

rock. I touched one; it felt like leather and didn't move. I wanted to ask Matt what they

were, but he was far ahead of me, scanning the cliff above us with his binoculars. He'd

seen a couple of ravens near the box this morning and wondered if they would be a

problem. It depended on how territorial they got. An adult raven could certainly give a

young peregrine a hard time.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. W e found the raven's nest on a rock just offshore, not right below the box, but

farther south. I had never seen a raven's nest. From below, it looked like a lot of sticks

stuck in a horizontal cleft in the rock about thirty feet up.

"It's a good location." Matt noted. "See, they are protected from predators out

there, isolated, but still close to land. I bet there are gulls nesting on that rock as well. I

don't like how close it is to the box, though. We'll just have to keep an eye on it."

When we returned to camp. Matt dug around in his car and handed me his bird

guide. It was the National Geographic one, which he explained was the best, as it showed

all the different plumages for each species: male, female and juvenile, as sometimes birds

didn’t molt into their adult plumage until after their first year. He also said that sometimes

different individuals in the same species went through various color variations; for

example, light and dark morphs. He showed me the pages with silhouettes of hawks in

flight, and suggested I copy them in my notebook. I nodded and listened, trying to take it

all in. I knew that birds were complicated, but this was daunting. I didn't say I had no idea

what he meant by "morphs. " I assumed by the way he was using the word it meant

different appearances, but I thought I'd wait and ask him about it later.

I sat down in my new aluminum lawn chair, which looked so campy I was

embarrassed to be using it. Even as I paged through the guide I noticed it was surprisingly

comfortable. I looked at peregrines. I noticed that juvenile peregrines looked a lot like the

adult prairie falcons. "That could get confusing," I thought. I found the pages with the

silhouettes of female hawks in flight, and drew them in my notebook.

At one point, between drawing the female red-tail and the female Cooper's, I

looked up. Matt was in his truck, door open, and it looked like he was drawing too. In

front of me, the ground sloped, and then dropped sharply. I could see the little ridge the

box was on, and the box itself, glaring white in the afternoon sun. For a moment the

surreal quality of the entire scene hit me. The box, isolated there on the cliff edge, and then,

a little away from it perched on the one flat place on this steep grass and thistle-covered hill,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a motley conglomeration of two tents, three trucks, a few aluminum chairs, and us, our

heads bent over notebooks, recording.

But then, when you came to think about it, making espresso drinks was pretty

surreal too; standing behind a counter all day and selling little cups of a brown liquid to

people who came up and gave you money. I looked out across the ocean. I was learning. I

was outside, drawing in a notebook. I wasn't waiting on people, I was doing something

scientific, I was getting a chance to do something on the right side of the scale, to balance a

wrong that had been done by my species towards another. Maybe done in ignorance, but

done nonetheless. I'd rather do this than sell things to people, any day.

Brent was the sort of person who would have made a good pioneer. I swear, he

could scratch a living from a rock. The first day he was there he scrounged old lumber left

from when the land was a ranch: warped pieces of plywood and gray-patinaed 2X4's

hidden in the grass. He nailed them together with hammer and nails from his toolbox and

built an outdoor kitchen. It had a little table where we set the stove and three little walls to

cut the wind. It faced the ocean, and he put in a bench so we could sit, cook, eat, and see

the box. He didn't have a saw, so pieces of wood stuck out at odd intervals, making it look

like a fort built by a couple of kids. But it became the center of our camp. Later in the site,

when the birds were older and flying all over, we'd sit there and make pancakes and watch.

Brent had a Coleman stovetop oven, and one weekend we made blueberry muffins from a

box. Oh, were they good! Big treat after two weeks of ramen, soup, and Kraft macaroni

and cheese.

Before working at the site, Brent clerked in a Thrifty Drug store in Southern

California. I couldn't picture him there. To me he always had his scruffy beard and the old

navy-blue ski bibs that he wore all the time. I could not imagine him in a florescent-lit drug

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. store. Here, outside, he looked like he belonged. Brent was all about practicality. The ski

overalls were from a thrift store; they were cheap and warm.

He knew how to deal with the cold. Even though he was from Redondo Beach, he

was savvy. He wore the ski bibs with a wool shirt, a pile jacket and a hat with flaps. He

had a thin, hawkish face, a scraggly beard, and generally looked pretty scary. I just

bundled: wool hat—hand-knit by a student for my father—big pile jacket, long johns, jeans,

boots. We both looked homeless. That's what happens when you live in a tent and a Ram

Charger parked on the side of a hill for six weeks. Inevitably, everything gets dirty. We

camped in the dirt, and the wind blew dust around. The first few weeks of the site we were

too tired to stay clean. We’d shower in the utility room in the barn when we could.

On the day of release Manel came to the site with Lee. He was a Spanish wildlife

biologist who was studying an endangered harrier in Spain and wanted to look at the

techniques that the Bird Group used in hacking, to see if similar efforts would be effective

with the harrier. He was compact, gorgeous, and very polite. I don’t think my mouth

dropped open when I saw him, but I definitely registered the gorgeous part.

6/12/87 Release day

7:15 pm. Release. I am in left O.P. We are doing an evening release instead of a morning

one. Most likely the birds will not fly tonight. Matt by box, putting quail on top. Now he's

removing nails that hold on front of box on the right side.

7:17 Lee is by the bo.x. Birds are aware something is going on

7:18 Lee opens door to box, enters, birds each wildly—Lee now in box herding birds Brent

and Matt are removing front o f the box. B. on far side by ocean, M. on this side 35

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7:19 Brent lying across top of box removing bottom nail with Matt hanging onto his foot.

Lee putting transmitters on birds, Manel taking pictures.

7:24 Birds still caching, Lee still in box. Matt and Brent waiting to remove front of box.

7:25 Brent taking notes on top o f box. Lee still in box, Manel still watching from top of

cliff. Windy and clear, S/SW winds. Matt placing quail on rocks by box.

7:31 Matt/Brent remove the front o f the box. Matt hands Lee a plastic bag. M att out of

view, Brent on top of box, Lee inside, putting quail remains in bag.

7:37 Brent gets off top o f box. Matt & Brent on top of cliff. Lee still in box.

7:40 Lee still in box, has all birds behind blind. M att going back to right O.P. Manel and

Brent take box front and leave by fence

7:41 Lee removes cardboard from front of blind, squirts water on the birds to keep them

from flying, and slowly emerges from box, closes door and leaves. Matt comes back up

hill w / gear, puts it at fence.

7:48 Birds out from behind blind, 2 females-both by edge of box, much wing flapping,

that fla p at each other—

7:50 Right red female is on perch outside of box. Male still behind blind. Other female

perched on rock in box flapping.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7:53 Right red female goes around to outside of box by ocean. White female takes her

place on perch on board outside of box.

7:55 Red female out o f view. White female flapping on board. Can see wing tip o f female

by ocean. Male still behind blind.

7:57 Male comes out from behind blind, sees female, cacks, retreats. Looks out again and

emerges, cacking. He sits on stick perch in box, fluffed up, caching. Female on board still

flapping, both looking around a lot. Male stretches wings, cacks again. Red female still

unseen.

9:30 Watch until dark, both female and male in box, don't know if they ate. Red female is

still on ocean side of box. So far a good release—no trouble with ravens.

6 /1 3 /8 7

Up at 4:35 in blind by 5:45. Morning: dense fog with winds S.-SW

poor visibility, about 100 feet.

6:20 a.m. Messed w/ telemetry, writing in ball-point until / get a pencil, white fem ale

telemetry working well—red female and male don't seem to be coming through as well, but

this may be my inexperience as well as a transmitter problem. Increased visibility down,

can see ocean, but as far as across can barely see outline o f box.

By the end of the day I was getting the hang of it, and wrote this:

7:43 p.m. Just did telemetry on box, white female coming through really clear. Red female

not good, it's breaking up a lot. Male came out of box, sat on board, returned to box. ( just

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. got truck, it's great! A t the end o f this I ’ll have to do something really nice for Bill.) It's

funny though, the truck is obviously for larger people. The seat is not adjustable. Not

many short women driving 4-wheel drives for the government. I am in a great mood, I

laughed at two foolish things today, and more at the peregrines. They are amazing to

watch, inspiring and cute and silly and regal, I can't see too much from this O.P. that's

why I'm writing this.

7:50 No sign of birds from here. I love being by m yself alone, talking to new people,

watching young peregrines, this vast sea, and white box, feeling these restless winds, two

hours from my house, half an hour away from the city, and a world away from both.

The thing that I really got after the first release was that you never knew what the

birds would do. Well, you did, a bit, but there was such a luxury in being able to just

watch them. That was what we were there to do, watch. Vincent Van Gogh wrote It is

looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper understanding "

Voyeuristic, perhaps, but the word voyeur implies a sexual charge, and illicitness

somehow, and that wasn't what we were doing. Likewise, the word "observer" implies an

objectivity that after that first day, I certainly didn't have. In the hack report instructions it

says: do not refer to the birds as "the kids." When I first read that I thought, how

unprofessional. Later, I understood. Our watching of the birds was somewhere between

the parent watching their toddler at the play ground, and a child face down in the dirt

watching ants demolish some small dead animal or insect. Both protective and curious.

So much came from watching. From the privilege of seeing those young lives

develop, learn, and change. Of seeing their different personalities so clearly, seeing their

interaction. I couldn't watch that and not feel the ridge was theirs, the box was theirs. The

sky, after a few weeks, was theirs. The wild was theirs. And I, pinned to the ground by

gravity, by winglessness, my legs always connected to the earth, could only glimpse these

moments of pure joy, of surprise, of movement, of blessed flight. 38

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I’d watch them ring up, that long slow ring in a thermal that raptors do, sometimes

without flapping at all. I wondered, do they have sensors on their wings, on their bodies, a

lateral line of feathers to sense the wind, the currents? Do they read the landscape, or do

they actually see the thermals, the currents, the eddies of air? Birds have twice as many

cones in their eyes than we do; there are hypotheses that they see light waves, why not air

currents? So much of what they do is mysterious.

And that long, slow, ringing up and up, and up, until you can't tell color any more,

then you can't tell wing or tail, then you can’t even tell silhouette, just speck. That's it.

That's how high our birds got. So high you couldn't even see them, and as for keeping one

in your bins during a stoop, forget it. Stoops are for watching with bare eyes, they are too

fast for optics.

But that wasn't most of what we saw. We saw mostly learning. Watching a bird

leam to fly is like watching a toddler learn to walk, except they don’t cry when they fall.

They merely sit there for a LONG time and look stunned. Those clumsy first flights are a

total surprise to the birds, more so than to us; then the perch-to-perch flights, from

outcropping, to snag, to box. The birds had favorite perches, places where they'd hang

out, creatures of habit from the beginning. Places where they could see and feel safe,

perhaps. They would sit and look for hours with those eyes that perhaps saw thermals, that

perhaps saw light waves, certainly saw birds, movement, insects flying above the dry

grass.

Matt left two days after release. He had to get to another site. W ith any field work

concerned with populations during breeding season, everyone is swamped. Both Matt and

Lee had been working more than full-time since February. In a way, Brent and I were

lucky. We only had to stay in one place and take care of three birds, not drive all over the

state, concerned with dozens. Yes, our hours were long, sometimes boring—and we were

exhausted—but because we were in one place, there was an unfolding of time, a shift in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. perception that stillness allowed to happen. The flow of our lives became more bird than

human, the world slower and more full.

At Muir Beach we had two females and a male. Even though the birds were in the

box together, and we called them siblings, they were not related. All three came from

different clutches. In addition the male was a week younger than the females. Because he

was male he’d naturally develop faster—so perhaps being a week younger wasn't a big

deal. But Brent and I were concerned about him. The Bird Group tried to have all the birds

as close in age as possible, but sometimes the ages of the birds didn’t sync. However, it

may have been this age difference that led to some extraordinary behavior.

One of the females had a red transmitter, and she was dominant from the start. She

flew first, she ate well, she was a little aloof from the other two birds. The second female

had a white transmitter. She flew as well as the red bird, but when the little male

awkwardly fledged, and ended up on a bump above the box where he sat for hours, she

flew to him and perched beside him. Eventually, he headed back to the box, which was

funny since, when peregrines walk, they look like a winged version of the Hunchback of

Notre Dame: their shoulders up around their heads while they waddle like a duck, those

deadly feet awkward on the uneven ground. But where he went, she went also. During the

first two weeks, the white female was the protective older sibling to the little male. If you

saw one, you saw the other. This was good, because the telemetry on the male failed

within the first 24 hours. The telemetry always failed on the bird that you were—for

whatever reason—most worried about. Remember? Murphy's Law of Telemetry.

But at M uir Beach, if we needed to know where the male was, we looked for the

white female. Inevitably, she'd be near him. This behavior on the part of the birds led to

their names.

The imperiousness of the red transmittered female was very queen-like, so we

called her the Red Queen. The second female became the W hite Queen. The male, due to

his gender, could not be called Alice, but he did remind us of Alice in Wonderland, sort of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sweet and bumbling, so we called him Alex. Besides, the White Queen was nice to him,

while the Red Queen ignored everyone.

Once Alex really began to fly, the behavior of the White Queen changed, and soon

all the birds were treating each other with equal curiosity and detachment.

Young peregrines learn by watching, and trying what their "siblings" do. Some

réintroduction programs released more than three birds, but for various reasons, including

best development of the young, the Bird Group had decided that three was the optimum

number that could be protected. Three is the number of birds normally hatched in a clutch.

Single birds develop slowly, and two aren't much better. But three give a good degree of

interaction among the birds.

After that first hack site, I never saw two birds socialize like Alex and the White

Queen. Interact, yes. Bond, no.

We made an interesting trio, Brent, Manel and me. Both Brent and Manel were

much more knowledgeable about birds than I, which was reassuring. I could ask either one

questions. Manel's English was a bit quaint, but that didn't get in the way of

communication.

Even though Manel was a biologist, and lovely to look at, he hadn't brought the

right clothes. He thought California was the state he’d seen on television and in the movies:

sunshine and palms. He didn't know the coast of northern California is bone-chilling in the

summer. It's a function of the heat that builds up in the inland valleys. There's something

that draws the fog in to wrap the coast in coolness. The first few days he was shivering at

the O.P. and politely refusing all our offers of more clothes. Brent and I discussed it when

we were at the south O.P. and he was on the hilltop.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "He's freezing," Brent said. "I've got extra gloves and hats, but he won’t take

them ."

"I've got an extra pile pullover he could have," I said. "We've got to make him take

them. It's not good for him; he'll get sick. "

"He's so polite, though. He thinks it's rude to borrow our clothes."

"I know. Perhaps if we gang up on him and show him all the clothes we have, he'll

feel okay about taking our extras."

That evening before dinner, I pulled him into my tent. "Look," I said, showing him

my heaps of clothes. "I've got five sweaters, two pile jackets, three hats, two pairs of

gloves, two sets of long underwear. I have a lot of clothes. So it won't bother me if you

wear this while you are here. " I handed him my second-best pile sweater, with a nice big

collar to zip up around his neck. "It's not impolite," I added. "It's practical. You don't need

to be cold. You can’t work well cold. Okay?" He didn't look too comfortable, but he took

the sweater.

Brent repeated the process with his clothes and managed to get Manel to accept a

hat, gloves, and some long underwear. Once we had broken down his reticence, he wore

the warm clothes every day until he left.

Sometimes the fog got in our way. There were plenty of mornings when we could

barely see twenty feet. Couldn't see the box, the birds, or much of anything. And it was

cold and wet enough that if we were at our regular observation points we'd get soaked. On

these mornings, the Ram Charger that Bill Oswald left us paid its dues.

We'd make coffee and breakfast at our "ramada " and scramble into the rig, taking

food and telemetry with us. We'd sit, two in front, one in back—taking turns getting out

and checking telemetry every fifteen minutes—and talk, read, and wait until we could see. If

we couldn't see, neither could our birds, and neither could any potential predators. At least

that's what we hoped. Of course, something could always go wrong, but under the

conditions the car was the best place to be.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. One morning when it was really socked in, conversation was exhausted so we read.

M anel was reading his book about bourgeois Americans, some sort of social political

critique in Spanish. I was readingThe Lord o f the Rings, and Brent was reading this

newsletter. Hawk Chalk, a newsletter put out by the American Falconers Association, The

"chalk" referred to hawk droppings. He had perhaps five issues, but they ran out before the

fog cleared, so he turned to me.

"What you reading?" he asked over the seat.

"The Lord of the Rings."

"What's it about?"

"What? You’ve never read it?"

"No. W hat’s it about?"

' "Have you readThe HobbitT'

"No."

"You haven't read The HobbhV."

"No. W hat's it about?"

"The Hobbit, or this one? ” I waved my book.

"This one." He hit it as I waved it. I glared at him, he looked back, innocent and

bland.

"Okay, it's a fantasy, and it’s about a quest, and the search for a ring, and the good

guys, and the bad guys. And it has fairies, and wizards, and a hobbit..."

"What’s a hobbit?"

"Brent! How old are you? ”

"Twenty-eight, why?"

"Well, you should have readThe H obbit by now. Everybody readsThe Hobbit.

It's a classic. If you grow up in California, you smoke dope, you read The Hobbit. You

ju st do."

"I've only read one book," Brent said.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "What?" I said, disbelieving.

"I’ve only read one book. Something by James Michener, I think," Brent said.

"Books are too long. X read a lot of magazines, and this..." he picked up his Hawk Chalk,

"but books are too long. They're too much. I can't see how you're not bored with that."

He leaned over and lightly slapped my book, again.

I stared at him. His lean hawkish face, tanned and bearded, with dark brown eyes,

stared back. This was the man who built us the wonderful outdoor kitchen that we used

morning, noon, and night. The one who rehabilitated injured red-shoulders and flew a

prairie falcon. The one who explained the jokes I couldn't get in Hawk Chalk. But he had

read only one book.

"Well." I looked at my book, at the thickness and how I never noticed how many

pages there where, and then back at Brent, who looked questioning.

"Well...when I read, I go into the story. I go into the book. I'm not sitting here—" I

waved my hand around to the tan interior of the Charger, the windows white with fog,

Brent and Manel in the front seat—"I'm in Mordor, in a cave with wizards, traveling a

treacherous track, and wondering what sort of evil or danger I'll encounter next. It's

always been like that. I go to where the story is, I go into it. W hen I was a kid, my mother

physically put her hand between my eyes and the page to tell me to set the table. She'd talk

to me, she'd yell at me, but I didn't hear her. I was in another world "

"Wow. That doesn't happen to me at all," Brent said. " I don't think that's ever

happened. Reading is a lot of work. You should stop reading, and talk to me."

"Brent! I talk to you all the time!"

"Yeah, but we can talk some more." He smiled his engaging, puppy dog smile.

"Are you bored?" I asked.

"Yeah! and I already tried Manel, but he's ignoring me," Brent confided, looking

toward Manel's clean, handsome profile, studiously buried in his book.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "I guess I missed that. Okay, look. I’m almost done with my chapter." I looked at

my watch. " W hy don't you do the telemetry, and let me finish my chapter and then we'll

talk."

" Okay." Brent turned around, and I went back to my book. I'd much rather spend

the morning heading toward Mordor than talking to Brent in a foggy truck. I was pissed at

him. What kind of person doesn't read?

Once we settled down to our routine of constant vigilance, we talked while we

watched the birds. I found out that Manel was Castilian, meaning that he was from the

Castile province in Spain. Evidently people in this area pride themselves on the purity of

their Spanish blood. This sort of explained the book he'd been reading in the rig on foggy

mornings about how bourgeois Americans were. This puzzled me. First, I sort of thought

that the entire bourgeois concept was very European and a little passé, and secondly, it

seemed a bit, well, rude to read a book criticizing a country you are visiting while you are

visiting it.

I didn’t fully get the whole pure-biood thing until one weekend afternoon. Manel

and I were doing public relations duty, standing around and talking to people about

peregrines, while Brent was at the observation point. Two law-enforcement rangers on

horseback came by. They were doing weekend patrol, and of course they stopped for a

conversation. They asked how the site was going. We inquired about their weekend, if

there was anything we should watch out for. After our talk, they rode away. I didn't think

anything of it until Manel turned to me and asked:

"Those men work for the government?"

"Yeah, they're park rangers," I replied, mystified.

"They work for the federal government?" he continued.

"Yeah, this is a federal park."

"But one was black, and the other Japanese!" Manel exclaimed.

"Manel," I said, "They are both Americans."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "In Castile, you cannot work for the government if you are not 100% Spanish," he

said earnestly.

I was shocked. I mean, of course I noticed they were not white, but this was the

Bay Area, both of them had probably grown up in San Francisco, more local than I. But

evidently this was news to Manel.

"Yes. And those two men were from different countries."

"Well, probably not. I'd say they were born in America, and most likely grew up in

San Francisco." I replied.

" I do not know. In Spain, that would not happen," he said flatly and walked back

to the O. P.

In San Francisco there were places where you could hear six different languages

being spoken in the course of walking down one block, and I expected this diversity. Of

course, come to think of it, I could see why other countries' governments wouldn't hire

those who they considered foreigners, but I hadn't realized how American the concept of a

melting pot was until now.

I looked down the trail. Another group was coming up, and eyeing me curiously.

Back to education.

"Hi, " I greeted them. "How's your afternoon going?"

Certain things became evident from very early on. During the first week, I’d go to

the box to observe. As I started down the steep, crumbly trail, I felt like I was venturing

onto the drawbridge to the castle where you find either a dragon or treasure. Later, after the

birds had fledged and perched all over the ridge it became theirs, not mine. I knew I had no

place there. It was off limits, and my presence was a disruption; necessary where the food

was concerned, but unnatural. Sometimes I felt this so strongly I could barely walk the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. trail. In the soft dark of pre-dawn, I moved slowly, carefully, asking forgiveness for my

intrusion with each step. The box, the ridge, all of it was hallowed ground.

I don't know why I felt so intrusive. I think it had something to do with the fact that

the young were so clearly innocent, vulnerable and wild. And, despite the intimacy of the

site, we maintained a buffer, a distance. We are dangerous. Humans are dangerous. We

have shot you, captured you, and now we've poisoned you. You want nothing to do with

us, we are bad, and we will continue to be that way. But for me it was also: we act this

way because we love you.

In fairy tales, there is a magic door, a potion to be drunk, a spell that is cast, and

then: lo, everything appears in a different way. Or you are turned into something else, or

you gain a magical ability to see what no one else can.

At a hack site that process is longer, harder, and frankly, more boring. It's not

dramatic, or draped with the magical narrative of story. But there is another world, and

after a week, you see it running beside you in time everywhere. The opening is not a rent in

time or space—it is that you slow down enough to see that it was always there. You sit and

sit and sit in one place for days, and then there it is. There is no line, no delineation

between the human world and this one, it is always there, always surrounding us. We just

don't see it. We are moving too fast, focusing on the wrong things: traffic, movies, who is

sleeping with whom, what we are going to eat for dinner, do we have enough money. And

all around us is the other world. The world where an Audubon rabbit comes up the trail at

7:00 a.m. sniffing for shoots, where there is some sort of weasel living in a hole at the

bottom of the hill, and with luck you'll catch a quick, vanishing glimpse. The world where

a red-shouldered hawk spends the afternoon perched on a pole, watching the open field

below for movement, a lizard, a snail even.

The other world is a place where everything is vulnerable to the vagaries of

weather, time, light, dark, predators and prey. While humans live our fast-paced, over-

stimulated lives, vulnerable to the whim and vagaries of a stupid and insecure boss, the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. political system, cultural mores, or our own family, that world is blessed with the gift of

silence, with long afternoons full of sleep, with a be-here-nowness. The joy of being an

attendant is that you get to go to that world and stay. It is for a blessed time, your job.

On a deep level it was a relief for me to do that work. There was the discovery of

peregrine time, and with that discovery came a release from feeling that humans were the

center of the world, a realization there were other constant and important lives being lived.

We had a place there, but we were not the place. For a time I got to live in a world where

blueberry muffins were exciting, but not as exciting as watching a bird fly. A place were

there is no future, no past, only now, now, now. The bird, dropping off the side of the

box and out, floating over the Pacific, catching a thermal, rising, and then, swifter than I

could follow, diving, down, down towards what I do not know, it could be anything-they

are just playing at this age—and I drop my binoculars so I can see the big picture. There's

our bird, our baby, stooping on a pelican, a brown, prehistoric, sedate bird, skimming the

face of a wave a scant six inches off the water. Our bird is stooping, diving, coming at the

pelican out of nowhere, like a bomber at twelve o'clock, and the pelican at the last minute

drops, flops, fumbles into the water with an ungainly splash, totally disconcerted, its head

turning to track our bird, who pulls up at the last possible moment and with wicked

momentum rises, like mercury in a thermometer, straight up up up against sky, the blue,

the clear wind and clouds, hovers a moment and then flies toward us, giving us a cool

glance as it goes over and vanishes beyond the horizon to the east.

Our days were often quiet, punctuated by a dazzling display of flight, a funny

landing, or something requiring a response—like the man who showed up below the box,

climbed the cliff and freaked us out.

That incident, as it turned out, was nothing; most incidents weren't. They became

moments of clarity, of uniqueness, like the sun breaking through the almost constant and

concealing fog. Now, if I went back to do that work, I might see differently. I would see

more, I think, and less. Perhaps I'd be complacent with experience, but experience might

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. also let me see deeply. Each moment like a bead, a pearl of light, of scene, glowing in the

hand of memory.

Weekends were fifty percent watching our birds, and fifty percent public relations.

A lot of people walked those hills on the weekends, and one or another of us would talk to

them about the birds and the project. The thing about the site was that, as long as you

watched the birds, you could talk as much as you wanted. This was nice, because it meant

I could talk to folks for as long as they wanted to stay. We'd put on our park service shirts

and try to look a little official on weekends.

It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon. The fog had burned off, Brent was doing

public relations duty; and Manel and I were at the main observation point watching the

birds. The Red Queen was flying spectacularly, and the White Queen joined her, alternately

chasing and being chased, ringing up, diving, cacking at each other—spectacular aerial

play.

Now all three were resting at the box. Alex was lying on his tummy. White Queen was

asleep, and Red Queen was perched at the edge, watching gulls.

"You know what I do not understand?" Manel asked me. We were sitting in our

lawn chairs, looking at the birds through binoculars.

"What?" Red Queen was definitely watching gulls.

"That you have the same word for what covers your bed and for, you know, your

poop. I do not see how that is the same word. It is disgusting."

"What?" I turned to look at him. The same word for what covers your bed and your

poop? What WAS he talking about?

"You know, the word for what covers your bed and your poop is the same. I do

not understand this." He looked irritated, that English was so sloppy, and that I was not

4 9

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. agreeing with him. But I was lost. I felt like I did when I was reading clues to crosswords:

fifteen-down: Covers your bed and means your poop. "What word is that?" I asked.

"Sheet." he said succinctly.

"Shit," I repeated. I felt like a complete dimwit. One minute I'm watching birds,

then the next I'm trying to think of bed coverings that are referred to as shit...bedspread,

blanket, quilt, cover, sheet..."Oh! You meansheetV'

"Yes, sheet. It is the word for what you spread on your bed and for poop. It is very

disgusting. I do not understand." His nose wrinkled slightly, as if we English bourgeois

were deliberately rolling in our filth.

"Oh, no. It's not the same word at all. The cover on the bed is a sheet, and the

word for poop is shit." I said helpfully. But I didn't have a complete grasp on the problem.

"How do you spell?" Manel asked.

"Sheet is S-H-E-E-T, and shit is S-H-I-T. Sheet, and shit." I tried to accentuate the

ee sound and the short i, so Manel could hear the difference. So he could stop thinking we

spread our beds with shit.

"Yes, sheet and sheet." he repeated impatiently "It is the same. It is disgusting."

I realized he couldn't hear the difference. And he had a point, when I thought of it,

it was disgusting. "You’re right, " I said " it's disgusting."

Right then, while I was still reeling from the sheet/shit incident, Brent came up the

trail. He had on his new wool army surplus pants held up by suspenders, very natty, and

the short-sleeved beige ranger shirt over a long-sleeved white shirt, it being far too cold to

go short-sleeved out here. He'd brushed his hair and pulled it back into a neat pony tail,

and all-in-all looked dressy, as dressy as one can look living out of a tent and watching

birds sixteen hours a day. He'd been quite proud of his outfit this morning, but right now

there was a large flag of white hanging by his crotch. When he got closer, I saw it was the

tail of his white shirt zipped into his fly.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Guess what I just did?! I just talked to an entire group of Sierra Club members for

about half an hour up there." He waved his hand toward the hillside above us. "They were

totally into the birds. I did really well," he beamed.

Manel and I looked up at him from our chairs.

"Brent, " I said, "did you talk to them like that?"

"Like what?" He looked indignant, like I was implying there was something wrong

with his clothes.

"Like that," I said, and pointed at the shirt hanging out of his fly like a tired gesture

of surrender.

He looked down. "Oh." He looked back up at us. "I took a piss right before they

walked up...so...yeah, oh no, yeah, I think I did talk to them like this." He looked

horrified. I burst out laughing. It was too funny.

"What is funny?" asked Manel.

"Brent just talked to about twenty people looking like that."

I gestured to his fly.

"Like that? With that thing?" Manel was shocked.

"Yeah!" I chortled, as Brent hastily tucked it back in.

"To twenty people?"

"More like thirty," Brent mumbled.

"Ohmygod." I laughed even harder, and so did Brent. After a minute Manel joined

us. I think he was a bit shocked by our lack of embarrassment, but we were all so tired that

it felt good to laugh—a release of stress and exhaustion.

Brent dragged up his chair and sat down.

"You know, though, you do look nice," I told him.

"Really?"

"Yes, quite attractive. In that outdoorsy sort of way."

"Look, " said Manel, and we all looked toward the box.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Red Queen was diving on White Queen, who rolled onto her back and cached. Red

Queen wanted to play and White Queen was the available playmate. White Queen took off

after Red Queen, who was ringing up again. As we looked, Alex dropped effortless off the

box and rose above the other two.

"It doesn’t get much better than this," Brent said.

In front of us, the grass-covered hill dropped away into a steep cliff that ended in

the churning Pacific. The sun was shining so the background was blue sky and sea. In the

middle distance was a tall-masted sailing ship, looking like a throwback to the 1700's, its

sails not white, as I would have expected, but a soft brown. It had appeared to the south

some time ago, and now was making its courtly way north. In the foreground—the reason

we were sitting on this cliff in the first place, the main attraction—were three immature

peregrines playing tag, tail-chasing, diving, short stoops, turning upside down in the air,

cacking, showing their feet, then flipping upright, like the acrobatics were nothing. This

was what they were designed to do.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. HETCH HETCHYI

I first heard about Hetch Hetchy when I called the Bird Group. I was finishing

Muir Beach, leaving quail every other day, checking to see if they'd been eaten. One of the

birds was still coming around, although infrequently. Most likely one of the females. I

didn’t see her but sometimes a quail's throat had been mangled, so it looked like she'd just

cruise through for a snack. I'd call in every three days or so to report. That's when Lee got

on the phone and asked me if I’d like to go to Hetch Hetchy.

The Sierras? Yosemite? Were they kidding? Of course I'd go. In an instant. But, I

started classes the third week of August, so I couldn't finish the site. That's okay, Lee

assured me, we can fill in by that time. We just need you for the critical part; the first two

weeks.

I left Muir Beach, the fog and cold, went back to Santa Cruz and met with Lee.

"Your contact is Mike Webb. He does the bear management in Yosemite. You'll be

the experienced one. The other guy is from England. He almost killed himself on glacier

polish already. The birds have been in the box two days. You'll get up there and Mike will

take you to the site. "

"How do we get back and forth? " I asked

"Motorboat. We've got one there. "

"I don't know how to drive a boat, " I said quickly.

"We'll teach you. Also," Lee looked serious, "there was an incident out there a few

days ago, a woman was bitten by a rattlesnake, it was pretty serious, so I want you to be

extra careful there. If you get hurt, we'll have to take care of you, and we need to take care

of the birds. That's the problem with this guy there now. We don't want to take care of

him, we need to take care of the birds. So, I want you to be really careful. It's a difficult

site, but I have no doubt you can do it. "

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Will Matt be there?" I asked. I could do better if Matt was there.

"He's at Wishon. So you'll be the expert on this one. "

Great. One hack site and I was an "expert." And I’d be up there with a guy who

didn't know what glacier polish was. Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy and many of the valleys

in the Sierras were formed by glaciers. When these glaciers retreated, there was a lot of

pressure involved. In some places small particles between the glacier and the bedrock

actually rubbed the granite into smooth patches—patches that looked and felt as smooth as

glass—glacier polish.

I went home and read about rattlesnakes. Big boots and loose pants were

recommended, in the hope that the rattlers would strike the fabric instead of your flesh.

Sucking the venom was a fallacy; snakebite kits made things worse. The best way to deal

with a bite was to get to a hospital and get a shot of anti-venom. I wasn't comforted. One

book suggested that you make noise, or tap a stick in front of you, letting the snake know

that you're coming. That seemed fair to me. From my small experience at M uir Beach, I'd

already noted that most wild animals didn't want anything to do with humans. Accidents

seemed to occur when animals were surprised, or the human did something stupid. I didn’t

think there were rattlesnakes there waiting to bite me. They were there. We were there. We

just needed not to scare each other.

I dug through my clothes and found an oversize pair of white pants. Perfect. I went

downtown to stock up on dark roast coffee, and found a pair of green-striped pajama

bottoms in a hip boutique, huge and loose. Perfect. A bit loud perhaps, but no one would

see me except the birds and Clive, the unlucky Englishman. I packed white cotton shirts, a

bathing suit, a sundress with patch pockets for pencils or snacks, sandals, a hat. And of

course all my warm things—the site was in the Sierras, and even though it was July, it

could still snow.

I drove to Hetch Hetchy on highway 80. There was a certain place in the foothills

where the air smelled like artichokes. With the windows open to the heat, the smell filled

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. my car. Later, I learned this was mountain misery, a low growing shrub that grew only at

certain elevations. Soon after I started smelling the mountain misery, I turned onto the road

to Hetch Hetchy.

Eventually, I went through San Francisco's summer camp. Camp Mather. It was a

collection of rustic cabins, a store and restaurant. This sort of surprised me. Growing up in

a tourist town, where the town itself is the destination, things like resorts and summer

camps were a new concept for me. I had no idea the city of San Francisco had a camp here.

Of course, Hetch Hetchy was their water supply, so it made sense when I thought about it.

I stopped at the store, used the bathroom and asked how much farther it was to the

reservoir.

Once I reached Hetch Hetchy valley, the road dropped down in a steep winding

diagonal, through scrub oak and granite outcroppings, before ending in a parking lot beside

O'Shaughnessy dam. As I slowed for numerous hairpin curves 1 remembered what my

sister had told me about living in the Sierras and how inherently dangerous these mountains

were.

My brother-in-law taught the Ansel Adams Photography workshops in Yosemite

valley for a time in the 1970s, and as a result, my sister and her family lived in the valley

and were part of the small, tight-knit park community; mainly Park Service and concession

personnel, all with their own reasons for being in Yosemite. According to her, people got

killed all the time; not because they were doing something risky like climbing, but because

somehow the designation of Yosemite as a "park" also made it "safe." People died of

hypothermia during day hikes, were killed scrambling on talus at the base of cliffs,

drowned in the river, struck by lightning, hit by falling trees or unexpected rock slides.

There were a hundred ways to die in the Sierras, many of them ordinary and preventable.

And I was here—the supposed "expert"—with an inexperienced person and three peregrine

falcons.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I got to the parking lot at 2:35, half an hour late. I was anxious and hungry and

hot. I saw a big truck with government plates, but no sign of anyone who looked like he

might be Mike Webb, the ranger who was supposed to meet me. I sat by my car and felt

the heat and remembered how a week before, driving across the Golden Gate bridge, I

thought about Hetch Hetchy and was filled with strong excitement or fear. I couldn't really

tell—my body reacts the same way to both sometimes. But as I was driving, my stomach

curled and grew cold, and I was filled with a tangible tension. I hoped that it wasn't a

premonition. Before long a blonde man in t-shirt, shorts and a Park Service hat came

walking up the road.

"Are you Clara?" he asked

"Yes, are you Mike Webb?"

A lot of field work is hauling around your gear. With a hack site at least you aren't

hiking and camping in different places. But because you are there for a long time, there’s

the initial big haul of stuff. Mike and I carried my gear from my car into the Park Service

boat. Mike explained the site boat was already there, and was much smaller, and that he’d

be ferrying me out to the site.

Hetch Hetchy is a valley as beautiful as Yosemite that was dammed for San

Francisco’s water supply. I knew the story, but I had never been there. As Mike started the

boat I stared up at the impressive facade of Kolana Rock that rose straight out of the green-

black water. There was an active peregrine eyrie here. This year my friend Rob Ramey had

climbed in to band the chicks. Mike kept the boat fairly close to the rock, and I stared up

trying to imagine being there, being a peregrine, and landing on one of those huge ledges.

When we were about halfway along the face, Mike turned down the throttle and pointed.

"See that diagonal that runs like a ramp up to that big right-facing comer?" He

asked. I’d been climbing enough to know that a comer is a section of the rock that meets at

right angles, like the corner of a room. Often a corner will have a crack in it, making it

easier to climb and also, from a safety point of view, easier to protect.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Y eah"

"If you follow the comer up, you can see how it ends in a ledge system under that

big overhang. The nest is on one of those ledges, I can't tell you which from here." I

followed the comer up until it ended in a area of the rock that looked rough with ledges.

The ledges looked well protected by the huge overhang. A good safe place for an eyrie.

"That must have been quite a climb to get into that nest," I said.

"Oh yeah, it took them three days," Mike replied as he throttled up again. I wasn’t

too surprised. Climbing this rock would be like climbing a big wall, which entailed more

planning and gear than a shorter climb. I'd never climbed a big wall, but I'd always wanted

to.

Kolana Rock was early in the ride. It took awhile, because the hack site was

another 40 minutes to the east by boat. The valley narrowed and we wound our way

toward where the Tuolumne River fed into the reservoir.

"You be careful out here," Mike wamed me. "We had a woman last week get bitten

by a baby rattlesnake right near the tributary. Had to 'copter her out to Merced. She almost

didn't make it."

"Yeah, I heard about the snakes." I replied. Ahead of us I could see a small beach

on the north shore, with big granite boulders sticking out of the water. There was a tent and

a sort of tarp/shade rigged up, and a guy standing there watching us approach. I assumed

he was Clive. Far above, I could see the box. A tiny white square against the massive cliffs

that encircled the valley.

"You're going to want to watch out for this guy, " Mike told me. "He almost killed

himself sliding down glacier polish the other day. I don't know what he was thinking." I

wasn’t sure if Mike had witnessed the slide or not.

"I know, I heard about that too." I said. God, I was anxious. Snakes, granite,

boats, and an Englishman. And, golden eagles, which meant shotguns. I'd never shot a

gun in my life. And I was the experienced one here.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The main thing I remember about Hetch Hetchy was trying not to panic. W hen

Mike pulled up to the boulder-strewn beach and introduced me to Clive, who was blonde

and sunburned as only an Englishman can be, I was scared. We unloaded my gear and as

Mike left I was exhilarated at being in the Sierras and quietly trying not to flip out. Maybe

Clive bought into the popular misconception that because the site was in Yosemite "park” it

was safe, but I didn’t. Not for a minute. We were remote. We had a Park Service radio,

but here, near the tributary, the canyon was narrow, and even though the steep ridges were

covered with scrub oak, pines and manzanita, they were still granite underneath.

Essentially we were in a big granite bowl, where radio signals bounced like a ping-pong

ball. Sometimes we picked up Yosemite dispatch and sometimes we couldn’t. Not

comforting if there was an emergency.

There won’t be one. I thought. Not if I can help it—but I had a knot in my stomach

that wouldn't quit.

Later, I became accustomed to the way the Bird Group did things on a wing and a

prayer. It was a function of never enough money and trying to put the money where it

would do the most good, which meant as an employee, you did the best you could with

minimal training. You got tossed in. I'd had my hand held at Muir Beach, learning from

Matt and Brent. But it was graduation day, and I was being pushed to the next level. Lee

decided I could do this, and so I could. I might not think so, but what I thought was

immaterial.

I pitched my tent down the beach, away from Clive’s and the general camp area. I

already had on my big white pants and hiking boots. After I pitched my tent and tossed in

my sleeping gear, I collected my notebook and field pack. There was a lot of driftwood

around, and I selected a nicely weathered branch to use as a snake stick. I walked back to

where Clive was lying on a rock in the sun. He had on cut-offs, a tank top and no hat, for

maximum sun exposure, I guessed. As a result he was a disturbing pink. I hoped he knew

about sunstroke, and wasn’t going to be complaining about sunburn later.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Want to show me the birds?" I asked.

"Sure" he replied, without opening his eyes. There was a moment while I waited,

and he lay there.

"Now?" I pressed. He nodded, opened his eyes, winked at me, and got up. He was

medium height, medium build, with a scruffy beard and glasses.

"Actually, before we head up there, can you give me the band numbers, and all that

information? I want to put it in my notebook," I said.

"Sure." He ambled towards his tent, and I looked out across the water. It was hot,

about 85 degrees and blindingly bright. I turned and looked uphill, toward where the box

was. It was a steep jumble of talus, oak, and grass. This was not going to be an easy jaunt.

God only knew how hard it would be in the dark.

Clive returned holding a piece of paper with the bird data on it. This listed the birds'

sexes, age, and band numbers, and which leg the band was on. Later, when Lee did the

release and attached telemetry, he would let us know which telemetry transmitters were on

which bird. All part of keeping track of our charges for the duration of the site and

hopefully into the future as well.

I copied it into my notebook for easy reference. I handed the sheet to Clive, who

stuck it in his back pocket.

"Let's go," he said, and started uphill to the east of camp. He didn't take a pack or

water. I followed. We scrambled over big boulders, then across a bare patch of dirt and

leaves, followed by more boulders, some covered with moss. It was so dry that the moss

wasn't damp, but it made a treacherous crumbly layer on top of the rocks. Besides, down

in the cool shade of these tumbled rocks was what I considered prime snake habitat. I'd

step on a rock and thump the one ahead of me before I stepped up. It made me slow, but in

that heat and elevation, I didn't mind.

"You don't really need to do that." Clive informed me. "I'm an expert snake

handler."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Really?" I asked curiously.

"Oh yeah. I caught all sorts of snakes back in Britain. They even called me in when

they had an escaped cobra." He was standing above me, waiting while I tapped my way to

him .

"Yes?" I said politely.

"Yeah. This bloke collected snakes, right? And one of them, a cobra it was, got

loose. Everyone was terrified to go after it. But then they called me, and I got it."

"Hmm." The boulder I’d just stepped on had shifted a little under my weight.

Seeing as it was about the size of a VW bug, having it shift was nerve-racking.

"I've collected snakes since I was a child," Clive continued as he started uphill

again. "They're quite harmless really, if you know how to handle them." He was moving

pretty fast. I was in okay shape, but I could tell that I'd just come up to altitude from sea

level. We crossed another dirt bit, and ahead I saw more moss-covered talus.

"I had the usual; garter snakes, and the like. I had a boa constrictor, of course, and

then I worked with a snake rehabilitation unit. " He zipped up the talus like a sunburned

rabbit. I watched were he stepped. Perhaps if I put my feet right where he had I could

dispense with tapping the rocks first with the stick. Then I remembered that sometimes it's

the second person that gets bit, as the first person merely serves to alarm the snake. 1 kept

tapping. The rocks here were smaller. They didn't rock as sickeningly as the larger ones.

"I don't see why you're bothering with that stick." Clive commented. "You don't

need it. Rattlers always let you know before they strike."

I remembered my sister telling me about seeing a rattler fly straight up out of a

boulder field, startling and silent right after her 5-year-old daughter had stepped across a

gap. I kept tapping.

"We're almost there. " Clive informed me. I looked ahead. I could see the white side

of the box through the trees.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "How do you want to handle this?" I asked. "I want to observe them, but I don’t

think it's a good idea for both of us to go up there."

"Oh, I'll just wait here," Clive said easily. "I watched them this morning when I

fed."

I nodded, and looked up at the box again. The approach wasn't too bad. Just

another bit of talus and then a bit of steep granite outcrop. But no exposure.

"Okay, back in a bit," I said and started up. I still had my stick, but instead of

tapping, I just placed it in front of me. I got to the back of the box. I could hear a scuttling

sound, peregrine feet against gravel. I hoped it wasn't because they'd heard me. I laid

down my stick quietly, took off my pack, slow and silent. I looked at my watch. 15:30:15.

I’d give myself two minutes before I looked. I'd set my watch to military time. All notes

needed to be taken in 24-hour time, as often we are up and doing stuff at 4:00 a.m., and at

4:00 p. m. When reading them back it's easier to tell the difference between 0400 and

1600. At first it was strange, but by then I sort of preferred it.

The box looked west, where the outcrop it stood on dropped off. There was a steep

cliff rising to the north above the box, a good place for the birds to fly to. Right now it was

reflecting the afternoon sun, but the box was partly in shade due to a few large evergreens.

I looked at my watch again. 15:32:40. No scuttling sounds from the box. I stepped

forward, placing my feet slowly and carefully. There were sticks and gravel here, all sorts

of things that could crunch and alarm the birds. I got to the side of the box and bent and

covered the peephole before I squatted beside it. 15:34:52. One minute wait this time. I

bent my head and looked at the detritus at my feet. The air smelled like heat and pines and

granite. There were granite chips, bits of moss, some sticks, a few small plants between

my feet. I heard scuttling inside the box again. 15:36:01. Okay.

I put my head close to the hole, moved my finger, and observed. Three birds. Just

like our birds at Muir Beach, except the data sheet had said that we had three males. That

was why they were all the same size.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Two looked out the front of the box, their dark eyes active. One was napping, lying

on his breast on the gravel. Older birds sleep standing up, but the younger ones will lie

down. It’s adorable, actually. Sweet and relaxed. Its eyes closed, opened, then closed.

There were remains of a few quail. It looked like they'd been eating. In front of the box a

white-throated swift dropped down the face of the cliff, and the birds heads swiveled to

watch it. Locked in. Once they matured, if they stayed in the Sierras, swifts would be a big

part of their diet. Just one more indication of their flying ability, that peregrines catch swifts

on the wing, when they are about five times as big. But both swifts and peregrines have a

similar wing shape: curved and narrow, like a boomerang.

I watched them a bit more. They seemed healthy and alert. Fine, actually. I fought

an urge to yawn. Time to head down. I put my finger over the peep hole again to block it

while I moved, straightened and as I stepped away, removed my finger from the peep-hole.

I collected my pack and stick, and dropped down to where Clive was sitting. There was an

apple box beside him.

"From when we brought the birds up," he said tapping it. "Left it here in case

anything goes wrong, and we need to transport one. Actually, " he continued, "I think this

would make a good observation point. W e could call it the Apple Box O.P.

I looked around. The hack box was only about 50 yards away, and you could

barely see it through the screen of trees. The drop-off to the west was also screened by

trees. There was no way to see any of the birds. It was a terrible observation point.

"I don't think this will work, " I said. "You don't have a clear view of the box. You

can't see the big picture."

"Yes, but you'll see them when they fly over." Clive waved his hand at the patch of

sky directly above us.

I looked up. The chances of one of the birds flying over that patch were practically

nil. I looked at Clive, who was beaming at me.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "We've got two days to figure out observation points," I said. "Let’s head back

down." Clive nodded, and went down the talus ahead of me. I followed slowly, tapping

the stick. I thought about the time frame. This was day five that the birds were in the box.

In two days Lee would be here to release them. We’d have to scout more observation

points, I had to learn to handle a boat, and there was a shotgun somewhere I needed to

leam to shoot. And then there was Clive. He seemed confident about his snake handling

abilities, but his idea about what constituted an observation point was nowhere. Where did

they get this guy? W hat was his background? I tried not to worry too much. The birds

seemed safe, healthy and alert. That was all that really mattered.

Once we got down to camp, I walked out on the rocks near the water. From there I

could see the box, high, white, and far away. But I could also see the cliff face behind it,

the area in front of it, and a bit of ridge to the east. This might be a good O.P. Not for

seeing if the birds ate; but for seeing the bigger picture, especially if one of them took off in

an unusual direction. There was no shade, of course, and the box was at least a quarter

mile away, which sort of sucked, but the terrain was such that it might be good to have

someone on the water where we could move relatively quickly via boat, if we had to.

Besides, we could have a scope here, which would help a lot. I looked over to where Clive

was fussing around in a food box. He seemed remarkably unconcerned about where he

was, and the birds. I wasn't sure how to take this. He treated it more like a vacation. True,

while the birds are in the box, it was not as intense as when they are out, but still, there

was plenty to be done. I mean, he hadn't even scouted for observation points! Or maybe

that was what he'd been doing when he slipped on glacier polish.

I looked at the water-rounded granite I was standing on. I'd grown up in

California, and visited Yosemite at an early age, so I knew what glacier polish was. I

looked around, up at the granite exposed through the trees. Yup, there was some. I could

see it shining in the sun, glinting like glass. I still didn’t see how Clive could have slipped

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. though. I mean, it looked like glass. Who in their right mind would step on it? Perhaps

Clive wasn't, then I pushed that thought away. Lee wouldn't put me out here with

someone who wasn't reliable.

The next morning I hiked up and fed. I wanted to see the box again, and leam the

route up, seeing as I'd be doing it in the dark. I did pretty well. Didn’t get lost. At some

points, I was fairly sure I stepped on the exact boulders I stepped on yesterday. Even the

tilting one. I reminded myself not to do that again.

At the box, I fed the birds, observed for a while, and then stood at the box fora

few minutes looking over to the ridge across from it. There were plenty of places where

you could put an O.P.—the problem would be getting to them. Not really a problem, I

reflected, just a slow heave uphill, given the steepness of the ridge.

Back at camp I suggested to Clive we go check for other observation points.

"What? Way up there?" he asked.

"Well, yeah. We need an O.P. where we can see into the box, and make sure that

they are eating. "

"You’re not going to see anything up there. The trees will block you."

"I don't think so. There's an opening that you can see from the box. I saw it this

m orning."

Clive just looked at me.

"Were going to have to go up there and check it out, Clive. We have to be able to

see into the box. I know it's hot, and the hillside is steep, but that's what we're here for.

You don't have to come if you don't want to..."

"No, I’ll come," he said sulkily. " I just need to get my kit."

He got his pack. I got mine and the snake stick, and we headed north-west out of

camp, through a thin ring of trees and brush, which butted up against some huge boulders.

A few had come together to form a cool shady cave, and I could see the bright sunlight

reflecting off a talus field, a huge steep pile of granite that had flaked off the cliffs at one

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. time or another. In this valley, there was talus everywhere. I was very careful walking

through the cave area. Perfect for snakes, I thought. Clive went bounding ahead. As I came

out into the sun, I noticed this talus field hardly had any moss so it was fairly new.

Sometimes when there was a lot of rockfall, you could see the lighter scar on the face

where it had come off. I looked up and scanned the cliff for a lighter area. There were a

few places on the cliffs where these rocks could have come from. I followed Clive, who

was suddenly being irritatingly chivalrous.

"This rock’s a bit steep, but there’s a good hand hold on the right. Here, you can't

get up that. I’ll give you a hand. ” I know he meant well, but I’d been climbing for four

years and traversed many a talus field. And after his whining about the hike up here, his

concern for my welfare rang false.

"You know," he said looking up at where the box was. "We're going to go to all

this trouble, and we won’t see a thing. W e can't see the box from here, the trees are

blocking it, and they’ll block it higher up as well."

"No, they won't," I replied. "See over there? " I pointed to where the talus ended

and a steep dirty scrub covered hill began. "We re going up that. There aren't many trees,

and once we get high enough. I’m betting we’ll be able to see directly into the box."

"If you say so." Clive gave me a look of utter doubt. What was it with this guy?

Why was he even here if everything is so hopeless?

”I say so, and I'm right, ” I snapped. I ignored his outstretched hand at the next

steep boulder, and stemmed up in a smooth series of moves that left him looking a little

astonished. I was pissed. It was difficult enough at a site without someone with a bad

attitude.

We were scrambling off the talus and onto the dirt of the ridge when I heard the

peregrines cack. I tilted my head and scanned the sky. I didn’t see any raptors flying by. I

looked across at the box. I could see the front of it, which meant the young were probably

cacking at us. Good. One, we’ll probably be able to get good visuals from some place on

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. this ridge. Two, they were not imprinted. They were alarmed at the sight of humans. "Stay

that way, sweethearts," I think, "good for you.”

Clive was ahead of me again, but I didn’t mind. The ridge was steep. He stepped

around a bush and stopped.

"I think this is it," he said.

When I got to him, he was standing on a level spot across from and just a little

below the box. The young had stopped cacking, but were probably still watching us.

"This is great! Look, we can see right in!" He raised his bins and looked. I did too.

I saw all three birds; at least I saw their silhouettes through the bars.

"This is brilliant, just brilliant!" Clive was beaming, like it was his idea to come up

here, like he’d just invented buttered toast, like he wasn’t whining before.

I looked around. No shade of course, but that's the breaks. A good view of the

box, the birds, the cliff to the north and the area in front of the box. I couldn’t see camp,

but I could see the point that stuck out beyond it, the place I was thinking of for a second

observation point. That was good. It would be nice to be able to keep an eye on each other,

especially from the point of view of safety.

"Look," Clive said. "This is the perfect place to sit." He pointed to the flat spot.

"And we can see that cliff. ’’ He waved at it. "Too bad we can’t see camp, though."

"Too bad, ” I said. I glassed the box again and also the cliff below it, just to get a

sense of what ledges the birds might perch on. Although that was impossible to predict.

Who knew where they’d go? I wasn't a bird, I didn't know what they liked, where they'd

land, how they'd behave. The most we could do was find a good place to observe them.

"Head back?" Clive asked.

"Sure," I said. I looked at my watch, and followed Clive, thinking about everything

we had to do before release. I kind of dawdled, actually. I was in no rush. When he'd

grabbed my hand to assist me his palms were hot and sweaty, and I didn't want to repeat

the experience going down.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I spent the next day making sure the camp was set for release. Clive fed, but I hiked

to the box in the afternoon to observe. I timed my hike up and back. In daylight, being

careful with the snake stick, it took me an hour and eight minutes. "Oh God," I thought,

"that's such a long time, time that I can't be watching the birds." I didn't see a way to make

it faster, though. Not with the snake danger. If I got bit, that would take me away, Clive

away, bring in a helicopter or boats, disturbance, and who would take care of the birds? I

couldn't get sloppy here. Too much riding on me. Especially with Clive, who, when I

returned from observing and timing the hike to the box, had not pumped the water I'd

asked him to, but was sitting in the full sun without a hat or shirt, feet up on a boulder,

reading something by Robert Heinlein, a science fiction writer who thought that women

would still be wearing aprons on Mars in 2320.

"An hour and 10 minutes up and back," I informed him as I filled up my water

bottle.

"Hm m m."

"It's going to be longer in the dark. "

" I timed it," he said without looking up.

"And?" I queried.

"Half an hour up and back." He sounded smug.

There is no way he'd gotten up that slope and back down in half an hour. If he was

an elite climber, a Sherpa, or one of those tribesmen in Mexico who run high elevation

races between villages, maybe. But he wasn't. He was Clive.

"Well, I guess it will be longer when I feed, " I said. I knew he couldn’t have done

it in that time, but I felt inadequate all the same.

"Are you going to pump that water or not?" I asked.

"Right. I'll get to it," he assured me, and went back to his book.

I looked around. The water was my main concern. I still needed to mix fuel for the

boat, and make sure the gas tank was full, but otherwise, everything was a go. I could

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hoof a chair up to the high observation point, leave it, and time myself up and back. I

looked longingly at the water. It looked dark, placid and cool. No bathing though. San

Francisco's water supply. Right.

"I'm going up to the upper O.P. I want to time it, and I'll take a chair,"

I told Clive. "Keep an ear out, I'll yell if I get into trouble,"

He looked up.

"You're going to hike all the way up there? In this heat? You're bloody crazy."

"It'll be hot tomorrow, and I have time today. After release, time is what we won't

have."

"If you say so." He looked at me like I was an idiot. That coupled with the Heinlein

and the water bottles pissed me off.

"You can start working on filling those water bottles. That's got to get done by

tomorrow. "

"Right. I said I'd do it, and I will." He looked aggrieved.

I bit my tongue, and started off. The guy was unbelievable. I navigated across the

boulder strewn beach and into the brush before the hill started in earnest. Once I reached

the shade, I looked back. He was reading. I looked at my watch. 14:36.

It took me 45 minutes to get to the observation point. The birds cacked at me again.

Good. Being alarmed by humans was always good. Man has not been kind to predatory

birds. In the 1920's and 30's farmers shot hawks in the mistaken belief that they harmed

their livestock and crops. Fear and ignorance. Fear and ignorance. I sat in the chair and

looked across at the box. The sound of the birds cacking echoed off the rocks. The bushes

in front of the box shimmered in heat haze, and my feet were hot in my thick boots.

Sometimes I despaired of our culture. We were so selfish. These are owr crops, our

chickens, the deer are here for us to hunt, so are the ducks and geese. The fruit on the trees

is ours. It's all ours. God gave it to us.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Didn't they ever think that God gave those things to other beings? Sometimes I

thought our selfishness was so extreme that it now seemed radical to step away from it

even a little. I knew people who'd hassled me because I refused to eat meat, refused to kill.

I carried bugs out of the house, so they could continue their bug life, and now I sat on this

hillside, in brutal heat, being paid, I'd calculated at Muir Beach, about nine cents an hour,

to get these birds their lives back. John Muir wrote, "The world, we are told, was made

especially for man—a presumption not supported by all the facts." An opinion that I heartily

agreed with. Despite what our culture seemed to think, peregrines had as much right to live

and thrive as I did. As much right as any human. As much as Clive—curse his lazy ass—

did.

I drank some water, got up, stashed the chair, and scouted around a little for a place

with shade where I could watch the box. There wasn't one. Maybe higher up, but that was

a lot of effort, and I didn't have it in me. I was too hot.

I was half-way down the talus field when I realized I didn't have to immediately go

back to camp. After that it was the work of an instant to justify jumping in San Francisco's

water supply. There was a lot of bear scat around, and I knew when the water level rose all

the bear poop would get into the water. Well, I was hot and dirty and sweaty, but I didn't

see how what I'd got on my skin was any worse than a pile of bear scat. Two at the most.

And given the number I'd seen, hundreds of piles were ending up in the water. I knew

Mike the ranger said we were not supposed to swim in the reservoir, but he hadn't said

why. And I was here re-introducing an endangered species. A noble and selfless job; one

that required me to be mentally fit and up to the challenge, which started tomorrow. A dip

in cold mountain water would be just the thing to restore me. By the time I reached the base

of the talus, I was convinced. The only thing I was concerned with was hiding from Clive.

I cut west, through trees, stepping carefully, both for snakes and for quiet. When I came

out of the brush, I was behind a rise west of camp. I couldn't be seen. Below me was an

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. inlet screened by boulders. Perfect. The water was dark green, almost black. I had never

seen anything so inviting.

I stripped quickly, but the hot granite burnt my bare feet as I stood, so I stuffed

them back into my unlaced boots for the few steps to the edge. I stepped out of the boots

and into the water. OHMYGOD, cold.

I stood there, my ankles going numb, reconsidering the entire idea. I came to the

conclusion that if it must be done, 'tis better it be done quickly. I walked a few steps, and

dived in.

The water took my breath. I tried to swim a few strokes, but on top of not being

able to breathe I kept sinking. I realized that usually when I dove into something this cold,

it was the Pacific, filled with salt which gave me extra buoyancy. I treaded water for a few

minutes instead. The heat shimmer against the ridges seemed surreal in this all

encompassing cold, but the shimmer reflected the shimmer of the water, the reflection of

my pale body distorted against the dark of the bottom. Ohhh, I didn’t want to think about

the bottom. About this lovely drowned valley. I didn’t want to think about the bear shit in

the water either. I was only 10 feet from shore. And to think at one point I'd considered

swimming to the other side. Big joke. I stayed until the hot white boulders looked inviting.

I clambered back to my boots and slopped over to my pile of clothes. 1 sat on my shorts so

my butt wouldn't burn, and draped my shirt over myself in case anyone came along.

It was heaven. I was so cold, the heat meant nothing, and the breeze was pure

pleasure against my skin. I felt like I had ginger ale in my veins. Suddenly my situation

didn't seem so bad. Perhaps I’d sneak back here and do this again. I stayed another twenty

minutes relishing my privacy and cold. When my hair was dry, I dressed and returned,

straight to my tent. I didn't care if Clive had filled the water bottles. I’d do it later, and hold

it against him.

That night Clive built a fire out of the driftwood that was piled everywhere along

the water’s edge. I sat on a log, thinking and watching the flames. Clive sat across from

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. me, and in the time honored tradition of campfires everywhere, told me a story about going

walkabout in the Australian outback. He rented a motorcycle, took it some place on a dirt

road, stashed it, took off all his clothes, and went walkabout.

"What to you mean, walkabout?" I asked.

"I went walking around out in the bush," he replied.

"For how long?"

"Two weeks. I took off my clothes and walked into the bush. The aborigines do it

all the time." He seemed completely sincere.

I didn’t bring up the fact that aborigines are much more suited for walking around

naked in the heat of the Australian outback than a blonde Englishman who doesn't know

w hat glacier polish is.

"What did you do for food? For water? Didn't you take a pack?"

"No, nothing. I killed lizards and drank their blood. And at the end of two weeks I

came right back to my motorcycle." The fire-light glinted off his glasses as he poked a log

closer to the center.

I turned this over in my mind. I tend to believe people. I tend toward gullibility,

actually. Dating a lawyer for a few years cured me of some of that, but I still gave people

the benefit of the doubt. But this...this was flat out unbelievable. And actually, Clive said

he'd been handling snakes for fifteen years. But he was only twenty years old. That meant

he'd been handling snakes since he was five. Oh sure.

"That must have been quite an adventure," I said

"Oh, it was, it was," he nodded enthusiastically. Then he told me about riding with

the outback's equivalent of the Hell’s Angels when he got back from his "walkabout."

They had evidently been so impressed with him, they’d made him an honorary member.

The thing about pathological lying, is that it is that: pathological. So the person

lying absolutely believes the lie. Which makes him persuasive and hard to disbelieve. My

encounters with pathological liars had been, up to that point, limited. So I can't really fault

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. myself for taking an entire two days to conclude that Clive, sunburned, snake-savvy,

accented Clive, was a complete wacko.

When I got back to my tent, I left my head lamp on and looked at a lacewing

crawling up the side. Its eyes glowed with a fire-blue, delicate, and magic. I'm up here

with a pathological liar, I said to the lacewing. It's me, the birds, a bunch of snakes, and a

pathological liar. Oh God. Outside, I heard crickets and the occasional chirrup of a bat.

Reminders that mine was not the only story, that mine was not the only life here, but one of

m any.

But what if this place had a jinx on it? A woman bitten by a rattler three days before I

arrived and Clive almost fell off a cliff, I lay in the dark and wondered if the site would be a

success. What if there where Indian spirits here like in Tenaya Canyon? My sister and

climber friends of mine had both told me stories about Tenaya. It was the site of a horrible

massacre, and there were stories about people hearing voices and seeing strange things.

What if there were spirits here and our presence disturbed them? Before I slept I talked to

them, and told them what we were trying to do with the birds, how we didn't mean to

disturb them and I asked for their help and understanding. It made me feel better, at least

enough to fall asleep.

The next morning after breakfast Clive asked me to take his picture. He wanted

photos to send back to his girl in England. When I said I would, he started taking off his

clothes. "What is going on," I thought, but I didn’t give him the benefit of being shocked.

He posed, completely naked, with a beat-up shotgun in one hand, and a couple of slings

draped around his torso like bandoleers, against the back-drop of the water and granite. I

snapped the pictures. I was sure that he'd use them to perpetuate some horrendous lie, but

at this point, it seemed like his lying was more in the realm of egotistical tall tales rather

than something_that might endanger the birds. O f course, once I’d thought it out, his being

there was endangering the birds, but there was nothing I could do about that, at least not

until Lee got there.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Lee arrived around 11:00 with Mike, the bear management ranger. God, it was

great to see him. I felt like he was a savior coming across the water to save me and the site.

I didn't know what Clive felt and I didn't care. Lee brought a bunch of five gallon

containers of water, as he'd heard we were pumping.

"You aren't going to have time to do that once we release the birds," he said as we

unloaded them. "You can fill them up at the dam when you go in for quail." He'd also

brought more quail. Mike wasn't staying, but said he’d try to make it back on the day of

release and stay the weekend.

First thing we did was take Lee up to the box, so he could look at the birds.

"They look good," was his comment. "Healthy. It’s some hike up here, though.

It'll be hard in the dark."

"I know, " I replied, "I've been thinking about that. "

"And?" he queried

"I'll just give myself plenty of time I suppose." I replied. I didn't see that there was

anything else I could do. It was a long, difficult hike. No way to make it easier.

Then Clive showed him the "apple box" O.P.

"You can't use this, " Lee said, with a sharp almost incredulous glance at Clive.

"You can't see the birds at all."

"You can when they fly over," Clive said defensively.

"No," Lee replied. "It's too close to the box, and the birds may never fly over. This

is not an O.P. "

I didn't say anything. I didn't want to get into it. I knew the other observation

points were good.

"Do you have others?" Lee asked, looking at me.

"Two more," I replied. "We can show you from camp."

Hetch Hetchy was were I really learned Lee's management style. I'd seen it a bit at

Muir Beach, but there everyone had been working hard. Here, because Clive was such a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. doofus, and I was, well, the only one working, I got to see what Lee could really do. The

way he managed was that he worked harder than anyone else, and he expected you to keep

up. Set the example, and people will follow. Everyone but Clive, who did not seem as

smitten with Lee as I was.

We made our way down, me with the snake stick.

"That's the stupidest thing," Clive commented again.

"No it's not, " Lee replied. "It's damn smart. It's dangerous out here. It may be

slow, but we don't want you getting bit by a snake, or twisting your ankle." I felt better.

"Well, I've worked with snakes for fifteen years," Clive said sulkily.

Lee turned to me as Clive continued down the talus, his back to us.

"Fifteen years?" he mouthed silently, with a skeptical look. I knew right then that Lee had

Clive's number. "Fifteen," I mouthed back. Lee rolled his eyes and followed Clive, while I

tapped along behind them. Thus the alliance of Clara and Lee against Clive was formed.

Working in the field is a strange thing. At least working a hack site is. I think that

any experience where people are asked to do difficult, sometimes dangerous things, to go

through the same experiences under duress and pressure you can get really close to who

you are working with. You forge a bond that is unique and strong. I've never fought fires

or been in the military, but I suspect there's a similar intimacy. No one is having fun, you

are putting up with various hardships, and you end up bonding in a special way. When

Brent and I worked Muir Beach, within a month we were fussing at each other like an old

married couple, or a pair of maiden aunts who'd lived with each other all their lives.

There's an element of condensed intimacy. When Lee gave me that secret look, I knew I

had an ally. The entire hike down, I allowed myself to hope that the site might work out,

that Clive's whining and criticism weren't going to bring me down.

Back at camp, we took Lee to the O.P. on the water, where we could see the box

and the surrounding area.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Okay," he said. "This will do once they are flying. But we also need to see directly

into the box. We need to track when they eat."

"I know," I said. "The other O.P. is there." I pointed to the ridge across from the

box. " W e can hike up if you'd like."

"I’d like," Lee said.

We stopped in camp, filled our water bottles, and set off to the west ridge.

"You'll like this one," Clive announced, "It's just brilliant."

"You picked this one and the one by camp, didn't you?" Lee muttered as he gave

me a hand up a particularly large boulder. I nodded.

"I thought so." He looked a little grim. "We'll talk later."

The west O.P. met with his approval. Once again the birds cacked at us.

"Oh, that's good, that's good." he said.

Back at camp, I stopped at my tent to leave my pack. Lee was talking to Clive, and

then I saw Clive take off towards the reservoir O.P. Lee came over to me.

"I sent him off so we could talk," he said. "Something's going on here, and I need

to know what it is."

So I told him how I thought Clive was a pathological liar, how he whined. How I

hoped that Lee could stay after release, and if he couldn’t, could he just take Clive with him

and I'd do the site by myself, because working with Clive was like working with a ball and

chain.

"Okay," he said when I finished my litany, "I'll see what I can do. I wanted to

release in the morning, but I’ll need to call in, let them know what’s going on. How about

if you drive me to the dam this afternoon? Get some boating practice? ”

On release day we found a baby rattler, right across our path in the rocks. It was

curled in a pile of driftwood, its gray-black-tan markings an exquisite contrast and play

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. against the white granite and golden gray sticks of driftwood. W e didn't t kill it. Clive took

pictures of it, and made a big fuss about knowing all about snakes. Eventually he picked it

up with a stick and threw it into the water—which it immediately swam out of. Lee was

impatient, today was about release, not about snakes. Clive told us once again how much

he knew about snakes, and then it was up the hill and on with release.

Clive got the front off the box practically by himself and while Lee was still in the

box, I left—my stomach cold and palms sweaty—to hike down the hill, past where the rattler

had been that morning, through camp, and up another poison oak, snake-filled talus field to

the upper observation point. I took my snake stick, tapping everywhere in front of me, and

reminding myself that in Africa they say the best way to do something is to hurry slowly,

so that was how I would do it. It wouldn’t help me or the birds if I got bitten by a snake. I

made it to my O.P. in an hour and fifteen minutes, which was pretty good, considering the

terrain. The birds flapped their wings, explored a little, and spent most of the afternoon

sleeping together in the shade of the box.

At about 5:00 Mike Webb showed up in a boat. I could see him unloading lots of

gear and water, and I hoped he would stay, as it was always good to have an extra person

at release. Around 7:30 I heard Lee and Clive in camp, their voices floating up in the clear

hot air. About this time the birds showed signs of roosting, but they were wiffling, slowly

deciding on the best place for their first night out of the box. I was impatient because I was

hungry, and didn’t want to hike in the dark if I could help it, but I stayed until 8:00 when

one of the birds fledged, flying from the box to a ledge on the cliff face. Oh, you’re

sneaky, I thought. But I had a feeling one would pull something like that. I was glad 1

stayed. I heard Lee yelling for me to come on down, so I did, happy that I could report a

fledge.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Telemetry has come a long way from when I was first using it in 1987. Now birds

can be tracked by satellite, a fantastic tool, enabling researchers to appreciate how far

animals can travel, and how big a territory or habitat really is.

I really learned the finesse of telemetry in Hetch Hetchy from Lee. I was okay

before, but at Muir Beach everything was open, hills were relatively easy to get on top of—

there was no bounce and it was easy to use triangulation to track the birds. Besides, even

though the transmitter failed on Alex, he was always with White Queen the first few weeks

anyway. After that, it didn't matter. But Hetch Hetchy was a granite bowl, and the signal

bounced all over. Plus, it was incredibly difficult to get a triangulation. You couldn't just

run to a ridge-top. Getting into the boat, and doing telemetry from the water was a

possibility, but this required hiking to the boat, then firing it up. Always a production. Not

that I'd been doing badly—circumstances had been in my favor, but Lee showed me how to

really detect bounce.

We were set up on a spit of granite, hot white granite, next to a small tree— spindly

with effort— struggling to grow out of a crack next to us. That morning we'd set up a

remote feeding station. That's what Lee had called it. W e got up early and blanketed the top

of a large flat boulder sticking out of the water about 500 yards east of us with quail. The

birds had perched there for two days now, in the afternoon. And none of them had returned

to the box. So this morning we boated out with thirty quail.

"We’ve got to use enough so wherever they land they’ll be close to a quail. They're

getting hungry, but they won't necessarily recognize the quail as food. We've got a better

chance if they land close to one," Lee said. He squatted by the bag of quail industriously

breaking their wings at the shoulder and the elbow. We wanted the wings to wave in the

breeze, if possible, to attract the birds' interest. "Peregrines are a wonderful bird,

wonderful, but they are not the sharpest tool in the shed," he said, handing me a plastic bag

of about ten quail with mangled wings. "A raven, now they'd be coming into camp already

for those quail. But these guys, you'd better hope they land right on top of one. That's

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. what it's going to take. Now, I want you to scatter those all over. About five, ten feet

apart. That should do it."

I nodded, and walked over to the other side of the little island. It was still cool, the

air crisp with morning. I carefully placed the quail in a random pattern, for maximum

coverage. When I was done, I went back to the boat. Lee had already taken care of his part

of the island and was sitting at the tiller.

"Let’s get out of here," he said and started the boat as I stepped in. We swept back to

camp.

But now the light sparkling off the reservoir was fierce. There was no shade. I kept

squinting. I hadn't perfected the technique of keeping my sunglasses on and looking

through binoculars. I was afraid I might miss something and right now, waiting and

hoping that the birds would feed, I didn't want to miss anything.

Lee stood and picked up the telemetry from beside his camp chair.

"Here, I'll show you how to work with bounce. First, turn the volume way down.

Then put the receiver on your shoulder with the speaker right next to your ear. Then scan

with the antenna. You have to listen hard but the true signal will be just a bit sharper and

cleaner. Just a bit. It's a difference that gets lost with more volume, or if the speaker isn't

by your ear." He lowered the antenna and took the receiver off his shoulder. "Right now,

I've got it dialed into the red transmitter. It's bouncing from two different locations, and

then the tme signal. Let's see if you can identify the bounce and the location of the

transmitter." He waited while I stood and then handed me the antenna and receiver.

I imitated Lee. I put the receiver on my shoulder, heard the faint ping of the

transmitter, and then raised the antenna and started to sweep. I'd learned that holding the

antenna vertically or horizontally changed how well you got the signal. I vertically swept

the antenna, slowly turning in a full circle. The pinging was equally strong to the SW, the

NE, and NW. Dang. One of those locations was where the transmitter was, and the other

two were bounce. I shifted the antenna to vertical, and slowly turned around again. I

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. listened carefully. Ah, the ping to the NW was distinctly softer. I swept again, listening

hard between the SW and the NE. NE was just a little clearer, a little cleaner. I lowered the

antenna, took the receiver off my shoulder and pointed.

"He's there."

Lee smiled.

"See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Good job." He leaned back in his camp chair and

stretched. In front of us, about 500 feet east, the flat island of granite emerged out of the

cool cobalt water. I could see the quail like dark rocks, scattered across its hot surface. So

far, none of our birds had appeared to feed, even though they had perched all over this rock

yesterday afternoon. Well, it wasn't afternoon yet. At 1100, it was still technically

morning, so we had a while to wait.

"So," Lee said." What do you want to name them?"

"What?" I had been glassing the quail with binoculars, seeing a broken wing flutter

here, a totally still lump there. "Name them?"

"Yeah. It seems like we should. It's about the right time. You haven't yet, have

you?"

"No." I glassed a snag a little to the south. No bird. "I haven't."

"Well." Lee sat up straight. "Let's name them."

I put down my bins and looked at him.

"At our last site, we gave them names that helped us remember the transmitter

colors, so we could know which was which. And here, because you so nicely had two

blue transmitters, we've really got to keep that straight," I said.

"Hey, those were the colors we had," Lee protested. "At least I put them on

different legs."

"1 know. I've been referring to them in my notes as BR and BL."

"Blue right and Blue left?" Lee asked

"How did you know?" I grinned at him.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "How about a double name thing to help us remember, like in the south. Billy Bob,

you know," Lee suggested.

"That works. Billy for blue and what for right and left?" I asked.

"We can do Roy for right, that has a nice ring."

"Okay. And blue/left can be your namesake."

Lee looked at me quizzically.

"Billy Lee." I said.

"Excellent!" he laughed.

"And, then we've got red," I continued, "Robert, Roy, Raymond, Richard..."

"Randell" Lee said.

"Randell? You seem very sure of that."

"Oh, I am," he said. And that's were it stood. Billy Roy, Billy Lee, and Randell.

Sitting out on the hot granite rocks with Lee, with the water right there, we had a

good view when our three birds landed on the granite island. They ate, and then napped.

What a relief. This gave me a chance to look around a bit, take in Hetch Hetchy close to the

water. A pair of red-headed mergansers swam by and I wrote this:

13:20 Lee says take notes in pen, as they are used as an original legal document,

sometimes. The clouds float over like great white entities of their own...against the clear

blue and the wind, strong warm winds, blowing the pages of this notebook, and anything

else not weighted down with a rock. This morning I saw three immature mergansers, rust

brown heads, Sunday gray backs, white tummies and lovely rose pink feet and bills. They

swam by close to the shore, ducking their heads under the surface occasionally giving me a

flash o f white as they turn over to preen in the water, and then, all diving, their strong feet

pumping the green towards some unsuspecting fish...all three o f them. How amazing they

are hits me as I write, a bird-flyer, with wings for the air, and floats above the water,

foraging below the water, at ease in both elements...waterfowl.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. We saw another 'buzztaiV this morning. Lee was down by the water, started to

boulder around a rock and put his fingers 2 "from a rattler coiled in a niche in the rock. I

was above him, and saw him suddenly jump back into the water, (which was shallow) and

then he called to me: "come down and see another rattlesnake!" I went and looked into the

niche from a safe distance. There it was, coiled, its markings a little indistinct in the shade,

a good place for a snake to sleep and be cool, close to the water...Lee named him 'Larry”

and on our other trip down to the water we can now look and see him serenely deadly,

coiled there.

We saw a very small tree-frog, jeepers' in Lee's words, this morning in the pre

dawn camp darkness, he was caught in our head lamps light while we looked.

Last night a bat bumped my hat...I love watching them, there are hundreds o f them

here, and every night at dusk the air is filled with their awkward fluttering shapes, and

shrill chirps, that go on all night—a counterpoint against the crickets song.

This is a rough, wild area, though. The danger from rattlers is real and high. No

fair being stupid and spacing out in this country. It is good, so far fo r the birds however,

the only encounters we've had with other predators getting too close are red-tails, although

Lee saw an eagle way over a ridge two days ago, and we both heard a homed owl the other

morning about 4:00 am.

Experience is our only real reference...compassion, empathy, love, we bring our

experiences into our situations...! can never know completely how someone else feels, but

/ can refer to my own life, and find the circumstances, the situation and realize, and apply

my perceptions...how amazing, and we sometimes presume we 'know how the other

person really feels. ' and yet, perhaps we do. Another wonderful forever mystery.

I finished writing, looked up, checked the birds.

"So," said Lee, "What do you think we should do with Clive?"

"God, I don’t know," I replied. "Can you take him away?"

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Well, we'll get the other attendants here as soon as we can. They're almost

finished at Lake Tahoe. I'm just worried that he'll kill himself before then."

"There's always that possibility." I said. "You know who he reminds me of?"

"N o."

"Did you ever read the Chronicles of Namia by C.S. Lewis?"

"N o."

"They're children's books. They're great. There's one. The Voyage of the Dawn

Treader, where the characters are exploring on a ship. And one of the characters doesn't

want to be there, and he's just awful. He makes fun of the other people, and he whines,

and he expects everything to be done for him, and he's a huge drag. His name is Eustuce.

Well, Clive reminds me of Eustuce."

"Hmmm." Said Lee. He lifted his bins and looked at our babies. They were still

asleep. "Well, he's certainly useless alright."

After that, we referred to Clive as Useless.

"What would you do to Useless anyway. If you could do anything? " Lee asked.

This was interesting. I didn't normally consider "doing" things to people, at least not

verbalizing it.

"Like what?" I asked

"Well, like taking him out to the middle of the lake in a boat, tying a boulder to his

leg and dropping him in," said Lee.

"Oh." I was a little shocked. "Isn't that a bit much? I mean he's useless, but not

bad."

"Okay, how about taking off all of his clothes, and making him go on a walkabout

here? " Lee suggested

"Alright. Then we could have a group of Hell's Angels waiting at the dam to pick

him up," I said

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Yeah, they could take him down to Merced with them, riding naked all the way

dow n."

"With no helmet, so he gets bugs in his face."

"Bugs in his teeth," said Lee with satisfaction

"Hugh! Beetle bits that he'd be flossing out for days!" I shuddered

"Yeah, you’re getting the hang of it," Lee said "Now, what would we do to the

birds if they hadn't come in and eaten?"

"To the birds?" I had never even thought of going there. How could we do

anything to the birds? The All-Important-Noble-Sacred-Birds.

"Yeah, the birds, " Lee prodded me.

"You start this one," I pleaded. "I don’t have any ideas. We wouldn't kill them."

"Oh no. But we could rough them up a bit. I tell you what. We'd catch all of them

first. "

"And put them in my tent." I said.

"And then what? What could we do to them? " Lee mused. " I know, we'd put them

in the tent, and then we'd shake them around, like popcorn in a popcorn popper, until they

came out and ate!"

I had an image of the three birds tossed like big popcorn kernels around in my tent,

down flying off, feet scrabbling. Of course, in the fantasy nothing would be happening to

their feathers. That was part of the reason that not just anyone could handle the birds.

When the juvenile plumage comes in over the down, the shafts of the feathers are filled

with blood so the rest of the feather can grow. The feathers do not become "hard-penned"

until a few weeks after they take their first flight. This is the only time in a falcon's life that

all the feathers come in at once. That's why it was so important that the birds not break a

feather. It can seriously affect their ability to fly.

"1 know what we else we could do to Clive," I said.

"What?"

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "We could spread honey on his face while he's asleep, and then a bear would come

and lick his face and wake him up."

"Oh, that's good. And then he'd yell...." We both laughed. I felt sort of bad. It was

mean to be talking about Clive like that, but he'd been pretty rude and this helped blow off

steam. I guessed it was okay. And it was funny.

"Look, one of them's awake. Which one is that?" Lee said.

"Um, blue/right transceiver, oh, that's Billy Roy."

I made a note in my notebook:

1546: BR wakes up from nap. Other two birds still sleeping. All three still

perched on island by food. None o f the birds has returned to the box to feed. This will no w

be the food station. Not bad, as is easier to feed here. No long hike in the dark uphill,

merely a little boat ride in the dark, which is much less stressful. Weather clear, west wind,

warm.

At this point, making notes was as much something to keep me awake and alert as it

was a recording of what the birds were doing.

* * * * * *

That evening, when we got to camp, Mike the ranger had made a fire. W e sat

around it after dinner, talking. I was tired but excited, and besides Mike was talking about

bears.

"So you haven’t had any trouble with bears yet out here?" he asked, looking at me

and Clive.

"No." Clive replied. "But I'd like to see one." He'd gotten a lot quieter now that

there are two older males around.

"No," I said. "But we're using the bear box, and keeping a clean camp."

"I only ask because Hetch Hetchy is one of the places where we dump the trouble

bears. You know, the ones that are repeatedly breaking into cars, dumpster diving, coming

up while people are eating and scaring them."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Is that right?" Lee asked.

"Yeah. There isn't that much public use out here, and most people who are here are

savvy about the back-country and act accordingly. It's funny, though it only puts off the

problem. They always find their way back to either the Valley or Tuolumne. Somewhere

where there are people and cars."

"What do you do after that?" I asked.

"Well, they get three chances. We dart them, tag them, and haul them out here three

times. After the third time, they are labeled incorrigible and when we catch them again we

dispose of them."

"You mean you kill them?" I asked.

"Yeah. Shoot them usually." Mike looked into the fire for a minute. All of us are

silent, aware of animals and death, the heavy dark around the light of the fire.

"The sad thing about it," he continued, "is that we are killing the bears that are

evolving. We're killing the bears that are pushing the evolutionary edge. People, cars and

dumpsters are a new food source for them. And they've learned how to take advantage of

that. I've seen sows teaching their cubs how to get into a dumpster. Seen the mom send the

baby up a tree after food that's been hung in the back-country. Seen a bear come up to

hung food, look at the food pack, look at the rope, find the tree that it's tied to, and untie

the rope to get the food down. They are smart, smart animals, and we are killing the

smartest ones. I mean, think about it."

He shifted forward, earnest with his subject.

"What would you rather do, forage around all day for some berries and insects, or

walk up to a car, bust out the window with your paw, and eat an ice chest full of food? It’s

energetically smarter to bust the window. It doesn't hurt your paw. You get a lot more

calories than if you forage all day, and nothing happens, except sometimes some people

show up and yell at you. I'd do it. Hell, we’d all do it. That's what I hate about my job. I

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. have to kill the smartest bears because they are inconvenient to us. I really don't like that

policy. It seems like we could do something else."

I'd never thought about it like that before. I was dreadfully afraid of bears and

didn't want them getting my food, so I was scrupulous about keeping a clean camp when I

was in bear country. Besides, when my sister lived in Yosemite, she'd had a bear tear the

wing window off her VW bug trying to get to the laundry it thought was food. A friend of

hers had awakened one night to see a faint light in the kitchen. When she went to see what

it was, she found it was the refrigerator light, shining around the dark bulk of a bear

foraging through the crisper drawers. But I liked Mike's point. We were killing the smart

ones.

"It's interesting," Lee said, leaning forward. "What you're describing happens over

and over with human interactions with wild animals. If it's not working, the animals get

taken out. "

"Yeah, but that's not the case with peregrines, is it?" Mike looked at Lee a little

enviously, I thought.

"You're right, we got really lucky with that one," Lee agreed.

"What are you talking about?" Clive asked.

"Urban peregrines," Lee replied. "The peregrine's adaptation to urban

environments. No one could have predicted that. In fact, if anyone had, I bet they would

have been laughed out of the scientific community. But it happened. "

"When you think about it, it's not that surprising," Mike said. "Skyscrapers and tall

buildings give the same steep isolation that a cliff face does. There are similar air currents

and pigeons are a plentiful food source."

"Close enough," Lee replied. "So far the main problem with urban sites is the

young birds getting hit by cars. But compared to the adaptive advantage, the problem is

pretty small. Not only that, peregrines don't mind people. They aren't as sensitive to

disturbance as some other species."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I thought about this. This was new. I'd known about urban peregrines, of course. I

guessed it was unusual that a wild animal adapted to human presence without it becoming a

major problem. Usually the outcome was more like what happened with the bears. Deer

overwhelmed gardens, and got hit by cars. Raccoons infested attics, skunks got under

houses, squirrels raided bird feeders. And our response? We killed them.

The peregrine was unusual as an endangered species, because its problem wasn't

habitat loss, like practically everything else. It was pesticides, and poisoning. A problem

that was potentially solvable. The argument and the accompanying proof that the DDT that

poisoned birds also poisoned humans was a strong one. The argument that we shouldn't

expand our cites, or build in a wetland because it was the only home of a particular animal

was weak. It made intuitive sense to me, but people are not very responsive at being told

that they can't do what they want. We pride ourselves on our limitlessness more than we

do on our judgment. Or wisdom, or restraint. We like control, but not restraint. And

usually control is control of "Nature" to get us what we want, not restraint in response to

nature, not acceptance to the way things are, but seeing nature as a challenge to be

overcom e.

When 1 was a child, my parents used to read me bedtime stories out of a book titled

Z.en Flesh, Zen Bones. These were parables, stories and koans that illustrated right

thinking. There was a story about the bamboo that grew next to the big oak. The oak made

fun of the bamboo because it was so thin and spindly. It bragged that it would be around

forever, because it was big and strong. Then a storm came and blew the oak over, because

the oak tried to resist the force of the storm. And the bamboo? It bent with the wind, and

survived. It seemed to me that given the conflict between animal and human, the animals

couldn't bend as easily as we could. But that wasn't a strong argument either. Not many

people were going to see this like I did. Not many people were going to consider that bears

had as much of a right to eat their food as they did. And the bears were there first. Doing

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. their bear thing. The entire situation made me sad. I could tell Mike wasn't any too happy

with it either.

"Hey," Lee commented, " you ever notice how people look like the animal they

work with? Like Mike here, he looks just like a big blonde bear." He grinned across the

fire at Mike, sort of serious, sort of teasing. Mike was like a bear, though. He was a big

guy, with one of those bodies that look soft but aren't. Like bears that seem cozy on a

certain level but can run thirty miles an hour in a charge. I looked at Lee. He was like a

falcon, narrow curved nose, deep set intense eyes, compact build.

Mike grinned back. "Well, you certainly look like a falcon," he says, mirroring my

thoughts.

"I've always thought that I could work with wolves." Clive stated suddenly. He'd

been so quiet lately, and I was so relieved to be free from expecting him to do anything that

I'd almost forgotten he was there.

"I'd be quite good, I expect." he went on. "Given my experience with snakes."

How this fit in I had no idea. Mike and Lee just looked at him. "You know, dangerous

animals." Clive clarified.

"A cool head in stressful situations?" Lee asked, looking hard at Clive.

"Oh yes. I'd say so." Clive glowed. "It's one of the most important things with that

kind of work. And I think I sort of look like a wolf as well."

I glanced across the fire at Mike. He was looking down, but in the firelight I saw

the corner of his lip twitch just a bit. Lee stared at Clive for another minute, and then

abruptly turned to me.

"I don't know what I'll work with, so I don't know if I look like it yet." I said, but

I was covering. I knew what I'll work with. Gerbils. Or gophers. Some sort of rodent with

a round face. "You have a full-moon face," my mom used to say, and it drove me nuts. No

hope for sculpted cheeks or a dynamic jaw line. My face was round and sweet. Maybe I

could look like a pika, a very cute high elevation rodent. That wouldn't be so bad.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Hmm," said Lee. " I think you'll work with birds." But he was being kind, I

knew. He thought I'd end up working with rodents. Not that I minded, exactly. It didn't fit

the sexy predator image, but rodents are under rated. Pikas store straw for the winter, rats

are incredibly smart and social, and some Arctic ground squirrels have antifreeze in their

blood, so they can hibernate and not freeze during the winter. They just aren't as culturally

cool as predators.

Physical limitations always color science, influence what we know and assume,

and yet they are rarely talked about. You can study something, but the knowledge that you

gather and interpret is limited by what you observe, the sensitivity of your instruments, you

at the moment of observation, the weather, the air, thousands of discreet variables. Not to

imply for a moment that there are not valuable experiments made and duplicated, not to say

for a moment that what we know and have learned and still have to learn is not tremendous,

just to say...there is always an element of doubt, there is always an unknown variable,

there is always an effect that may be greater than was first assumed. Good scientists always

remembers the mystery and it keeps them humble.

One of the things that I love about field work is that it is direct; on a certain level,

simple, and a lot of what I have read and heard discussed in the literature and in theory gets

blown to hell as soon as you get it out into the field—a place where there are no controlled

perimeters, and practically every card is wild. A place of disasters and miracles. Hopes and

fears. Where you can be lulled into predictability, and experience constant surprise.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hetch Hetchy II

There's magic in getting up in those strange hours past midnight. I started my day

right when I should have been dropping deep into REM sleep. I drove through the foggy

night to the Bird Group, the little collection of trailers and temporary buildings filled with

endangered falcons where three juveniles enclosed in boxes that said Best Washington

A pples waited for me on the deck in front of the office. Apple boxes were the preferred

mode of transportation—roomy enough for the bird to crouch comfortably, but not so

roomy they could hurt themselves. When I peered through the hole in the side of the box at

each one, they glared at me. Defensive. Their brown and tan feathers still had leftover bits

of down poking through and each one had a powder-puff of white on top of its head,

which made them look adorable despite their fierce eyes. Adorable and vulnerable. These

were our children for the next six to eight weeks. I carefully lifted each box and set it in the

back seat of my silver Datsun B210 a car my grandfather left me when he died. The boxes

did not hold organic apples. My grandfather worked for Monsanto chemical all his life. The

three birds enclosed in those boxes, would probably be extinct if the DDT manufactured by

Monsanto were still being used in the United States.

I'd proved myself last year, so this year I was trusted to transport the birds to Hetch

Hetchy, my first site of the season.

It was as I was putting the last box onto my back seat that Janet came out of the lab.

She'd left the birds for me, and even though it was 3:00 a.m. she was awake. Baby

peregrines and hatching eggs didn't really pay attention to night and day.

"I see you got the birds. " she said.

"Yeah, safe and sound."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "You’ll need this too." She handed me a folder with the band numbers of the birds,

their place of origin, and copy of the MOU or memorandum of understanding. Seeing as I

was transporting an endangered species, I needed this in case I was stopped for any

reason. With an endangered species, possession is the crime. I could be arrested for having

a peregrine feather, much less three of the live birds. This piece of paper stated that I was

transporting the birds for the Bird Group with the agreement of both the federal and state

agencies that were concerned with wild animals. I put both of these in my field notebook in

the front seat.

"Hey, before you go do you want to see the miracle of life?" Janet asked. I must

have looked blank because she added, "I’ve got an egg hatching as we speak."

I followed her into the lab, a long white room, very warm, with incubators full of

eggs on one end, and tall tables with large plastic trays lined with white towels on either

side. Heat lamps hovered over the trays, which where filled with little downies. Janet led

me to a tray right by the incubators where a young peregrine had hatched halfway through

the shell. She pulled the rest off, and there was this little red and white living being curled

inside. It was about as big as a golf ball. I’d seen what those wings and feet could do as an

adult, and to see, just these little red stubs, that small beginning, I was suddenly struck

with the futility of what I was trying to do, and the necessity of my doing it.

I walked out of the warmth of the lab into the chill dark, got in my car filled with

peregrines, and left. I was driving early, because young peregrines can get heat stressed,

and I had to cross the Central Valley where temperatures could go into the hundreds. It was

best to just avoid that whole problem.

The drive went smoothly. I drove with my shoes off, as my sister had told me that

it helped keep you awake. When I hit the foothills of the Sierras the road got windy. As I

went around the first few curves I heard a soft skittery sound from the back. The birds

trying to keep their balance on the shifting cardboard of the box. After that I took the curves

as carefully as I could.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. At 7:00 a.m. I stopped for gas in Buck Meadows, just after the station opened. By

8:00 I turned onto the road leading to Hetch Hetchy. It wound through patches of meadow

and forest. In one meadow an old house sat far back from the road. It had a porch and a

metal roof. I played one of my favorite games, fantasizing that I lived in the house, and

what my life would be like if I did. With this house, I loved the metal roof. I would work

as a wildlife biologist and climb in the valley on weekends. I'd watch snow from the

porch, I'd hear rain on the metal roof, I’d come to know the animals for miles around.

Perhaps I'd meet a world-class climber and we could have a torrid romance until he had to

return to whatever country he was from or was tragically killed in an accident involving

heroics, bad weather and El Capitan. This occupied me long after I'd passed the house.

Halfway to the reservoir the steel gray sky started to spit snow, small dry flakes.

This is much colder than last year, I thought. But it was also earlier in the season. It could

snow anytime of year in these mountains.

This year I met my hack partner Tay Gerstell at the damkeeper's house. I not only

had the birds, I had the two boxes of quail that needed to be put into the freezer in a shed

behind the house. This was what we'd done last year, and as it still worked; there was no

reason to change.

That done, we loaded all our gear and the birds into the Boston Whaler that

belonged to the city of San Francisco. Steve, the damkeeper, would be driving out the

birds and our gear, Tay and I would follow in the site boat.

I almost tipped us into the water making a turn too fast as we started out. An

expression of alarm crossed Tay's face, and he grabbed the side. I laid off the throttle and

we evened out, but I was a little startled myself.

"Are you sure you want me to drive?" I shouted at him over the roar of the boat.

"Better you than me!" he replied.

The air smelled like snow and water. To the north were oak-covered mountains,

with the occasional "digger" pine, named insultingly for the "Digger Indians" who had

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. lived in the area. But the pines themselves where beautiful: tall, and solitary, with gray-

green needles that were not really dense, so they looked like an eddy of smoke against the

deep green of the oak. To the south, almost immediately, was a sheer granite cliff rising

straight out of the water for at least a thousand feet. The boat skirted the cliff, and I tilted

my head and looked at that huge expanse of virgin Yosemite granite. The climber in me

started to drool.

If I was good enough, oh. I'd lead that sweet finger crack that cut diagonally across

that face, or that clean hand crack that led to a right-facing corner and then a wicked roof,

beyond which I couldn't see. Perception changes when you start to climb. You no longer

see cliffs purely as part of the landscape. They become puzzles. You trace potential routes

over all rock faces you encounter, even crumbly ocean cliffs. But this—this was forbidden

territory. Glorious Yosemite granite, some of the best climbing rock in the world. The

Valley was already an international climbing Mecca. If this cliff was not totally restricted, it

would be crawling with rock-jocks.

Three days after release one male "blew out," site terminology for flying out of

range and never coming back. We knew he was too young to hunt on his own. Male

peregrines get restless, start to fly, go too far, lose their way, and—the assumption is—die.

The females are larger, develop more slowly, and the risk of blow-out is less. But those

little males. Gotta watch them every second.

Well, we watched. Watched him ring up and up against the steep granite sides of

the canyon where the Tuolumne flows into Hetch Hetchy. Watched him become a speck

against the high cliff face, watched him silhouette against the sky at the top and disappear

over the rim. Out of sight, out of range, vanished.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Damn!" Tay exclaimed. I grabbed the telemetry receiver and antenna, dialed it to

the male's frequency, hoisted the metal box to my shoulder so the speaker was right against

my ear, and swept the antenna in a slow arch towards the cliff face where he disappeared. I

could hear the blip of his transmitter, like a heartbeat on an EKG.

Beep....beep...beep....beep...then, fainter, then gone. All I got was the soft hiss of static.

Tay looked at me. I lowered the antenna.

"Gone." I said, taking the receiver off my shoulder and setting it carefully on the

boulder-strewn ground.

Hetch Hetchy. First release of the second year. Last year all the peregrines had

lived, but only because circumstances, providence, and fate had all lined up on our side.

The second year everything turned against us.

It takes a lot of work, time and money to restore a peregrine falcon population—In

the fifteen years that peregrines were listed as endangered in California, the Santa Cruz

Predatory Bird Research Group used three strategies for réintroduction. The first was nest

manipulation. An observer was hired to watch a known nest sites early in spring. Their

official title was nest attendant. The nest manipulations were done only on nests where the

eggshell fragments collected the previous year showed a dangerous level of thinning. Some

nests were manipulated every year. Others were watched, monitored, but never needed to

be manipulated, the peregrine parents producing viable eggs each season.

During a manipulation, the attendant informed the Bird Group when the female laid

eggs. Usually there were a few weeks of courtship before that. The male arrives at the nest

site first, and does aerial displays in front of the cliff. Stoops, of course, that stunning

straight up to 200 mph dive, but also long vertical corkscrews, loops, sometimes

descending so fast that you hear a sound like a jet, feathers cutting air with a vengeance.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The female arrives, and is hopefully much taken with this. When she had decided on a

ledge for the nest the male begins to hunt for her. He’ll bring her birds, and she encourages

him with hunger wails. Usually at this point, when the male comes in with food the birds

are quite noisy. I'd heard of one peregrine researcher, low on sleep during the field season,

who would go to the cliff to be observed, and rather than scanning the face for white-wash

or guano with a spotting scope, would find a flat place and take a nap. When the male came

in with food, he'd wake to their cries, and locate the nest.

After the attendant had contacted the Bird Group to say that eggs had been laid,

biologist/climbers went into the nest. The eggs were removed and porcelain eggs put into

their place for her to warm. The artificial eggs were painted the soft speckled brown of the

actual eggs, and the porcelain retained the heat of the mother’s body, so they did not grow

cold.

Of course during this process the peregrines were upset, lots of cacking and diving

on the intruders. A helmet was mandatory for the climber, and often shoulder pads as well.

Once the biologist had the eggs, they'd transport them to incubators at the Bird

Group—their shells fragile and thin. If the pesticide accumulations were not too great, the

eggs hatched. When the downies were about two weeks old, they were returned to the nest

and the dummy eggs removed. After the adults' initial surprise that their eggs had suddenly

morphed into large downy chicks, instinct kicked in and they raised them. This gave the

young the advantage of having real birds as parents. This was by far the most successful

way to get more peregrines into the wild.

The second strategy was cross-fostering, which Lee had explained to me during my

interview. Young peregrines were put into prairie falcon nests for the prairies to raise.

Prairie falcons were much less impacted by pesticides, mainly because they tended to have

a more general diet, reptiles and mammals in addition to birds. This variability coupled with

a tendency to nest in very remote areas had kept them from become a statistic in the annals

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of endangered animals. Cross-fostering was also successful, and was preferred to the last

method which was to do a hack site.

Hack sites were energetically expensive for what you got back. W hen the birds had

human foster parents they were much more vulnerable. We couldn't protect them the way

their parents could. We could fire a shotgun to scare of a predator, but we couldn't fly. We

couldn't follow the young with food once they fledged, and feed them wherever they

perched. We needed them to return to the same place to feed. Even though the peregrines

were able to do this for the most part, the margin for error, for failure was much much

larger.

The places selected for réintroduction were historic peregrine falcon sites that were

no longer occupied. The Bird Group had a number of them throughout California. Hetch

Hetchy was one. The flooding of the valley that holds the reservoir was the project that

broke John Muir's heart. He died within a year of the project's approval. Now it was part

of Yosemite National Park. In the mid 1980's Yosemite got extra funding for peregrine

hack sites. Hetch Hetchy was unusual as there was an active healthy peregrine eyrie on

Kolana Rock at the mouth of the valley. But our site was farther east, far enough that the

peregrine adults wouldn't be a problem. At least if all went well. Right now it was not

going well.

"Let’s check the others." Tay picked up the receiver, and dialed it into the frequency

of the other male. He was on the slope just below the box somewhere. We hadn't been able

to locate him visually in the thick tangle of oaks and manzanita. But he'd been there all day.

The female's signal was above the box. I scanned the granite outcroppings with binoculars.

Usually the birds perch where they can see around them.

"I've got her," I said.

"Where?" Tay set down the telemetry, and joined me.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Um, just to the right of the box, there's a dead snag...follow it up, and see where

it forks at the top? Just to the left of that fork is an outcropping, and she’s on the side

closest to the snag."

"Okay. I see her."

The young usually didn't fledge right after release. Usually it was one to two days

after. And then it could be a day or two before they made it back to the box. That is the

most critical part of the release. They needed to return to the box and eat there. Once they

did that, they associated the box with food and when they were hungry they’d return. They

needed to return somewhere regularly to eat. It didn’t have to be the box. If they had a

favorite perch and didn't show an interest in the box, we fed them there.

But we didn’t have wings. We couldn't follow them around responding to their

hunger wails like their real parents would. I'd say not having wings is the biggest limitation

when doing a site.

By nightfall, the male had flown again, and ended up closer to the female at the

outcrop. Neither of them had returned to the box. By tomorrow morning he wouldn't have

eaten in two days. The female fledged a day after him, so we didn't have to be so worried

about her.

"What do you want to do?" Tay asked me. He was sitting on a boulder, eating chili

out of the can. I stirred my ramen noodles. The flames of the stove cast a dim glow. Above

us, the stars were glorious.

"I'd say feeding station, but they aren't perching anywhere regularly yet."

"Didn't that happen last year?" he asked.

"Yup. They didn’t go back to the box. But it was really hot, so they ended up by

the water. We just scattered quail all over the rocks and that made it easy." I looked over at

him, and he blinked in the glare of my head lamp. I flipped it off.

"That's not going to happen this year. It's too cold " His voice came out of the

dark.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Yeah, it is colder. If it were up to me I'd say watch them tomorrow, hope they go

back and eat, or hope they decide on a regular perch we can get to. Then set up a feeding

station."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"Hell if I know. You're the expert." I said. Tay had done six hack sites to my two.

But one of mine had been Hetch Hetchy the previous year.

"That's right, I am." He sounded amused. "Hopefully they'll feed. We've got

enough quail?"

"Twenty-four in the cooler," I replied. Twenty-four in the cooler buried in the sand,

124 back in the freezer on the dam-keeper's shed, a 45 minute boat ride and another world

away.

"Okay. I'm going to turn in. See you in the morning." I sensed rather than saw him

unfold himself from his seat, amble to where our garbage was, deposit his can and head for

his tent. No head lamp for Tay. A minute later his tent illuminated down the beach, a soft

blue dom e.

W e lost the second male the next afternoon. After a morning of short experimental

flights, he'd flown across the water and perched on top of a large granite outcrop next to a

scrub oak. In full view of us and the golden eagle that grabbed him. I didn't see it. I was

scanning for the female. I heard Tay yelling, and saw the eagle out over the water.

"OHMYGODNO!" I screamed and reached for my shotgun. From below me Tay

was still yelling, and there was a fusillade of shots. The eagle flew northwest with deep

strong wing beats, landed in a talus field about a quarter mile away, and ate our bird.

It didn't eat the transmitter though. The tiny radio continued to transmit, a loud bip

bip bip. Bright and harsh. A reminder of the limitations of telemetry. When you get the

signal, all it means is that you can pinpoint the location of the transmitter. It does not mean

anything about the animal.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Alright," Tay said. "It's over. That first male blew out, now one of our babies is

eagle food. We've gone from a family of five to a family of three. Let's pick her up and go

hom e."

"And how are we going to do that?" I asked. It's one thing when the birds are

young, don’t know how to fly, and you're transporting them to the site in apple boxes. It's

entirely different once they are released. They are wild, flying, and you are clumping

around in a steep shrub-covered granite bowl with rattlesnakes, deep water, and no wings.

"We wait until she lands, sneak up on her, throw a T-shirt over her, and bring her

in," Tay replied. I look at him. Vietnam vet, biologist. He's handled birds, he knows how

to catch them.

But I have my doubts. I'd rather have a bal-chatri, a trap used in falconry. A live

mouse was put in the trap, and covered with the bell-shaped wire top. When the bird

landed on it trying for the mouse, slip-knotted fishing line attached to the wire would catch

her feet, her talons, hold her still, until we could reach her. The T-shirt thing seemed thin.

Something like this must have showed in my face.

"It sounds crazy, but it works." Tay said "I've done it before. We don’t have time

for anything else. We go in tomorrow early, before the wind picks up, get her and get out

o f here. "

"Okay." I trusted Tay. He showed me how to fire the shotgun off my hip so the

recoil wouldn't bruise my shoulder. It's not as if we were aiming at anything. He'd

advised the technique of firing all the shots in quick succession, creating a wall of sound to

frighten away whatever winged predator might be in the area. Of course, that's assuming

you see the predator. We didn’t see the eagle until it had our bird. We had radio telemetry,

a spotting scope, two pairs of binoculars, two shotguns, and a boat. Now we were down

to a T-shirt. I hoped Tay was good with the shirt. I'd never re-trapped a peregrine, and not

only that, I had serious reservations about the sneaking up part.

"You've had this happen before, haven't you? " I said.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "What?" he asked.

"Had sites fail,"I replied.

"Oh yeah." He looked away from me, across the water.

"How's it feel? I mean, how do you feel about it?"

"It never feels good. I never get used to it." He smiled ruefully. "But it has to be

done. I’ve gotten more birds out than I've lost. But, since you're asking, this site is failing

faster than most." I nodded. I felt awful. As if all of us, the female, Tay, and I were sliding

inexorably towards the edge of a cliff and nothing could stop it. We hadn’t even named her

yet. Usually that comes later, after you get a sense of the bird's personality. But she was

still just "the female." I didn't want to think about it.

The next morning we got her signal early. In the afternoon west winds came up,

making it easier for her to fly and for us to lose her. We only had a one day window. As

far as we could ascertain, the female had not fed yesterday or the day before. Young

peregrines get the moisture they need from the blood of their prey. Their kidneys will

function for three days without food. After that, even if they eat, their kidneys shut down

and they die. We had some luck; according to telemetry she wasn't perched high on a slope

or on an unreachable cliff face but low near the water, towards the confluence.

"We'll use the boat, " Tay said. "You drive. I’ll do telemetry. You know I'm lousy

with boats."

"Okay." I didn't think I was that much better with an outboard, but I was banking

on his trapping skills. Keeping the boat at a quiet idle, we slipped through the dark water of

Hetch Hetchy. In the gray light of dawn, bats skimmed the surface and the smell of

mountain-misery mingled with the damp scent of decay. All around us rose the granite

walls, with that ineffable presence of granite: dignified, vibrant.

Tay silently pointed north. Boulders jutted out of the water, and covered the flat

area that he indicated. I cut the motor, and we drifted to shore.

100

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Here." Tay took the telemetry and handed me the T-shirt, dirty and well-worn.

"Follow me. When we're close, I'll ask for it. I'll get behind her, and you block her from

the front."

"How do I do that?" I asked. I didn't think I could really block anything that could

fly.

"Hold your arms up, like blocking a shot in basketball." I never played basketball,

but I didn't say that.

"Okay, " I said. "Okay."

I followed him over the rocky ground. Setting my feet quietly. After about 50 yards

he stopped. Looked east.

"I see her, " he whispered. I came up beside him, and looked as well. She was

another 200 feet away, perched on a rock with her back to us, a dark brown shape on top

of a larger gray one. I could see the crisp outlines of her wings folded across her back. She

was still. Not moving, or stretching, or preening. Not even shifting her weight. Not a good

sign. It meant she was weak.

"Okay, here's the plan. Forget the blocking. I want you to go back, walk slowly by

the edge of the water and then turn in. Don’t look at her, that’s what a predator would do.

She'll see you and hopefully be distracted. While you do that. I'll get behind her and nab

her with the shirt. Take the telemetry. Leave it by the boat. We don't need it now." Tay

looked intense, like a hunter, completely focused.

"Hmm." I nodded, and handed him the shirt. He gave me the telemetry. I turned

and walked carefully towards the water. When I reached it, I left the telemetry and turned

east. I tried to imagine I was a deer or a bear, something looking for food, something that

didn't have the responsibility of another life. But my arms and legs felt heavy and it was

hard to move. The morning air was clear, and I could see dust motes where the sun was

starting to hit the cliffs. I turned north, one foot in front of another, slow.

101

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Her call split the air like light. Fierce and loud.

CACKCACKCACKCACKCACK. Warning me? Herself? I had no idea. I stole a

quick glance. She was there, cacking, but no wing-flapping, no other sign of agitation. Tay

was about 50 feet behind her. I looked down, stepped a few steps away from her, turned

my back. The cacking stopped. She'd be watching me now. This was the stupidest,

completely-harebrained-seat-of-the-pants idea, but it was all we had. I stepped a few more

feet, glanced. Tay was almost to her. He had the shirt up in front of him, spread out,

raised. I looked down, couldn’t alarm her now. Then I heard the cacking again, higher,

shriller. I looked. As Tay jumped towards her, swinging the shirt over her, she gave a leap

and was airborne, her wings pumping in the still air, her calls echoing off the hard cliffs. It

was difficult for her, I could see her working. She flew straight for the cliff face to the

north, and as I watched, breathless, she slammed into it, and dropped.

"GO!GO!GO! " Tay yelled. "We've got her! She's stunned! "

Stunned or dead, I thought. I stumbled over the rocky ground, towards the trees that grew

at the base of the cliff, towards where I had seen her fall. Tay was a little ahead. We got

there at the same time.

She was lying on her side in the duff. When she saw us, she struggled upright. Her

eyes were bright and she panted rapidly. Stressed.

"Quick," Tay hissed, "Block! " He advanced, T-shirt spread. I moved towards the

one opening she had. She took off practically at me. I grabbed at her, but some sense of

not wanting to hurt her kept me from a desperate lunge. I felt the air from her wings on my

face and then she was gone, out of reach. A thermal caught her and carried her up and up,

then she stopped flapping and drifted east, like ashes or smoke. As we watched, she

slammed into the cliff face again, but high, and tumbled like soft, silent rockfall. She came

to rest on a ledge about 500 feet above the ground. Her signal stayed there while we broke

camp, stayed while we retrieved the transmitter of the male eaten by the eagle, stayed as we

left.

102

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I knew that she probably wouldn't have made it without her siblings. The young

learn from each other and policy was if you got down to one, you caught them and re-

released them later. I knew we had to try to trap her—she was a tremendous investment of

money and time, a valuable addition to a population that had slipped close to the edge of

extinction. But I didn’t want that impossible task. I hated our odds. I hated loving her.

But when she flew past me, when she made that perilous and terrified leap away

from two predators she did what she was meant to. She stayed free. She stayed wild.

103

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CALL

I slathered myself in sunscreen, made sure I had a lot of water, picked a good

boulder to pee behind, filled the pockets of my shirt with shotgun shells, made sure my

pack and my shotgun were in easy reach of my folding chair, opened my notebook and

prepared to spend the day sitting and waiting and calling.

Ten years ago, if someone had come up and told me after a gig that my ability to

make myself heard over bass, drums and guitar would become invaluable one day on the

side of a mountain in Lassen County, California, and that I'd no longer be fronting a punk

band but be working on peregrine falcon réintroduction, I would have said first, "you’re

nuts," and second, "What's a peregrine falcon?"

In Lassen county, in 1991, the world was popping. It was overflowing with life

and energy. Now I was no longer a numbskull. Now it was me who delivered the

peregrines to release sites around California. It was June, that stupendous time of year,

when everything is blooming and breeding and coming to life. Days are long, breezes and

storms come up; everywhere you look something new is happening. For two weeks I got

to join the site attendants at Lassen and help with the initial days of release. I was an extra

person. I wasn't needed in Santa Cruz yet. My friend Rob Stein was running the site with

his girlfriend Lisa, and the number of birds and flowers in the area was amazing. Who

wouldn't stay?

By then I was sure of myself. I had opinions on the falconer/biologist tension. The

thing about the falconers was that they wanted an intimacy with the birds and it seemed to

me they had the illusion that they were somehow in control of the situation. In the field I

could sometimes see them lose track of the fact that the birds were wild, that nature was a

mystery, and that what we did often had little or no effect on the outcome of a situation.

104

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ten days after I arrived, the peregrines had been released, flown and returned to the

box to eat. The site was off to a successful start. Until one of the males got lost. It had been

a good day. Lisa was at the upper observation point, which was right by our camp, got

sun, and looked down on the box. I was at the lower one, east of the box by about 200

yards, and a little below it. This O.P. stayed in the cold shade until noon, and I put on all

my warm clothes when I was there. Despite the coldness of the site I liked it better. You

had good views of one side of the box, and it was on a small outcrop that put you just

above the top of many of the smaller trees and larger bushes. As long as you held still long

enough, you could get great views of all the little foraging birds as they came through,

gleaning insects off the stems and leaves. In my week here I had seen Wilson’s,

orange-crowned, and Audubon warblers, mountain chickadees, and ruby-crowned

kinglets. I had even seen the ruby-crown, which is surprisingly small and difficult to spot.

You have to be looking directly down onto the top of the bird, and how often do you have

that view? W ith the small birds, unless they're at a feeder outside your window, you are

often struggling for identifying marks. The bird shows itself and then vanishes into the

depths of a large bush or a leafy tree. You can hear it rustling or calling...and then you see

it for a second, a wing, a glimpse of tail, a movement behind a screen of leaves. And then,

it's gone. Usually, birding for the smaller birds is an exercise in frustration.

Which is why the lower O.P. was like a secret banquet. Because you were there all

day, just sitting, the birds got used to you. No sudden moves or loud noises. Plus the

above-the-foliage viewpoint. It was one scrumptious sighting after another. Sometimes I

had to consciously make myself look at the box. If I had known the plants there as well, I

think I would have gone practically nuts with delight. As it was, the only drawback was the

cold.

Rob was on guard duty. This meant he wasn't even looking at the box, but was

stationed on the southwest edge of the cliff, looking windward, where most of the potential

winged predators might show up. Rob believed that the best defense was a strong offense,

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. so anything we saw that looked remotely threatening got a volley of three shots from the

shotgun into the air, the sound meant to discourage them from coming closer. But we

didn't see much. Hardly any golden eagles, just a few balds, who despite their size were

more scavenger than predator, and not really a threat.

This was the first time that I'd really seen bald eagles. They were wonderful, regal

birds, but with the funniest vocalization. The first time I heard one I couldn't believe it. A

squeaky yarp, the sound you'd expect from a wimpy gull. Not what you'd imagine from a

noble raptor. Although I think my image of bird sounds has been permanently damaged by

Hollywood, no one wants to hear what a bald eagle actually sounds like. Every time you

see a bird of prey on film, you hear a red-tail scream. Unless it's a documentary.

Commercials, movies, anything fictional—red-tail scream. ALWAYS. It makes no

difference that the bird that you are seeing is not a red-tail. In my post-numbskull phase,

when I could start to begin to identify raptors, this drove me crazy.

There I was watching the peregrines, getting distracted by the warblers, trying to

stay warm. I'd count the hours until the sun hit the O.P. One of the males flew straight out

from the box, and then veered west and out of my view. I hoped Lisa could see him. If

not, she had the telemetry. It worked better from up high. Down where I was I couldn't

have gotten much of a reading. I opened my notebook.

6/27/91: 1130, blue male flies west, out of sight, red female and white male still in view at the box.

That was that. The day stretched ahead of me, a day where I would sit in one place

and watch the world around me. At 1:30, Lisa came down.

"Have you seen the blue male?" she asked.

"He took off to the west about two hours ago, and I haven't seen him since."

"I can't get his signal from up top, and neither can Rob."

106

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Crap," I said. This wasn't good. Out of sight for two hours, and no signal. And it

was still in the first two weeks of the site. W e were not out of the woods, still in the critical

period. Actually, there never was a not-critical period; there were only times when there

was less and less that we could do. "Well, that's what I came down for, to see if you'd

seen him, or knew something we didn't." Lisa looked towards the box. The female was

eating a quail. Her head dipped and her beak came back bloody.

"I am ignorant, " I said. "Even though warmer than I was."

Lisa grinned at me. She had this O.P. yesterday. "Okay. Well, I just thought I'd

find out. I gotta get back."

"Of course. Keep me posted."

She scrambled down off the outcrop, and started the stiff hike up the hill. I opened my

notebook.

1330, red female eating quail, white male perched on box. Lisa came down, informed me that they can't get a signal on blue male, and haven't seen him for two hours, shit.

I shut my notebook, looked at the box again. That's pretty much all I could do. Sit

here. Look at the box, watch the birds. Write comments in my notebook to keep myself

aw ake.

The white male looked over at the female eating. She saw his look and mantled over

the quail, hunching her shoulders forward and spreading her wings out and around the

quail in front of her. Sort of like when a toddler yells, MINE!, and tries to scoop up a huge

pile of toys, and protects it with her body. In all honesty, though, the male didn't look like

he wanted her food, there were plenty of quail. It was sort of funny, her strong reaction to

his look. In falconry, mantling is considered bad behavior.

But even while I was amused, I was worried. I was glad I was here with Rob.

Serious and experienced, he was getting a degree in ornithology at U.C. Davis. Not much I

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. could do now, just watch the birds, brainstorm possible scenarios, and figure out how we

would respond.

1538: female napping on box. male perched, alert, looking around./ wonder what he can see? Increased cones and the different shape of their eyes mean vision more acute than ours. Distance, movement, UV? I'd love to see with those eyes, just once. Second male still out o f view. Possible scenarios: He returns this evening to roost. He doesn't return. We scout around, try to get his signal. What do we do if we get it? No idea, ask Rob. If we don't get it? Cry. There are several mountain chickadees getting excited about something in a bush below me.

Weather: clear, warm, about 70. Slight breeze, some clouds.

At around five Rob came down. He sat beside me on the outcrop and looked at the

box.

"Nice view."

The male was eating, the female rousing, which is the term for when a bird fluffs

all its feathers out and sort of shakes itself. After that, if she pooped, she might go for a

short flight. Birds frequently "lighten their load" before flight. That's why if you see one

poop, it can be a sign that the bird will take off soon after.

"Yeah. The only thing that would make it better is having the blue male up there," I

replied.

"We still can't get his signal. We've been trying all day," he said.

"What do you want to do?" I asked.

"Are you up for a little night work?"

"Sure. Anything. What are you thinking?"

The female had backed to the edge of the box. She leaned forward, lifted her tail,

and a stream of white guano shot out and copiously decorated the side of the box.

Whitewash. In the wild, it's how you find cliff nests. Also known as eyries. Look for the

whitewash on the sides of the rocks. Often it marks the nest location of a bird of prey. 108

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "She's gonna fly," Rob stated. W e were sitting side by side, watching the birds as

we talked. I brought my binoculars up and focused on her. She was bobbing her head,

looking north.

"U h-huh."

She took off and sailed over the tree tops, using the breeze for loft. She started to

circle and rise. When birds soar in ascending circles, usually it’s because they are riding a

thermal that will take them higher without too much energy expense. Birds of prey do it

frequently.

We watched her. The birds were still young enough that flying was a big deal, for

them and for us. Until now they had been doing perch-to-perch flights. This was her first

thermal.

"Lovely," I breathed.

"You said it."

We watched for another minute and then Rob said:

"I'm thinking we wait for these guys to roost, and then we do a little foray to the

west with the telemetry, drive the truck and keep checking, see if we can get his signal, see

if he's still around."

"Sounds good to me. Do you think all three of us should go?"

"Yeah, I do. I mean, once they've roosted, there's nothing we can do anyway. And

I'd value your input, but I also think it would be good for Lisa to see how it's done. She

hasn't done any tracking yet."

I thought about this for a minute. He was right. Once the birds go to roost, their

main danger is a great homed owl. GHO's are completely bad ass. They are big, silent,

and vicious. Successful predator, in capital letters. My first release partner, Brent, had

monitored a nest where he saw a GHO come into the eyrie, kill the adult female, and eat the

three juvenile young. But here, we hadn't heard any hooting in the area.

"I think that should be fine," I said.

109

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "Okay. So that's the plan." Rob stood. The female is about 150 feet above the

trees, still ringing up. "I better get back, in case she goes somewhere. I'll see you later."

"You bet," I replied, eyes still on the bird. I didn't even see Rob leave. Or hear him

either. She's soaring north now, but I can still see her with binoculars. With my bare eyes,

she's just a speck.

"Sheesh, good flight," I muttered to myself. "Just be sure you come back."

That night we looked. We crammed into the cab of Lisa's truck, and while Rob

drove, Lisa leaned out the window with the telemetry. I squeezed into the middle and gave

hints. We stopped periodically and one of us would hoof it to a high point for better

accuracy. We got his signal, but it was faint, and kept disappearing.

"Well, we know where he is," I said when we returned to camp.

"But that doesn't help us, does it? " Lisa asked. She looked beat.

"Not really," said Rob, "It only tells us that he's still around, not completely gone.

We can't do anything until tomorrow, anyway, so let’s get what sleep we can. Who's

feeding in the morning?"

"I am," Lisa said. Feeding meant you got up an hour before the other attendants and

crept in the dark down to the box with a bag of quail, so the birds wouldn’t see you.

I yawned. Sleep depravation was part of bird work, but I never quite got used to it.

"I'm going to bed, see you in the morning," I said and crept off to my tent.

Next morning I got up and made coffee and took a cup to Lisa. She was at the top

O.P., but now that I was up, she would move to the lower one 1 was at yesterday.

"How'd it go?" I asked about the feeding.

"Okay, they're both eating at the box. I did telemetry, no signal on the blue male.

The other signals are strong. Let me know when you're ready, and you can take over

here."

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "I'm ready now," I said. And I was. Binoculars, coffee, water. This O.P. was

right next to camp, so I could go rummage for food whenever I wanted to. Lisa left me the

spotting scope and telemetry.

6/28/91 0548: Searched for male last night. Got his signal, about 3 miles west, but faint,

faded in and out. Could be distance, where he was perched, transmitter failure. Good to

know he's still in area. Will talk to Rob about possible solutions. Now: Clear, calm. Both

birds eating on top of box. Did telemetry on blue, no signal. Will do telemetry every 15

mins, just in case. Lisa at lower O.P.

Rob was at the stove. He came up with his coffee in a pub pint glass that for some

Rob-reason he had brought up from Davis.

"So what are we going to do about this blue male?" I asked.

"What do you suggest?"

"Well, if we had some other folks here, they might want to bump' him back

towards the box. 1 heard it worked at Ft. Reyes last year, but personally, I think it's stupid

that the Bird Group even has it as an option."

"Damn straight. There is no way we do that." Rob looked grim. "That's falconer

shit. There is no reason that just because you walk up on a bird from one direction, it's

going to fly in the opposite direction, and not only that, there is no guarantee that it'll see

the box when it does fly. And you scare the crap out of it. We won't do that."

"So," I asked," given that we both agree that the recommended official option is

bull, what do we do? There's trapping, but we don't have a trap and we'd have to find him

first anyway, and there's all these trees he'd be up, so I doubt if the T-shirt thing would

work. I don't think it works anyway. I think it's a myth."

"Oh yeah, you were at Hetch-Hetchy." Rob looked at me.

"Yeah. Don't get me started on that."

i l l

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Okay. But the T-shirt thing does work," Rob said. "I’ve done it. But not here.

Too many trees, too many places he could be. Tracking him would just be a waste of

energy. I've got a different idea."

"What?" I squinted up at him. The sun had risen and was right at eye level.

"Well, I was doing a lot of reading last quarter on bird behavior and calls. Some

species have a very strong response to calls, location calling in wrentits, alarm calls with

jays, stuff like that."

"Alright, but how does that apply here?" I asked.

"Well, we re in a bad place. We've basically lost him. " He turned towards me.

"The problem, as I see it, is that when you flush the bird back towards the box, you terrify

him and there is no guarantee which way he'll fly." He looked west again, perhaps hoping

that even as we discussed him the male would appear. "The premise isn't bad, though,

trying to get the bird towards the box. But let’s turn it around. Rather than push him back,

let's DRAW him back." He continued looking west. "So with that in mind. I'd like to try

an experiment. I want to call him back." Rob glanced at me to see how I'd take this.

"How? I mean, what exactly are you thinking of? Do you have a tape of calls in

your tent? " I was confused.

"No. I'm thinking we do the calls." He brought this piece of information out like it

was the coolest thing since iced tea. But I wasn't following. I didn't see how it was going

to work. "First, what call? Cacking is an alarm call, echupping is too soft, and hunger

wailing..."

"Hunger wailing is what the female does to stimulate the male to hunt during

nesting." Rob said. "It's what the young do to stimulate both parents to hunt once they are

hatched. And, even though there aren't any studies out on it. I'm betting that it's also a

location call of sorts for the young once they start to branch out. But no matter what, we

know it’s a stimulation and response call. I think we should hunger wail."

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I leaned back in my chair and thought about this. It made sense. No running after

the birds. No scaring them, or trying to get them to do what we want. Using their calls,

their stimulus, their way of locating. I smiled up at Rob. "You've sold me. I think it's a

great idea. So the next question is how often are you going to do it?"

"No, the question is, how often are YOU going to do it? No..." he raised his hand

before I could protest "I’ve heard you sing. I know your secrets. I heard your demo tape. I

know you've got some serious pipes. And what we need now is VOLUME."

"Oh crumbs," I said. "But I can’t do bird calls. I can't whistle loud. I'm lousy.

See?" I tried to whistle a trill, but it came out as a sputter.

"Hunger wailing is not a whistle. Look, I'll try, and you try, and whoever sounds

the best does the calling."

"Okay, that's fair. "

Rob took a deep breath and got this sort of goofy expression on his face.

Concentration, I supposed, but it still looked funny. He opened his month and yarped.

Loudly. It sounded awful. And not anything like a hunger wail.

"That didn't sound anything like a wail, " I said.

"Duh." He pushed his glasses up on his nose, they slipped while he was yarping.

"Your turn."

"I think I’d better stand up for this, " I said, getting out of my chair. "Watch the

birds, okay?"

"I’ve been watching. You're just putting off the inevitable."

"Yeah. I am." Suddenly the whole absurdity of the situation hit me. Two humans

on top of a cliff, in big sunhats, fleece sweaters and sarongs, cups of coffee, binoculars,

spotting scope, telemetry and a shotgun, intently yarping. There are very few jobs where

this would be the beginning of your day. But this was also serious. I took a deep breath

and shut my eyes. 1 tried to hear the hunger wail in my mind and imitate it. I opened my

mouth and this sound emerged. It was loud. And it took my entire body to do it. It seemed

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to start in my feet and flow up. Like the cry was being pulled out of the earth, through me,

into the air.

"Wow!" Rob exclaimed, as I opened my eyes, disoriented for a moment. "You've

got it." He looked surprised and admiring.

"Um," I said. I felt like I'd stepped through some portal, suddenly seen something

I didn’t expect. As if, by making the sound I'd blurred the line between human and bird.

"Try it again," Rob said. And I did. This time I took a deeper breath, focused, and

called. Once more it seemed to come from the ground. It vibrated my entire body. This call

was WORK. Below us the white male wailed too, despite the fact that he was half-full of

quail.

"A response already," Rob grinned.

"If this works, Rob Stein, you will go down as dazzling in the annals of peregrine

history. Or at least in my field notes. I'm going to have to drink lots of water," I said.

"Okay, this is how I think today should go," Rob said "Lisa at the lower O.P. I’ll

stay up here at the upper O.P. with the scope and telemetry. You do defense, and call,

what, every twenty minutes? You're right by a little ravine there, and you know sound

carries well down ravines."

"Every thirty minutes. I might have to do this all day. Or more than one day. I

won't be any good with no voice. "

"Every thirty minutes then. Let's do it."

I left Rob at the top O.P., and went down and told Lisa what was going on. Then I

collected my gear and went to the defense O.P., about 200 yards southwest of our camp on

top of the cliff. You couldn't see the box or the birds, but it was a good lookout for other

predators coming in.

It was strange, doing the call. Every half hour throughout the day, as morning

turned to mid-morning turned to noon to mid-afternoon, I wailed. I’d stand, and face down

the ravine, so the sound would echo out. I imagined that I was a peregrine, that I wanted

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. food, that I needed it, and as I called, made that sound that I had heard so often, the

urgency of that desire seemed more and more tangible. I kept being surprised at how

wholly that wail encompassed my body. This was not merely a noise, it was a legs, torso,

lungs, chest-head-he art sound. When I did my first site at M uir beach, I had revelation after

revelation. About animals, and nature and time. Incidents and situations that I didn't even

know I needed to learn. This was another one. But it didn't involve my intellect. It

involved my body. It brushed up against something wild, and way, way beyond me. It

was exhausting, and loud. And at 4:30, just as the day started to tinge with possibility of

coolness, it was answered. From below me. Loud, fresh, and indignant. Outraged, even.

"Oh my God." I whispered, "Oh my God." I walked gently to the edge of the cliff

and peered down. In the rocky, shadowed slot of the ravine, on a shaded ledge about 75

feet down, was the blue male. He looked pissed. Rauowwwit Rauowwwit, Rauowwwwit.

He was going off. From around the corner his siblings answered him. He was here, he

was back. I was looking at him. We did it.

I heard rocks crunch, and turned and saw Rob. I put my hand up to signal silence

and pointed down. I backed away from the edge and let Rob take my place. I watched as he

leaned over and looked, and smiled, a shit-eating grin.

"We did it," he silently mouthed.

"I know," I mouthed back.

Later, Rob and Lisa and I toasted our success with a dinner of Kraft macaroni and

cheese, peppermint tea, and a Fosters, split three ways. The male had gone back to the

box, gorged on quail and fallen asleep for the rest of the afternoon.

"No 'bumping' back to the box," I said "No scaring the bird, none of that over

controlling stuff."

"Amen." Rob raised the Fosters can. Lisa leaned against his shoulder.

"This was a good day, wasn't it?" she said.

"Better than most," he replied.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The dark surrounded us like a blanket. There were crickets, and a few bats. I

remembered the night hawk I had seen in the dusk a few nights ago, its body almost

invisible, the white wing patches flashing like lights. At first I'd thought it was a ghost,

and even when I understood what it was, I still was left with the sense of a spirit. Today

had an element of that. Not the fleeting instant of awareness of other, but something more

unspeakable and tiring. Something that I wasn’t even quite sure I knew.

"I feed tomorrow," I said. "I'm going to bed."

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Bibliography

Art, Henry W. editor. The Dictionary of Ecology and Environmental Science. (Henry Holt and Company, New York. 1993)

Beede, Frank L. A Falconry Manual. (Handcock House Publishers, Washington. 1999)

Cameron, Julia. The Artist's Way. (G.P. Putman's Sons, New York. 1992)

Dunne, Pete; Sibley, David; and Sutton, Clay. Hawks in Flight. (Houghton Mifflin Company. 1988)

Gill, Frank B. Ornithology. (W. H. Freeman and Company, New York. 1990)

Johnsgard, Paul A. Hawks, Eagles, and Falcons of North America. (Smithsonian Institution Press. Washington and London. 1990)

Leahy, Christopher. The Birdwatcher's Companion: An Encyclopedic Handbook of North American Birdlife. (Bonanza Books, New York. 1982)

Linthicum, Janet personal communication. (4 12 2002)

Sherrod, Steve K. et al. Hacking: A Method For Releasing Peregrine Falcons and Other Birds of Prey. (The Peregrine Fund, third edition 1987.)

The Rocky Mountain/Southwest Peregrine Falcon Recovery Team. American Peregrine Falcon Rocky Mountain/Southwest Population Recovery Plan. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 1984)

Turner, Jack. The Abstract Wild. (The University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 1996)

Weidensaul, Scott. Raptors. (Lyons and Burford. 1996)

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