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Meet the stars of On the Wing
Amelia
Amelia was the first peregrine we followed all the way north. As she grew
restless with the lengthening days of approaching summer, we could see a
change come over her. Yet long before she left the hunting flats of the
Texas coast, I wondered why she sought the vultures' thermals every morning,
riding up thousands of feet, where she’d never ventured? And why go higher
every day? All Amelia could find up there were vantage points--ever loftier
aerial sites from which her laser eyes could pick out the upthrust highlands
that , 100 miles inland, would guide her north. Within her there had to burn
a force. Some guiding image more ephemeral than a blueprint of the genes,
something more dreamlike than memory--but some awareness, some close-held
picture of a rocky, cliff-side place not far from where she herself had
hatched.
Gradually the pull of that distant prospect must have swum into focus,
pulling her up toward the heights she would need to vault the continent. And
somehow, we had managed to be with her at the moment when that primal vision
at last exploded across her consciousness, spinning her away like a bright
spark flung from the circling vultures. Wisps of chocolate cloud, the last
of their flock swept beneath our wings but, five miles ahead, Amelia was
already changing -- not just choosing her course of migration but starting
to remake herself. As the minutes passed it was like seeing a butterfly
slough its gray-shroud chrysalis, for with every mile Amelia was creating a
new winged being. The mostly idle, afternoon-dozing little hawk George and I
thought we knew so well was leaving us, becoming an unfamiliar 30 ounces of
singular purpose. Stroking deeply and steadily, she swept past the shoreline
and, focussed now on lands far beyond our accustomed coastal haunts, like a
departing angel she pressed on toward those distant highlands. It was what
I'd glimpsed on my first radio tracking flight with Vose--the primordial
flame of which we'd had only a vague idea when we chose it as our beacon.
Now, caught in its power, George and I exchanged a look. Locked on this
heading, Amelia had committed herself to the western fork of the tundra
peregrines' long highway home. If she lived, with or without us she was
going to Alaska.
Crazy Legs
Crazy Legs was, for a while, Bill Satterfield's pride and joy. I'd been at
Padre when she was brought in, and like many of the newly flighted
youngsters that arrived on the barrier islands, she was thoroughly beaten
up. But Crazy Legs, as we called her for her twisted, previously broken left
leg, was worse. Somehow she had made it down from the arctic on wings gapped
by the stubs of missing flight feathers, likely broken from tackling too
large prey, and in desperation she had come in to one of our pigeons.
Satterfield, who was both a vet and a student of falcon ecology, wasn't
optimistic. "Even if she lives, I can't see her defending a nest ledge. And
she doesn't reproduce, statistically she's a questionable member of the
population." On her carpet covered perch, C.L. could not even look at us. In
the Cyclops's cave of beach cabin, just the sight of her lumbering captors
would have provoked constant, panicked flight, and in the darkness of her
hood she could only bend to pick at the bits of pigeon breast we slipped
beneath her toes. Otherwise, she did not move. Satterfield was able to stand
that for almost two full days. Then the scientist in him capitulated, and to
soothe away her fear Bill knocked off his trapping. His work began at night.
An hour after the rest of us had turned in, I heard him begin to cluck the
low, infant feeding call peregrines use as baby talk with their mates.
Mingling his counterfeit peregrine voice with the pulse of distant surf,
during the long hours of darkness Bill plied his courtship, like Cyrano,
from the shadows. Even with her hood removed, his small Roxanne could not
see him well enough to panic, and by the third night she had begun to relax,
cocking her head expectantly as he began his serenade. Deep in my down bag,
I wasn't sure when I first heard her reply.
Six months later, packed with muscle built on wings held aloft by fresh
flight feathers I had watched Satterfield surgically implant, Crazy Legs was
ready to go. A gusty springtime wind greeted Bill and me as we pulled away
from the beach house, riding slowly because he was steering his ATV with
with just one hand; on his wrist, proudly hooded as a falcon in a
Restoration woodcut, stood C.L. Three miles southeast he stopped, removed
C.L.'s anklets, and slipped off her hood. As usual, she shook herself out
and swiveled around, eyeing the vast horizon. "You're free, Gal,"
Satterfield said softly. C.L. looked down and nibbled the place on her
yellow shanks where her tethers had been. Then she dropped from Bill's
wrist, swooped an inch off the sand, and swept away with the wind. It had
happened too quickly, and, insanely, we leapt on the ATVs and spun off after
her, burning out the emotion over the sand. For more than a hell-for-leather
mile we could see her flickering wings before she vanished into the mist
over the dunes.
Cherokee
Once they have flown even a little, raptors' souls wed themselves to the
air in ways probably impossible for humans to comprehend. Gravely wounded,
Cherokee had been brought to the Austin Natural Science Center, where I
worked. A just fledged red-tailed hawk still patched with milky down, he had
been an easy target for someone with a shotgun who'd blown apart his left
wing, right up to the shoulder. Eventually, though, Cherokee healed, and got
his Indian name from the kids who used the feathers from his amputated wing
for headdresses. Then, because the Center always had more hurt hawks than it
could care for, he at last came home with me, and from him I learned the
power of the sky. Inside my backyard's tall cedar fence he'd tear around on
foot, holding out his good wing for balance, and leap up onto my wrist for
his daily mice. But he never forgot what lay above. From my arm he'd cock a
burning eye upward at -- as far as I could tell -- nothing. Then there 'd be
the faint con-trail of a passing jet, and I'd figure Cherokee was
scrutinizing the passengers in its windows. But he didn't just watch the
sky; he wanted to be part of it. Eventually, helped by frantic flaps from
his good right wing, he learned to reach the topmost branch of a big oak.
There he would spend the day, riveting every passing jay or overflying
vulture with a gleaming golden eye. But it was not enough. Every few hours
the freedom he saw in other flying things would grow too much, and Cherokee
would clench his straw colored feet, squat, and from his worn-bare branch,
fling himself upward with all his strength. Face turned hopefully toward the
firmament, he'd gain an inch or two on earth before it pulled him back,
parachuting down onto the grass. Before dark, though, he'd be back on his
branch, ready to try again. But here's the thing: this naive baby, who might
have spent no more than a day on the wing before he was shot, then spent
twelve years trying to regain the sky.
Anukiat
Anukiat got his name from what an Inupiat teenager had called me the day I
left the Arctic Slope. Hoping I had drugs to trade he complimented me on my
travels, grinning something like 'ungliat' or 'anukliat.' It didn't matter:
peregrine means traveler anyway and now our last transmitter-carrying
peregrine was Anukiat. Quasi-Inupiat for traveler. Almost a full day behind
our two girls -- the pair of adolescent female peregrines we called the
Ninas -- Anukiat was the last to leave the Gulf Coast on his autumn
migration to the tropics. George and I were looking for the Ninas near the
Mexican fishing village of La Pesca when I punched Anukiat's #.973 into our
telemetry receiver. As his beeps blared out of its speaker, I dived out from
under the Cessna's wing, binoculars in hand. I didn't need them. To the
north, the estuary's icing of shorebirds was starting to explode. As if
detonated by some silent oncoming artillery, every hundred yards a
shimmering geyser of waders -- willets, yellowlegs, godwits, turnstones --
was throwing itself into the sky. As each rising fountain of birds came
streaming down the beach, peppering our ears with their cries, another,
closer flock would suddenly erupt -- for in the distance, on casual
wings,came Anukiat.
The Ninas
As George and I flew into Mexico behind our two Ninas, I realized that, for
once, following peregrines was going to be easy. Our two falcon girls just
dawdled, that sunny autumn morning, back and forth across the hundreds of
square miles of sorghum fields north of Lake Vincente Guerrero. I asked
George to take us down to see what they were looking at and realized that, a
dozen miles apart, both were patrolling the fields' hackberry borders. Those
tall hedgerows would be full of finches and sparrows, but I'd started on a
theory that the helpless pigeons our falcons had caught on Padre might have
prompted them, in the desperation of their long migration, to look for the
similar doves that would also inhabit those hedges. Then I realized that was
ridiculous. Winging along below, neither falcon felt herself to be embarked
on some primal quest. Each was simply exercising her newfound freedom of
movement through the air, hungrily chasing smaller birds when the chance
arose. The only vision of a distant Caribbean shore was mine. Yet my larger
concept actually did reflect the truth of these babies' situation.
Oblivious as they were, our peregrines' survival depended on their being
able to complete the enormous journey they had unknowingly set out upon.
Yet, unfettered by the human burden of self-consciousness--of the future, of
the slimness of their chances--as the day wore on, flying free and feckless
across the fields of northern Mexico, they moved up toward the big Sierra
Madre Oriental for the night.
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