Spring 2005

How the Peregrines Learned to
Hack the Big City

Twenty years after the start of an ambitious reintroduction project, the peregrine falcon is on its way to recovery. But success in Chicago didn’t come without some ruffled feathers.

By Katherine Millett

Evanston nest.

Photo by Eric Walters.

Clinging to the edge of its high nest box, a young peregrine falcon beats its wings, repeatedly shifting grip with its big, pale yellow talons. It has been flapping like this for days, building up strength for its first flight.

Six stories below, Jon McElyea watches through binoculars. He works as a mechanic at the Midwest Generation power plant in Waukegan, Illinois, a gritty Taj Mahal where smokestacks stand at the four corners of a red-brick building. All week, between repair jobs, he has been checking the nest box anxiously.

The little fledgling runs around the box, squawking. It no longer resembles a snowball, although bits of white fluff poke through its plumage like lint on a suit. A Roman helmet of dark feathers crowns its head, complete with cheek guards. Its brown eyes look surprised and innocent; it hasn’t killed anything yet.

If this juvenile can fly, it will flap over a pair of ash silos, glide past a smokestack, and possibly soar all the way to Lake Michigan a quarter-mile to the east. If it can’t fly, it will fall 90 feet onto an asphalt lot. With a surge of energy and flailing, the bird totters to the edge of its box, leans, and drops.

Flying over Hyde Park.

Photo by Mary Hennen.

The situation in 1985 was dire. The charismatic peregrine falcon, the fastest animal on earth, had nearly vanished from the United States. Not a single one had been seen east of the Mississippi River since 1965, and only 39 breeding pairs remained in the cliffs and canyons of the West. With a sense of urgency, Carl Becker of the Illinois Department of Conservation (now the Department of Natural Resources), Paul Heltne and Mark Spreyer of the Chicago Academy of Sciences (now Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum), and Maria Finitzo, an independent filmmaker, met over breakfast at a Lincoln Park pancake house to consider releasing captive-bred birds in Chicago. The birds had a chance, they maintained, among the skyscrapers and bridges of the urban landscape.

	Where to Watch Peregrine falcons have 13 nesting territories in Chicago Wilderness (see map). They prefer to nest on high ledges, which often puts them out of sight; but with a territory of up to five miles, they also can be spotted flying. One study revealed that 40 percent of Midwestern peregrines nest on buildings, 32 percent choose cliffs, 17 percent choose smokestacks, and 10 percent choose bridges. If they return this year, G/G and Zoom may be patrolling the Uptown Theatre and Uptown National Bank, or hunting at Montrose Point. Downtown, watch the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where another couple nested last year. And pedestrians at The University of Chicago should keep their eyes on Mitchell Tower. For a virtual tour of nest sites, photos, journal accounts, and an interactive nesting map, visit The Field Museum. The 2005 “expedition” begins in April. These nesting sites were active in Spring 2004, according to The Field Museum’s Web site.

Good views from the Hyde Park nest box.

Photo by Mary Hennen.

Other contributors soon got involved, and the group formed what now is known as the Chicago Peregrine Project. Spreyer became the project’s first director.

The chief culprit was DDT, a pesticide developed during World War II and used widely in the United States until it was banned in 1972. The long-lasting chemical has become ubiquitous on the planet, found even in polar bears living inside the Arctic Circle. Because it accumulates in fat tissue and concentrates as it moves up the food chain, DDT takes the greatest toll on predators like peregrines, causing them to lay fragile eggs that break during incubation. But by 1985, levels in the United States had fallen low enough for peregrines to reproduce.

The group consulted two scientists at the University of Minnesota, Professors Harrison Tordoff and Patrick Redig, who were raising and releasing peregrines in the Midwest to complement similar efforts by the Peregrine Fund in eastern and western states. To increase the birds’ chances for survival, the scientists were breeding and cross-breeding members of several subspecies. They then released the birds by “hacking” them from boxes on buildings, cliffs, or high tree branches. During hacking, nestlings old enough to feed from meat placed in the box spend up to ten days fixing an image of their surroundings in their minds before taking off into the wild.

Spreyer’s first challenge was to find a suitable hack site in Chicago. He approached numerous Loop landlords who squirmed at the prospect of publicity. Not everyone warmed to the idea of predatory birds in the neighborhood. When the plan was announced in the press, letters accused Mayor Harold Washington of bringing “Hitlerite” falcons to prey on “innocent, beautiful birds” and make pigeon lovers miserable. Any mayor who would do such a thing, wrote one critic, was “the meanest, meanest man in Chicago.”

You wanna piece a me? Dory protects her young.

Photo by John Chitty.

Of course, pigeons (and those who loved them) had every reason to worry. Bullet-headed, broad through the shoulders and tapering to the tail, the peregrine falcon dives on pointed wings at speeds estimated as high as 200 miles per hour. A damper in each nostril restricts the flow of air and allows it to breathe during a nosedive. The bird “flares” at the last moment, sticking out its talons to strike a bird in flight. With astonishing agility, a peregrine can hit a large bird once, then loop around to strike it again before it hits the ground. An adult, which needs the equivalent of a pigeon a day, can strip the head and wings off a small bird and devour it in midair.
Another challenge was to secure approval from the Chicago City Council for the release. This meant entering the “Council Wars” at that time, in which 21 aldermen supported the mayor and 28 voted with South Side alderman Edward Vrdolyak. “There was perpetual conflict,” says Spreyer. “My job turned out to be 20 percent about birds and 80 percent about politics.”

Photo by Jerry Goldner.

Perseverance paid off when Spreyer found cooperation and a building bedecked with ledges at the University of Illinois Circle Campus. A helicopter delivered a large “hack” box to the roof of University Hall in 1986, and five nestlings spent ten days inside feeding on meat placed there by team members. Every bird learned to fly and fend for itself. In 1987, a male named Jingles took up with a falcon from Minneapolis named Harriet. They became the first nesting pair in Chicago when they settled on a ledge near the Sears Tower, 33 stories above the ground, at 125 South Wacker.

The next year’s release took place 30 miles north of the Loop, along the lakefront at Fort Sheridan. Eleven peregrines hacked from the top of a water tower found their separate ways to Fermilab in Batavia, a cliff on the Mississippi, a building in Milwaukee, and other venues in Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

In all, 46 peregrines were released during a five-year period from University of Illinois at Chicago, Fort Sheridan, Illinois Beach State Park, and the College of DuPage. Most did well, although not all of the birds survived. (One peregrine’s leg band, for instance, was found in a great horned owl pellet near the release site.)

In addition to birds that are banded, named, and monitored, about 20 percent are likely to live in the area undetected, according to Tordoff and Redig. Some of these peregrines are “floaters” — single birds that migrated during their first season, returned to the area, and now linger around established sites hoping for a chance to mate.

If this competitive situation sounds ripe for scandal, it is. The ledge on South Wacker is a very hot property. (It features an eastern exposure for morning light, a barrier against prevailing winds, and a sheltering overhang.) According to John Chitty, a forester who monitors the site from his office window, Harriet and Jingles were the original actors in a long-running soap opera. “The local peregrines like that site,” he says. “They seem to be killing each other over it, in fact.”

Violence among them may be exacerbated by the peregrines’ mixed breeding, because some subspecies migrate and others do not. A bird that leaves its mate for the winter is likely to find a rival in the nest the following spring. Harriet and Jingles reproduced faithfully for four years, laying a dozen eggs from which three chicks fledged.

Their domestic bliss came to an end around 1991, when a stranger ousted Jingles from the nest and took his place at Harriet’s side. The following year, another male, Hubert, took over, and produced four eggs and three fledglings with Harriet. Their seven-year record of 28 eggs makes them the most prolific pair in the Chicago project’s history.

Then along came Monica. Because no one knew quite where she came from, she was a true “peregrine,” in the 17th-century sense of the word. (In the early 1600s, an English scholar wrote, “the name of Pergrin’s is given, for that they com from remote and unknowne places.”)

Monica appeared in the spring of 1998, while President Clinton and his former intern were making news. Monitors believe that Monica disrupted the partnership, stealing Hubert from Harriet. Badly injured during the likely confrontation, Harriet was found on a downtown roof and was taken to the Raptor Center in Minneapolis for rehabilitation. Although she recovered and lived to the advanced age of 15, she never returned to South Wacker.

Left: Two juvenile peregrines in Uptown flap their wings for days to prepare for their first flight. Right: A young peregrine born in Waukegan at Midwest Generation in 2001, minutes after making it to the ground in one piece. It landed on one of the employee cars in the parking lot.

Photos by Jerry Goldner and Mary Connor.

But Monica had a problem of her own: Dory from Milwaukee. After a year with Hubert, Monica was viciously attacked and killed. “Dory was the one that finally hit me,” says Chitty. “She is a very aggressive bird. When I went out on the ledge to check the eggs, Harriet and Jingles used to fly around and yell, but they never attacked. Dory jumped right at me, then flew around and hit me in the back of the head. She had no fear.”

Despite Dory’s ferocity, the most desirable eyrie in Chicago proved difficult to defend. Dory and Hubert produced four eggs in 2004. But shortly after they hatched, Hubert was found dead on the Sears Tower. Dory had lost an eye. Both birds showed clear signs of attack by other peregrines, says Chitty. “That site is well known by resident and migrating peregrines. I guarantee that if you go up there now, there’s someone there. You’ll get attacked.”

Passersby stop to watch peregrines, including this adult and preening juvenile.

Photos by Jerry Goldner.

More than most local wildlife, peregrines seem to inspire personality cults. Many are known by name, watched, and discussed by people who live or work near eyries. Photographers and birders gather with giant zoom lenses and binoculars hoping to catch a first flight in May or a mature bird diving for prey. Commuters look for them on the way to and from work. One Evanston woman distributed flyers to office mates, alerting them to the new chicks at the library across the street. A Lakeview woman reports watching them hunt while she sips a before-dinner drink on her rooftop deck.

On that morning in Waukegan, Jon McElyea winced as he watched the young bird fall from the roof. “He was way out of control, flapping and doing everything not to crash. He looked like a kid wearing cement shoes. He was weaving around, with no balance.”

The bird landed with a thud on the fiberglass roof of a silo.

“I went running up there to see if it was okay, and when I got to the roof, I found him on a set of metal steps. He was hopping up the stairs. He seemed kind of confused, but the mother was there. She was taking care of things, so I went back to work.”

The chick, later named Rocky, learned to fly and hunt along with his sister and two brothers. For about eight weeks, their parents taught them to hunt by handing them food in midair and dropping dead birds in front of them during flight. As birds born into the wild, they had the advantage of parental instruction that hacked birds lack.

McElyea has witnessed amorous behavior as well. “I’ve seen a pair of them flying in intertwining flight paths, holding each other by the feet. My buddy said they were wrestling, but I said, ‘No, that’s foreplay.’ They’ll dodge each other, then grab talons and tumble through the air. Next thing you know, they’re in the box.”

Last spring, thousands of people watched on a Web site when Rocky and his siblings — Angel, AJ, and Joe — received their official names and the leg bands used to identify peregrines born into the Chicago Project. Mary Hennen, an employee of the Field Museum who has directed the effort for the last 15 years, and Matt Gies, an employee of the Shedd Aquarium, donned bicycle helmets and safety glasses for protection against dive-bombing attacks from the parents.

The outlook for peregrines in Chicago, as in other parts of the United States, is stirringly positive. Placed on the federal endangered species list in 1970, the bird was removed from it in 1999 due to the success of recovery efforts. Illinois changed the peregrine’s status in 2004 from endangered to threatened. Even the human populace has come around. When Chicago held an election to name an official city bird in 1999, the peregrine swamped five other candidates. Its platform? “The environment should be poison-free for me.” Having survived the devastation of DDT and adapted to the cliffs and canyons of Chicago, the peregrine continues its impressive saga. Each spring, wild-born fledglings fly from 13 local territories. The peregrine soars and dives today with the same power and majesty that inspired wildlife artist G.H. Thayer to call it, in 1904, “the very embodiment of noble rapacity and lonely freedom.”

Related Articles

Peregrine Falcon: On the (High) Rise (Meet Your Neighbors, Summer 2000)

Migration Hawk Watch: Thirty-One Peregrines in One Hour (News of the Wild, Summer 2002)

Black and White? (Reading Pictures, Spring 1998)

Photo Essay: Appreciating Predators (CW, Summer 2000)

Midwest Peregrine Falcon Restoration (University of Minnesota)

Hyde Park Peregrines at First Unitarian Church

Peregrine Falcon, Birds of North America Online (Cornell Lab of Ornithology). Detailed account of behavior and other attributes, especially hunting techniques.