The Shark and the Albatross Page 6

  Rick murmurs observations into his recorder. He’s smiling. It’s time for me to go: I thank him and as he turns back to his ’scope Laurie gives me a hug. I understand now why Rick spends every day here. It’s a wrench for me to leave while Dull-bar’s story is still unfinished, to no longer have any sightings to share with others who admire and appreciate Yellowstone’s wolves. Many of our best achievements come from dedicated groups like this: we are like wolves in that respect as well.

  On the drive I savour the wildness of the Lamar Valley for the last time, passing the landmarks of the weeks I have spent here: the silhouetted trees where the angel dust danced in its own rainbow, the prairie where the pack hunted in the dark and Rick said ‘well done’, the ordinary-looking bend in the river where the extraordinary bull elk saw off sixteen wolves and where the alpha female showed me why she is the leader of her pack.

  As I pass under the Roosevelt arch at the park entrance I see Yellowstone’s founding statement reflected in the mirror: For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People. National Parks have moved on now, and quite rightly: they are as much or more for the benefit of the elk and the wolves and all the wild things living there.

  The silver river gives way to fast-food joints and car dealerships, to the geometric shapes and garish colours of the ‘real world’. One of the park’s visitors told me that hearing a wolf howl would not have mattered to her ten years ago, but now it does and this is why: the wolves’ world is more real than where most of us live.

  I spend my last night in Montana in an old hotel in Livingstone, where two rocking chairs rest side by side in the quiet corridor, like an elderly couple, comfortable with each other’s silence. An antique elevator, operated by a lever like a ship’s telegraph, is a welcome respite from modern America. It takes my mind off the sense of loss.

  That evening, when I break the seal on the camera case, I find the astonishing cold of the wolves’ valley stored there, deep inside the metal and glass, like a memory.

  AN UPDATE ON YELLOWSTONE’S WOLVES

  When I filmed the Druid pack in the winter of 2007/8 there were 170 wolves living in Yellowstone. A year later there were only 120. The deaths were caused by infighting over territory and access to the herds of elk, which had continued to shrink and adapt to their predators. Other wolves died of distemper, complicated by mange. Of the Druids’ pups born the next spring, just the alpha pair’s survived. Only one other pack had any surviving pups and four packs dissolved completely. In August 2008, 302 split off from the Druids with some of the young males we had filmed. They formed a new pack with three females from elsewhere. He became the alpha male and had six healthy pups of his own. A year or so later, the nous that had helped him slink through other wolves’ territories unscathed finally let him down and he was killed in a fight. That autumn, the Druid’s alpha female was also killed by other wolves. Her mate, 480, survived, but all their pups died and for him it was the end of the line. He could not breed with any of the remaining females because they were all his relations and when another male moved in, 480 left the Druids and was not seen alive again. His sons and some of his daughters left too, reducing the pack to five. In 2010, the last radio-collared Druid wolf was shot by a rancher outside the park.

  We were lucky to have filmed them when we did. Other wolves have now occupied the Lamar Valley but with the elk population at a more natural level their numbers will never match the Druids’ in the glory days of 2001, when their pack was thirty-seven strong: one of the largest wolf packs ever seen.

  In May 2011, Yellowstone’s wolves were officially downgraded from their protected status. Perversely it was a sign that the reintroduction had worked, but the change proved deadly for many of them because they could now be killed legally outside the park. Montana and Idaho quickly issued hunting permits and annual quotas. In 2012, they were joined by Wyoming, which allowed wolves to be killed without a permit in more than 80 per cent of that state and hunted as trophies under licence in the remainder. For the first time since they had returned, the National Park’s wolves were being hunted on every side. In 2013, a record 12 per cent of them were killed.

  After a legal challenge a year later, a federal judge ruled that Wyoming’s policy was not appropriate and returned the responsibility for managing the state’s wolves to the government, restoring some degree of protection. A similar decision was reached earlier in the year regarding wolves in the Great Lakes states, which restored their ‘endangered’ status there. No doubt these rulings will be challenged in turn. Meanwhile, wolf hunting and trapping continues in Montana, Idaho and elsewhere.

  Within Yellowstone’s boundaries there are now around 100 adult wolves. In 2014 they had about thirty pups. Perhaps these young wolves will grow up to be more wary than their parents, of the traps and guns waiting for them outside.

  Rick is still doing a sterling job. At the time of writing he has been there every day of the week for nearly fifteen years. He reckons he has talked to more than 700,000 visitors about Yellowstone’s wolves, which he watches with as much interest as ever. As he puts it:

  ‘How could I stop now? It’s an ongoing story, like living through the Civil War or the Russian Revolution.’

  – THREE –

  PEREGRINES AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS

  Other reintroductions have been less controversial than the wolves’. New York City is not an obvious place to film wildlife, yet it’s home to one of the world’s most exciting birds: the peregrine falcon. This bird of prey has come back from the brink. In the twentieth century peregrines were all but wiped out in America. The story of their recovery shows that, given a helping hand, some wild animals can adapt well to the modern world.

  A policeman spills his coffee, sets his car’s wheels spinning and zooms away, with blue and red lights flashing.

  ‘We got a deer dying on the approach way, we got a cat on the upper roadway, we got falcons on the tower: it’s like being back in the country,’ says the manager. ‘Welcome to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.’

  The bridge was built during the 1960s: a time of confident expansion in the United States when, alongside ambitious engineering projects like building the Apollo moon rockets, the country’s chemical industry was in full flow, producing a miracle pesticide called DDT. Seeds were soaked in it before being sown and tractors sprayed it onto orchards and fields. Crop yields soared as a result.

  When the bridge was built across the Hudson River, at the Verrazano Narrows, it had the world’s longest span, suspended from cables almost a metre thick, running from towers more than 200 metres (about 700ft) tall. The peregrines are nesting on top of one of these towers so filming them will be complicated. Without Chris Nadareski it would be impossible. Chris works for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection and every year he visits all the accessible peregrine eyries in New York City, to fit numbered and coloured bands (known as rings in Europe) to the legs of their chicks.

  We each put on a harness and a hard hat and are driven in a slow convoy across the bridge to the base of one of the towers. It soars above us like a huge staple. The traffic lane is closed while we unload our gear and take turns to duck through a door small enough to challenge some of today’s larger engineers. Inside there are hot, cramped metal cells, studded with bolts on every surface. The sound is extraordinary: a bass rumble of traffic on the bridge’s twin six-lane highways, stacked one above the other. Sometimes there are loud and inexplicable booms, as if we were deep in the guts of an iron beast. There are very few lights. The elevator is just large enough for three of us. It feels like squeezing into a suitcase. The controls have notes beside them, handwritten in correcting fluid: TOP next to one button and Don’t press, don’t press! by the one above it. Clanking upwards, we all look through a hole in the ceiling, watching the cable winding into and out of the darkness. To reach the uppermost level we climb through circular holes cut in the steel decking, hauling our gear after us with ropes.

  When Chris opens the hatch onto the
roof there is a welcome flood of fresh air and immediately we can hear the peregrines’ alarm calls. He climbs out and I set up to film. We must all leave once the last chick is banded, so there is not much time. The top of the tower is a smooth metal surface, enclosed by a low rail. The bridge below has shrunk to the width of a pencil and its trucks are the size of rice grains. A container ship passes easily beneath the span. I don’t mind the height but I am worried about the consequences of dropping anything over the side, so I tuck everything loose into my bag before concentrating on the job in hand, which is to film the peregrines as they hurtle past.

  They circle, superbly indifferent to the gulf of air below them, taking turns to dive at Chris’s head. He approaches their nest, which is in a wooden box, roofed with plywood and floored with pea gravel. Chris put the box here to encourage the birds to move home because their old eyrie, under the bridge, was in the way of maintenance work. They adopted the new one the next spring. I can see him deftly checking the four young falcons and fitting their bands. The bridge maintenance crew crouch, holding brooms over their shoulders to protect the backs of their heads. Chris takes the chance to show them what he is doing. Part of his skill is in explaining why it matters to balance the birds’ needs with theirs. After all, 190,000 vehicles cross this bridge every day and it was no small ask to interrupt the traffic so we could come up here. By placing the peregrines’ nest box where the birds will have the least effect on the workings of the bridge, Chris is giving something back on their behalf.

  On the way down, the guy in the lift says he grew up on Staten Island, where he could see the bridge being built from his house. On its opening day his parents drove him here, intending to cross, but the sign above the toll-booths brought them to a screeching halt. Fifty cents! They drove straight home. That was in 1964.

  In the preceding four years, not one pair of peregrines had bred anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the USA.

  During the 1960s Professor Tom Cade, of Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab, realised that something was wrong. As well as being a scientist, Cade was a falconer and he loved peregrines. His research, and others’, proved there was a connection between the high levels of DDT accumulating in birds of prey and their inability to raise chicks. Top predators such as peregrines were swallowing the chemical whenever they ate birds that had fed on treated seeds or insects. Cade even found DDT in peregrines in Alaska, far from sprayed fields, and concluded that they had encountered the poison while on migration. It so weakened the falcons’ eggshells that the incubating adults crushed them, killing their unborn chicks. Peregrines faced extinction in America and wherever else DDT was used.

  Cade came up with an ambitious plan. He founded the Peregrine Fund to breed the birds in captivity, on an unprecedented scale, and to release them into the wild. If it worked they would at least have a better world in which to hunt because, by 1972, Cade’s research had helped win the fight to have DDT banned. By then it had been found in animals all over the globe, even Adélie penguins in the Antarctic. The Peregrine Fund’s first captive-bred birds hatched the following year, but the most difficult part of the plan to bring back the peregrine still lay ahead.

  I have been asked to film New York’s peregrines for a programme about urban wildlife, being made by a producer called Fredi. He dreams of filming a city peregrine hunting to feed its family, among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. It would be the ultimate proof that the falcons have adapted fully to life in the city. Filming a peregrine hunting is one of the hardest things a cameraman can do. They dive at more than 300kph (up to 200mph), often from such a height that they are invisible to the naked eye. Just following a fast-stooping bird through a long lens is hard enough, never mind the difficulties of keeping it in focus, and to make matters worse they often travel so far that their stoops end out of sight. That problem at least would be eased by filming from higher up. In the wild that’s only possible if you can find a convenient hill but in New York it’s easy. When Paul, the programme’s researcher, reads out Chris’s list of peregrine nest sites, it sounds as though he is describing the city itself: there are several hospitals, skyscrapers overlooking Park Avenue, America’s tallest church, a detention complex and many bridges. They all share the thing most useful to us and the peregrines: elevation.

  We are captivated by New York’s peregrines as soon as we step onto our first rooftop, which belongs to a building directly opposite the tall church. The male peregrine (called a tiercel) from the pair nesting on the church tower rides the wind up the vertical walls and passes us slowly, just beyond arm’s reach. The skin around his beak and eyes, and on his legs, is the same bright yellow as the taxis in the streets below. He seems completely at ease in the upper air among the towers, where light bounces from building to mirrored building, dappling some like skin and banishing shadows from dark corners. He hardly glances at the city’s people and its cars crawling far below, as if they were sea creatures on the bottom of the ocean.

  Matt, a peregrine expert, stands beside me, to help spot the falcons and their potential prey. Paul and Fredi station themselves with radios on different corners of the roof. Feathers swirl in bright eddies against its plain surface: the glinting wing feathers of a jay, flashing indigo and blue. We stand near the edge with a wall of metal shutters at our backs. To our amazement, the female peregrine lands on it, less than twenty metres away. In the countryside, birds would be far more wary than this. She is larger than her mate and more heavily built. Her talons scratch a little on the metal as she rouses, opening her feathers for a shake, then preening them in the sun. This pair have chosen well: from their nest behind a gargoyle they have clear views across Harlem and the Hudson River. Their neighbours are carved devils and animals: a winged demon on a throne rests his chin on his hand, contemplating several big cats and a wicked pelican. All of them leer at us across the void. The tiercel perches on a stone lion, gripping its ear with his long bird-catching toes. His front is pale and streaked while his back is a subtle two-tone grey, like the carbon-fibre housing of the camera. With his white mask and black helmet he looks like an assassin: one whose home is a church. He stands as perfectly still as the gargoyles and stares intently across the river.

  This pair must be good hunters. We saw their five chicks yesterday, when Chris took us up the church tower to fit their bands. He had moved the young birds from the nest into a cluttered room, where elevator motors whirred. The female was so defensive of her family that when Chris went to lift the first chick, she flew at his face with her talons outstretched. Astonishingly he caught her calmly by her legs in the split second before she struck, then put her in a box where she would not harm herself while he worked. He joked that over the years he has ‘had the honour of multiple body parts being autographed’ by falcons’ talons. As soon as her chicks were back in the nest, Chris released the female and she settled at once.

  From our filming position on the roof we can see messages drifting up from the streets. They are printed on helium balloons and they are always the same: Happy Birthday! Usually the birthday balloons come in ones or twos but this morning forty pass together, hinting at a day’s lost profits or a party spoiled. They separate and drift among the buildings, rising over some and between others, revealing the air currents the falcons ride so effortlessly as they search for prey below them in the deep. It’s breezy down there too, where a bride struggles to control her billowing dress. Laughter rises above the sounds of traffic. So does birdsong from the park. The peregrines watch these other birds like hawks (of course) but they’ll be hard to catch as long as they stay close to the trees. The falcons watch the river too, where reflected light makes patterns on the surface like a leopard’s fur. While we wait, the shadow of a tall building creeps across the water: a gnomon in the largest of sundials.

  The tiercel takes off and accelerates astonishingly quickly, pumping his wings. He has spotted the flicker of wings, catching the sunlight a kilometre away. Through the long lens I can see that it’s a gr
ackle, flying above the river’s far bank, which is so distant that with my naked eyes I can’t even make out people. The grackle sees him coming and at the last moment dives into the trees. The tiercel returns to perch on a different gargoyle: a stone bird of prey, whose hooked beak and talons are just like his own, but it has flowers for its eyes. Beside him rows of stone saints gaze vacantly across Manhattan.

  On the stroke of five the church bells chime in chorus while, on our rooftop, more secular air-conditioning fans come to life. As we leave the building the lady behind the reception desk asks, ‘How’s my birds?’ and we pass the pipe band of the New York Fire Service, arriving to practise in their kilts.

  First saints and now sinners: above the door of the building we are facing in Brooklyn, it says Department of Correction: it’s not quite Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here but it’s near enough. There are high walls, surveillance cameras and coils of razor wire. Outside, a policeman patrols on foot. He’s armed, of course, and when Fredi runs up behind him, to explain why we are pointing a long lens at his jail, the rest of us wince at the potential for misunderstanding. When he comes back, un-arrested, Fredi says, ‘People have been filing complaints about voodoo rites – it was the peregrines, dropping dead pigeons at their feet. I asked him about filming them and he just said, “God bless …”’

  The policeman is not the only one who’s interested in what we are doing. A woman stops to ask, ‘What are you filming?’

  ‘Falcons, on the jail.’

  ‘Felons?’

  ‘No, falcons. Birds.’

  ‘Boids? Boids? I thought you were paparazzi and it must be some high-profile criminal that was in there. We get them around here too, you know.’