Alan Tennant was in love with peregrines, so he captured them (using pigeons as bait), attached a tiny transmitter and radio-tracked them with the help of a pilot named George Vose and his single-engine Cessna.
What an adventure. They start from the barrier islands off the east coast of Texas and follow the peregrine they name Amelia as far as they can with a small plane, well into Canada to the northern boundary of the great boreal forest. Amelia kept going into the tundra but they could no longer follow in their plane; the tundra was too boggy in the spring. Perhaps she would nest on the MacKenzie River or would go on to Alaska.
Alan guides some natural history tours, spends time in Denali and has a polar bear encounter in Barrow. He then finds himself in Umiat on the Colville River in northern Alaska where he watches peregrines in their nests on the cliffs along the river, the young birds so ferocious and so driven by hunger that even the parents need to be vigilant and careful around these wild offspring.
Peregrines live by eating other birds, slashing them with razor-sharp feet after snatching them in the air or on the ground. They fly amazingly fast and acrobatically. They are fierce.
Back in Texas, he rides out a hurricane, and then decides to follow three more radio-trasmitted peregrines south into Mexico, Ecuador, Belize and Guatemala. Where will these birds winter? He and George have a few heart-stopping moments in the plane due to mechanical malfunctions; they are scrutinized and detained by various police, military and airport officials as they sneak around the skies with minimal or no legal permission. They eventually follow one of the peregrines out over the open ocean, but they have to turn back, limited by fuel capacity, without determining the bird's destination. They often lose signals and pick them up again days later, or not. Much of the time they fly in huge circles or S-shpaes, either to stay with the slower-flying peregrines or to try to find them anew each day.
One day they put down on island of Ambergris near San Pedro (Saint Pete) off the eastern coast of Belize and get swooped into a Day of the Dead celebration. Alan calls the town the "quintessential Caribbean party town." The next day, he rents a bicycle and where "Ambergris protrudes farthest to sea, the peregrine parted a flurry of frightened gulls, then swerved serenely through the halo empty space their struggling bodies had left behind." He bicycles on and catches a green vine snake just because he can, and then lets it go. Jeez.... (He has written more books about snakes than birds and is a snake expert.)
"It seemed strange to be searching for a barren-ground arctic peregrine above wet tropical forest whose nearly 400 lofty tree species could not have been more different from the bonsai wold of every tundrius's birthplace..."
They finally go as far as they can and know they have done as much as they can. They run out of land and money. Alan is not willing to cross the open ocean to South America even as George is plotting and thinking it is possible. Alan told him that "although he was probably willing to ultimately go down in the plane, I was not."
The author tells us again how DDTs caused egg-shell thinning and how the peregrine population declined severely until DDTs were banned. But there are other pesticides and petrochemical hazards that are in the food chain and are cumulative in avifauna and, in fact, in fauna in general, including humans. Many of the countries south of the Rio Grande do not have the same regulatory infrastructure as the US, and birds know no borders.
So, the book is both a specific tale and a general one; it is the story of a couple of peregrines and the places they live and their migratory routes, and it is also a plea for global awareness of our common and shared environment and how we will all suffer from the consequences of maltreatment of our land and water and air. For Alan, for all of us, the peregrine is a symbol of "wildness that preserves the world."
George and Alan go their separate ways. "As I tossed my duffel into the truck I heard our old motor cough, miss and come to life. Then '469 was in the air, heading west into the still-bright evening sky. Soon, I knew, Vose would trim its angle of ascent and fold his big wrinkled hands over his lap and, feeling lost that I was not on aboard, for a long time I watched the little plane rise. Then, so far off I could barely make him out, below the first small stars the old skyhawk dropped a notch and cut two tight circles, wagging his wings good-bye." Isn't this a lovely sentence?
A story of one man's passion; a tale of peregrines, masters of their universe of sky.
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