BY LISA BARIL PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATE DAVIS

42

S C I E N C E

WATCHINGTHE WANDERER

A peregrine falcon swoops past fall foliage on a late October day.

M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R L Y 43

On a gusty spring morning in southwest Montana, Jay Sumner and Don MacCarter thread their way through the sagebrush-studded flats above Gardiner. They have come seeking peregrine falcons at a narrow

sandstone cliff overlooking the Yellowstone River. The two men unfold their camp chairs at the edge of

the flats where the land falls abruptly into the roiling river below. Jay, president and founder of the Montana Peregrine Institute, raises his binoculars and begins scanning the cliff for falcons. Then he spots one, leaden-backed and soaring above the river.

“I’ve got one,” he says. Don, a volunteer with MPI, raises his own optics as the falcon’s angular wings slice the crisp April air with dives and figure eights—a male courtship gesture. The female, perched on a ledge, accepts his offer and he flies in to meet her. The pair mate in a brief encounter and the male flies off.

In a few weeks, the female will use one of the ledges to lay three to four bronze eggs flecked with ochre. And if the adults can protect their young from predators such as golden eagles and great horned owls, they’ll leave the nesting area in August and migrate to Mexico, or perhaps as far as Panama, though no one knows for sure. Peregrines get their name from the Latin root peregrinus, which means “wanderer.” True to their name, peregrines are found on every continent except Antarctica.

These falcons are just one of more than 100 pairs that Jay and his team of volunteers monitor as part of MPI’s nest watch program. Jay launched the group in 2002 to track Montana’s growing peregrine population following their removal from the endangered species list in 1999. But Jay’s passion for peregrines began much earlier, before anyone knew they were endangered.

Discovering Peregrines“i was a teenager when i read a NatioNal GeoGraphic article about falconry by John and Frank Craighead,” says Jay.

The article inspired Jay to begin his own search for peregrines and in 1961, while a senior in high school,

he found his first pair of falcons near his hometown of Livingston. “I saw that falcon stoop into the nesting ledge and I was hooked forever,” says Jay.

In a bold move for a teenager, Jay contacted the Craighead brothers to tell them about the nest. To Jay’s astonishment, John Craighead suggested they collect one of the nestlings for falconry—a legal and unregulated practice at the time.

The pair scrambled to the top of the 300-foot cliff and though Jay wasn’t a rock climber, he stepped into a climb-ing harness and lowered himself over the edge. Jay was nervous, but with John’s encouragement he made it down the vertical rock face to the ledge where two young pere-grines stood. Jay gathered one of the nestlings, a female judging by her larger size, and began the climb back up the wall. Jay planned to train her to hunt game birds but says, “After about a week I realized I didn’t know what I was doing, so I gave her to John, who was an expert falconer.”

Not to be deterred, Jay continued reading all he could

Since the peregrine falcon left the endangered-species list in 1999, it has made a big comeback in Montana

Peregine falcons nest on ledges on steep cliffs. Here, Don MacCarter’s wife, Jane, seeks falcons for the Montana Peregrine Institute.

PHOTO BY DON MacCARTER

44

about the art of falconry. He recalls trapping and skin-ning skunks as a teenager to save $25 to purchase King Frederick the II’s classic book, The Art of Falconry, published in 1250. “We stunk up the entire west side of Livingston for weeks,” says Jay. He also learned much about falconry from John and became an expert himself. He’s had numerous falcons over the years and now flies a young female named Ki. Together they hunt pheasants, ducks, grouse and partridge.

Plight of the Peregrine

when John and Jay collected the nestling falcon in 1961, they had no idea peregrines were endangered. It was still a year before Rachel Carson’s publication of her controversial book, Silent Spring, which exposed the harmful effects of pesticides on the environment.

As Jay was heading to college at Eastern Montana College in Billings, biologists from around the world were reporting declines in peregrine populations. The news motivated biologists in the U.S. to launch their own

surveys. Despite an exhaustive effort, they failed to find a single peregrine falcon from Alabama to southeastern Canada. In the West, more than 90 percent had vanished from the region’s craggy peaks and valleys, though Jay still knew of a few in Montana.

The culprit was determined to be DDT (dichloro- diphenyltrichloroethane)—a volatile pesticide developed shortly after World War II. DDT proved to be a cheap and effective way to kill insects. The trouble was that it also killed birds because the lethal chemical moved up the food chain from the bugs it targeted.

By consuming birds that fed on insects, peregrines accumulated DDT in their tissues. This prevented some peregrines from laying any eggs at all, while others laid eggs with shells so thin that they cracked during incubation.

Because of the harmful effects of DDT, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the peregrine as endangered in 1970 under the Endangered Species Preservation Act, a precursor to the Endangered Species Act that was passed in 1973. Two years later, DDT was finally banned

Even speed demons need a break. This peregrine falcon perches on a fencepost along the Rocky Mountain Front near Choteau.

“It was a relatively simple problem. DDT was the cause of peregrine declines and once DDT was banned, peregrines were able to recover. Releasing young birds into the wild expedited the process.”

45M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R L Y

after more than three decades of use on crops and forests. But the damage had already been done. Peregrines continued to decline as the effects of DDT lingered in the environment.

By 1975, the North American population of peregrine falcons had reached an all-time low. Jay was then teach-ing high school science in Arlee and, with summers off, he searched Montana’s cliffs for any remaining peregrines. He says the last pair in Montana bred in the Mission Mountains in 1979 and, “By the early 1980s, I didn’t know of a single active peregrine site in the state.” The wanderer was rapidly soaring towards extinction, but that was a fate biologists, and falconers like Jay, were unwilling to accept.

Back from the Brinkfearing the loss of their sport, falconers took the lead in recovering the peregrine. They had begun with establishing the Peregrine Fund in 1970. Its mission was to save the pere-grine from extinction through captive breeding, and falconers donated birds to the program.

Some of the first falcons bred in captivity were “hacked” back east in 1974. Hacking is a release method that helps young falcons learn to hunt by gradually reducing their food supply. Biologists would place three or four young falcons in a large wooden box set high on a cliff or manmade tower, which mimics their natural environment. The box was either flown in by helicopter or carried in and assembled on site.

Hack site attendants were responsible for feeding the falcons a daily diet of quail while they acclimated to their new home. After 10 days, the attendants opened the hack box but remained on site for the next eight weeks to monitor and feed the young falcons. As time passed, the attendants cut back on the amount of food they delivered, which encouraged the birds to hunt for themselves.

But it would take seven years before there were enough falcons available to release some of them in Montana. First, Jay needed to find suitable habitat. In some states, says Jay, release sites were chosen based on historical occupancy, but not much was known about where Montana’s peregrines had nested in the past.

Jay did know what made for a good peregrine cliff. “I knew the release sites had to be a high cliff near water,” says Jay. “I searched all the major drainages in central and western Montana.” He also looked at parts of Yellowstone National Park and Idaho. His efforts were funded by the Peregrine Fund.

Jay remembers working 12-hour days hiking over rough country. It was exhausting, but his love and admiration for peregrines kept him going. Although only about the size

46

of a crow, a peregrine’s aerodynamic shape gives it unmatched power in the air. A peregrine in full dive, in pursuit of ducks, swallows and other birds, can exceed 200 miles per hour, making it the fastest bird in the world.

Jay was eager to get these aerial predators back into the wild. Montana’s first peregrines were hacked on a cliff in the Centennial Valley. Ralph Rogers, a wildlife biologist and falconer, oversaw the operation, bringing along his wife and two young children. Over the next three summers, Ralph and his family released 15 young falcons in the Centennial Valley. “I raised my kids on hack sites,” says Ralph. “What a treasure that was.”

Between 1981 and 1997, more than 600 peregrines were released in Montana. While many peregrines survived their first eight weeks, some were killed by golden eagles at the hack sites and others died during migration. The large number of releases made up for the loss.

Unlike with many other imperiled species, the pere-grine rescue effort did not generate conflict over land use practices, says Ralph. That’s partly because their most critical habitat—nesting sites on steep cliff faces—wasn’t important for most land uses.

“Furthermore,” says Ralph, “it was a relatively simple problem. DDT was the cause of peregrine declines and once DDT was banned, peregrines were able to recover. Releasing young birds into the wild expedited the process.”

Intrinsic Magnetismwild peregrines in montana began breeding again in 1984. The first pair to nest fledged three young in the Centennial Valley near the release site Ralph and his family tended. Jay continued to search for new release sites, but was thrilled at finding new breeding pairs.

By 1999 all recovery goals established by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had been exceeded and the peregrine was removed from the endangered species list. The goal for Montana was to establish 20 breeding pairs, and by 1999 there were 27. The decades of struggle and effort by Jay, Ralph, and others had finally paid off. Today there are an estimated 3,000 pairs in North America.

That same year, the site that Jay found as a teenager in 1961 near Livingston became active again, with pere-grines choosing to nest on the very same ledge they’d used nearly 40 years earlier.

“There’s something about those ledges that peregrines key in on,” says Jay. He calls it an “intrinsic magnetism.”

After decades of absence, peregrines all over the country chose the same ledges their predecessors used.

In 2002, when Jay launched the Montana Peregrine Institute, there were only 36 known territories and today there are more than 160, most of which are in central and western Montana. Jay’s convinced there are more, but he’s uncertain how many. “I’d like to survey more in eastern Montana, but there just isn’t time,” says Jay.

Jay has 80 volunteers, and between them they survey more than 100 territories annually. Jay would like to survey them all, but for that he needs more volunteers and time. Some volunteers like Don MacCarter have been monitoring peregrines for years. They are a dedicated group who don’t mind sitting for hours in the cold days of spring or on hot July afternoons, waiting for a glimpse of a peregrine or to hear their telltale wailing call.

Back at the site above the Yellowstone River, Jay admits he doesn’t know if it’s a historical territory or not, but it’s a new one to him and he’ll add it to the growing list of known sites in Montana.

The male peregrine flies out of view up river, but the female is still perched on the cliff. She hops into a crack in the rock wall and makes a scrape in the sandy floor with her soft belly. And that’s a positive omen.

“That’s a good sign she’ll use that ledge for nesting,” Jay says. He spotted his first wild falcon an hour’s drive to the north. Over the decades, he watched them disappear and he helped them rebound. Though tufts of gray hair now peek from his faded ball cap, the gleam in his eye is youthful. The birds are back.

Veteran falconer Jay Sumner flies his young peregrine in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley.