Nature Conservancy Magazine: Summer 2007

Peregrine falcon

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Focusing the Past

A falcon comes into view and changes everything you thought you knew

Look through the eyepiece of a spotting scope and try to bring the distant, unrecognizable object into focus. The view starts out blurry and undefined; it wavers and contorts as you twist the knob. Then, suddenly, there it is, as close and clear as the cardinal on your deck railing.

Even with the naked eye, the cliffs below Lake Yellowstone are breathtaking. They are massive, multicolored and honey combed. Just the sort of cavities that peregrine falcons prefer for nesting. But the main cliff is a half mile long and, from the only clear vantage point, nearly as far away. It is hard to see even the huge ravens that cruise the cliff face, and impossible to identify them until the 30-power scope pulls them up close.

That cliff is a historic nesting site for peregrine falcons, but by the summer of 1984, the birds had been absent for 15 years. I was part of a group that had been releasing captive-bred falcons in the Yellowstone ecosystem for five years. There had been occasional sightings but no sign that they were back at their nesting sites. Several times I had hiked out to where I could see the cliff and spent the day watching and waiting to see that tiny, hurling anchor shape or hear the kak-kak, kakking that, until the 1960s, had echoed in the canyon every spring.

On this trip, along with my scope, I carried a bar napkin. On it was a sketch made by an old-timer who could re-member the peregrines. The cliff was drawn the length of the napkin, and the layers of colored rock were shaded to help orient me. In an unlikely spot, too close to the water, was a dot with a circle around it. That dot, the man said, represented the last place that peregrines had nested.

The task of finding a nesting pair of peregrines had become a sort of unicorn hunt. Most people believed that the reintroduction of falcons would work, but proof in country as large as Yellowstone was hard to come by. Such landscapes can oppress a searcher; I had been reduced to relying on barroom sketches as if they were treasure maps. The cliff in question had hundreds, if not thousands, of nooks and crannies that could support a peregrine nest. I had twisted most of them into focus on other occasions. Why was I hopeful that the historic nest site would be any more likely than the others?

As I set up the tripod and scanned the cliff to find the strata marked on the sketch, it occurred to me that everything I knew about peregrines told me that if the birds were present, they would be high on the cliff. The circled dot on the sketch was so low that it suddenly seemed hopeless. But, of course, I am not a peregrine, and so I scanned the area first with binoculars to find what could be a cavity. It was too far to tell, so I aimed the spotting scope to the exact place—below the dark crack, straight up from where a pine tree was tipped into the current. I closed my right eye and began the magic twisting of the eyepiece.

And then, there she was. Like an elk appearing out of the mountain mist, a peregrine came bright and colorful into focus. She stood on the lip of a ledge carpeted with green grass. Her light, buff breast was barred black, and her feet were incongruously yellow. From beneath her jet-black helmet, her bottomless eyes stared at me—as if she had been waiting for me to bring her, and the past 15 years, into focus.

—Dan O’Brien

Dan O’Brien is a writer, falconer and rancher in South Dakota. He has written several books, including Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch.