Contents
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DEDICATION
TITLE PAGE
PART ONE: PADRE ISLAND
1. PARTNERS
2. PADRE
3. FROM FORAYNE PARTES
4. HIGH ROMANCE
5. RENEGADES
6. SPORT OF KINGS
7. CHEMICAL WARFARE
8. ON THE SEA WIND
9. AMELIA
10. THE PRAIRIE
11. LA JUNTA
PART TWO: ON THE WING
12. HORSESHOES
13. REUNION
14. AIRBORNE
15. CANADA
16. FAREWELL
17. MOUNTIES
18. PLANE CRASH
19. NORTH SLOPE
20. ARKTIKOS
21. CHEROKEE
22. ALONE
23. WAITING FOR NANOOK
PART THREE: THE BAY OF MEXICO
24. UNIFORMES Y DOCUMENTARIOS
25. HURRICANE
26. ANUKIAT
27. LA PESCA
28. POLICIA MILITAR
29. CORRIDOR OF HAWKS
30. PETRÓLEOS MEXICANOS
31. LORDS OF LADYVILLE
32. AMBERGRIS
33. APRIL THE TAPIR
34. XUNANTUNICH
35. BEYOND THE SEA
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
For George
TRAILING STEADY ELECTRONIC beeps from the tiny transmitter glued to the base of her tail feather, the peregrine quartered tentatively up Padre Island’s barrier beach. A tundra falcon, a barren-ground hunter born in the Arctic, she had for the past two weeks cruised with increasing randomness up and down Texas’s offshore islands, seemingly reluctant to leave the windswept flats for the alien greenery of the mainland. But today the springtime stream of tropical air welling in from the Gulf of Mexico had gripped her in its northerly flow, and after a final sideways cast along the surf she swept inland, away from the sea.
“She’s migrating,” called Janis Chase, the military attaché in charge of our radio-tracking flight. “I think she’s on her way!”
From 2,000 feet up, in the rear seat of our single-engine Cessna Skyhawk I watched the shoreline dunes give way to bluestem pasture, and gradually the magnitude of what we’d chanced upon sank in. With no companion, guided only by the ancestral memory she somehow carried within, our little hawk was staking her life. Nothing like the abstract idea of migration that I’d imagined, it was humbling even to be a spectator to the mortal intensity of what the tiny, determined speck below was doing. On that sunny coastal morning she was committing every ounce of will and spark of force that flowed inside her to a race toward home. I tried to imagine what could be going on behind her fierce eyes. Some inner vision, I guessed: a tucked-in cliffside ledge, set above the tundra, with long-unseen domestic details of surrounding rock and bluff-face. Maybe sounds, too: the whistle of arctic wind, and in the still air, familiar birdsong, the croak of ravens, or the scream of rough-legged hawks nesting nearby. No one would ever know what she thought, but it was clear that as we watched, something had swirled to life within this falcon, becoming the driving force of her entire being.
At the time, during the mid-eighties, it was thought that she would travel northwest from Texas, seeking the high-altitude passes of the Rockies, then work her way up the spine of the Continental Divide. But only she knew the route she would really take, or where it might eventually lead. And only she would ever know if that knotted force of will—the power that was now sweeping her along at mile-a-minute speeds—would be enough to carry her there. Enough to lift her up, buoy her over the third of the planet that lay to the north, and then deliver her, perhaps weeks from now, onto the coal-shale crags of the Arctic. There, more than 3,000 miles from this humid Texas plain, on some late spring day the ledge where she herself was born might once again appear beneath her wings.
“That’s enough,” Chase ordered our pilot, George Vose. “I’ve got my departure vector; it’s all we need.”
Chase bent to her U.S. Army Chemical Warfare clipboard, whose logsheet had a heading for “Migration Route.” On it she recorded the date, the weather, and the north-by-northwest compass heading that this falcon, the last of seventeen transmitter-bearing peregrines she had been assigned to monitor, had chosen as it left the Gulf’s barrier islands. While Janis wrote, for a few more minutes Vose flew on. I could see that—even though we knew her mostly from her relayed transmitter signal—it was hard for him to leave the falcon flickering along below, now embarked on a quest toward her unknown, almost inconceivably distant home.
Then Janis looked up and in irritation motioned for George to go ahead and turn. Reluctantly, he banked us slowly around, descending across the bay to Cameron County Airfield and what had suddenly become a far smaller world.
Smaller because, even with my daily chance to capture and band peregrines as part of a peregrine research team, seeing the metamorphosis that migration had brought about in one of the falcons whose kind I’d watched, and even captured on the tidal flats, was astonishing. Afterward, Padre’s peregrines were no longer simply beautiful raptors to be lured in for banding. They were part of something larger. Something ancient and powerful. Global as the tides, though at the moment all I could think of for comparison was gazing, as a kid in the port of Houston, at ocean-going tankers from Liberia, freighters from Singapore and Seoul, Buenos Aires and Dakar—places I knew about but never hoped to see.
What was frustrating was that it was clear we had not really needed to turn back. With our powerful receiver I was sure we could have gone farther: just kept on, maybe for days, aloft with one of these radio-tagged falcons.
But neither Janis nor her tightly managed military program would ever make that choice. Chase had been assigned only to determine what percentage of the arctic peregrines, Falco peregrinus tundrius, that migrated up from the Tropics every spring then traveled northeast from the Gulf Coast. Others went west, maybe to Alaska. As only a falcon-trapper’s helper, with no role at all in Chase’s study, I was lucky to have maneuvered my way onto even a single radio-tracking flight, and though I desperately wanted to go up again, Janis’s program already had its data. She was scheduled to move on to another assignment, and today was her last mission.
Maybe, I offered, I could keep flying with Vose—a long, silver-topped column of a man people took for Janis’s dad—filing more logbook statistics. But Janis made it clear that after she left Padre the Army wasn’t leaving its sophisticated radio-tracking gear with anyone. Especially, I gathered, either George or me.
Though the military had rented Vose’s little plane, to the project’s buttoned-down young administrators George hardly could have offered a less compatible job profile. As a World War II combat flight instructor he was a generation older than even the parents of his Army supervisors, and he’d logged more wartime military years and on-the-edge light-plane aviation hours than all his bosses put together. But beyond his occasional mention of his barnstorming years, none of them knew anything about Vose’s past since they’d hired him principally because he was the only telemetry-experienced pilot willing to accept the low-paying charter Janis had to offer.
George’s penchant for talking freely about his work also meant he was seen almost as a security risk, and I’d heard among the close-cropped young officers who ran the Army’s program that it was necessary to keep an eye on him, though I couldn’t imagine what kind of security breach his tracing the migration route of endangered birds of prey might entail.
I didn’t rate even that much attention. A lifelong naturalist, birder, and writer of herpetology texts, I was no more than the friend of one of the program’s directors, Kenton Riddle of the University of Texas’s Bastrop Science Center. I had managed to hitch a ride on the radio-tracking plane only because storms had flooded the mudflats where we trapped the study’s peregrines. But after that first flight I couldn’t get the falcons’ journeys out of my mind, and when Chase left Texas two days later I saw her onto the flight back to Patuxent, Maryland, then drove over to Laguna Vista Airfield. Vose was stitching up the sagging cloth of his Cessna’s headliner.
“Customs men,” he grumbled. “United States Customs. Slipped out while I was doing their paperwork and cut up my plane. Looking for drugs.”
He poked his needle into one side of a long slit.
“Wouldn’t put it past ’em not to make sure they found some, too.”
I examined the Army’s yard-long, Christmas-tree–shaped antennas, which George had cobbled onto the Skyhawk’s wing struts using hollowed-out chunks of 2 × 4 pine and a snarl of radiator-hose clamps. A little scary, but with no pilot’s license—never having even flown a plane—I wasn’t in a position to be choosy.
“Ever think about keeping on?” I asked him. “Just stay up there with one of these falcons?”
Vose said he’d thought about it. He had even followed some, over longer distances with earlier researchers, and with Janis. He jerked his thumb at the Cessna’s backseat, where three Army transmitters lay swaddled in bubble wrap.
“Still got some radios. . . . But what I’m saying is, this little Army deal’s nothing. Not even real aviation.”
It took Vose more than a moment to swing his big frame down from the plane, but he wasn’t finished.
“Lemme tell you. . . . After the War, one of the things I did for a living was go in to crash sites. Just one helper. Build us a board runway, eighty yards long. Then we’d mechanic that aircraft back together and fly it out.”
He looked at me closely.
“Certainly I could keep on after one of these little things.”
I raised my brow.
“Clear across the country?”
George put down his needle and fishing-line thread.
“Any country in the world—falcons only average fifty or sixty miles an hour.”
Anywhere in the world. I took a breath. Vose couldn’t know it, but since our first flight, the idea of following one of these creatures, wherever its airborne life might lead, had become the grandest idea I’d ever had.
George shook his head.
“Military won’t approve it,” he said. “They’re waiting for a satellite—due out sometime in the nineties—that can track these little transmitters.” I pictured an electronic warren, glowing with data screens where some technician sat, coolly plotting the intercontinental flights of flesh-and-blood peregrines as they streaked from tropic jungle to arctic steppe. By then, Vose and I and his little Cessna would be irrelevant.
Yet for a while now we still had a chance to be of consequence. If what he’d said was true, we really could go up with a peregrine, fly with it, and, while mystery still cloaked its realm aloft, share the primeval momentum of its dream, or instinct, or simple fancy.
I just didn’t know how much any of that might mean to Vose.
He was an aviator, not a bird guy, so maybe not much. But he had definitely been disinclined to let that first peregrine go. That and not having to watch from the sidelines as his share of aviation dwindled into technological irrelevance might be enough to draw him into what was becoming my own overwhelming vision.
In any case, it was now or never. I took another breath.
“How about . . . well, why not try it on our own?”
George put his sewing gear back in the toolbox.
“These birds are protected; some of ’em endangered. Army’d never give us permission. . . .”
I looked dead at him.
“Of course they wouldn’t.”
Vose turned away, and I was sure I’d lost him. I had barely met him, and there was absolutely no reason for him to defy his military employers in favor of a semi-illicit trip with me.
For a while he studied the Skyhawk’s stitched ceiling, which now resembled Frankenstein’s forehead. Then, in the same careful way, he looked me over, stroking his mustache. It was thin, white, and pointy—Errol Flynn style—a holdover from his adventure-flying days.
“Aviation takes intestinal fortitude, Mister. You were pretty green up there today. Calm air, too.”
From a battered leather suitcase George dug a roll of orange surveyor’s ribbon.
“I don’t do this,” he explained, draping the pointed prongs of the Army antennas with florescent streamers, “somebody’ll kill themselves and sue me.” He looked over. “Can’t think why you’d want to follow a falcon in the first place.”
Want to? Follow a peregrine, maybe all the way to its polar breeding ground? No one had ever done such a thing. But I was talking to the one man in the world who could.
I caught George’s eye.
“Same reason you’d want to,” I said.
Above the Skyhawk, big white cumulus were building, and to avoid each other’s eyes we both looked up at them.
“Go,” I said, “where no one’s ever gone.”
“Ever known how to go,” growled Vose.
But I could see his doubts. I was some kind of bird nut: no idea what kind of down-and-dirty flying my idea called for. Still, paying jobs in aviation didn’t come often to a guy in his sixties. Late sixties. Bad knees, shaky hands. Gin and tonic more often than every now and then. Plus, this Army deal wasn’t just discouraging; to a real flier it was almost an insult.
“We’ll never get this chance again,” I said.
Vose scuffed a foot.
Just barely, I could see a crinkle crease the corners of his pale blue eyes. He stepped back from his ribbon-draped antennas, stowed the roll of tape, and rooted through his leather case. Finally he pulled out a black plastic garbage bag.
“Here,” he said, pointing at his throat. “Buy you some of these. Just in case.”
At my grin he darkened.
“Now we’re only doin’ this, Mister, no more’n a couple days. Tops.”
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS later, gassed and as ready as its rattling old motor was ever going to be, Skyhawk ’469 sat by the flight shack at Cameron County Airfield. I already knew my new partner would be inside swapping stories with anybody who even looked like they might have once flown a plane, while he waited for me to call and report that I’d captured a peregrine falcon and put one of our leftover Army transmitters on it.
Not that I was very likely to. I was camped at the far end of the largest barrier island, smack in the path of the tundra falcons’ migration route, but so far I’d mostly just watched as Ken’s trappers captured peregrines. I had studied the team’s equipment, though, and since I’d hooked up with Vose I’d made my own rough copies. But I still wasn’t sure exactly what to do with them.
The biggest problem was that during three days alone on the flats I had seen nothing resembling a peregrine. Then, before first light on the fourth morning I smelled the mainland. I’d been on Padre long enough to know that meant an onshore wind was pushing out from the coast, ahead of a late-spring cold front. Soon, rain would force the shorebirds into the shelter of the reeds, and the falcons would press for an early kill while their prey was still exposed.
It was their way. Fierce wild spirits so briefly seen as to seem more apparitions than real birds of prey, peregrines hunt at the edges of the day, when their enormous, light-gathering pupils give them an advantage over the small-eyed wading birds unable to fly well before first light. Seldom relaxing like other hawks in idle floats across sunny summer clouds, Padre’s peregrines hid in the diminished perspective of distance, crouched on the empty flats, picking out prey birds with the uncanny acuity of their binocular vision. Then, concealed in the dimness of dawn or dusk, with a rush they would come flaring in, cutting through a sudden tumult of waders flailing into the air, then forever shutting off for one of them the light of the open sky.
A time or two I’d seen that here, but more often I had just glimpsed peregrines flickering like big spectral bats over the pre-dawn flats. It was a hunting ground not shown on any map. U.S. Geological Survey charts show the South Texas mainland to be paralleled, 10 to 20 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, by the long fingers of Matagorda, Mustang, and North and South Padre Islands. But instead of the broad bay that the maps depict as separating this 300-mile arc of barrier dunes from the coast, there is actually land.
At least there usually is. Except during the highest tides, most of what occupies this space is—despite its being called the Laguna Madre—dry, sandy terrain: a level, featureless desert the size of Connecticut. Known as a wind-tidal flat since the direction of the wind mostly determines whether the plain is submerged, this vast coastal plateau lies no more than a foot above sea level; without the barrier island’s ridge of intervening dunes, the Gulf’s 3-foot surf would roll all the way to the mainland.
Now the flats were empty, yet this desert of sandy mud was an oasis, a critical migration stop for the white-breasted, gunmetal-backed adult tundra peregrines. Thousands of miles north of their better-known but endangered southern anatum relatives—the more sedentary, often non-migratory falcons that nest on the skyscraper ledges of a score of eastern cities—the nesting aeries of arctic peregrines ring the polar rim of every northern continent. From this arctic realm, each autumn, tundra peregrines wing their way across North America, dropping onto the offshore Gulf Coast islands to rest and feed.
A few remain there all winter, but most tundra peregrines, each on its own solitary route, fly south. Maybe the strongest, the most willful, or most powerfully genetically programmed—maybe simply the most curious of their race—some may go as far as Argentina. But when our Padre migrants left the island, for the most part they simply vanished. I’d seen peregrines in the Caribbean during winter, and a few had been reported crossing the Isthmus of Panama, but no one was sure whether they were the same individuals that left the arctic steppes of Canada and Alaska with the first autumn winds. All that was known was that each April, from somewhere to the south, a depleted population of tundra falcons reappeared on Padre Island. Where they had been, and why so few returned, was still a mystery.
ARRIVING WITH the first springtime waves of northbound shore- and songbirds, the falcons were always hungry. Feeding almost entirely on other birds taken in flight, peregrines hunt most successfully over barren ground; where there is even a scrim of brush a fugitive passerine or shorebird can, at the last moment, dive among the wiry stems where a peregrine will not follow. On Padre’s stark flats falcons have the edge, however, and here they wait in ambush, watching from the tops of old drift fences or washed-up chunks of timber for the flurries of warblers, vireos, and flycatchers that flutter in from the sea. Exhausted by their two-day flight from Yucatán, these small creatures are desperate for the sheltering foliage and insects of the mainland. But first they must pass the gauntlet of the flats.
Only a few fall to the falcons, yet every small life that sets out across Padre’s savage desert feels the terror of the unseen eyes that scan the plain’s featureless horizon, and in the dimness of evening I too could feel the falcons’ presence—an essence far more palpable, out on those miles of empty sand, than the abstract medical research of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, which was a partner with the Army in Ken Riddle’s project.
The university’s part of the enterprise centered on the crucial testimony peregrines carried within their bodies: traces of organochlorine pesticides and environmentally dispersed carcinogens that could affect my life as much as theirs. To read that chemical signature entailed drawing a droplet of their blood, though, and that meant following the hawks’ own ferocious karma. It meant offering them the lives of prey.
Our victims were decoy pigeons, and as I groped through their coop before dawn each morning I was sorry that their soft lives were the only gift that could draw down a peregrine. In the darkness, a storm of frightened pigeon wings hid the six I came up with and, smoothing their feathers, I slipped each one into its carrying box, mounted on the back of my ATV. The pigeons were quiet and comfortable in their sheltered niches, but I knew I could not treat them with the falconer’s traditional detachment.
For one thing, they were too similar to falcons. With their slender-winged, big-breasted profile, pigeons’ bodies aren’t put together much differently than peregrines’. Their likeness may be what draws the falcons, for the rapid-fire wingbeat of Columbiformes seems to trigger in birds of prey a flash of predatory recognition. But theirs is a pact forged cleanly, in the heat of flight and pursuit between near-equals, and I resolved to try to prevent my hobbled captives’ death in the talons.
Squatting like a fat red toad, my Honda ATV idled throatily in the murky air outside the trappers’ beach cabin. Our balloon-tired ATVs, which each of us had outfitted to sustain him for days out on the flats, were the only way to reach the peregrines, and in the darkness I skimmed up the shadowy ocean beach, skirting pale ribbons of foam that snaked inward across the sand.
Then the sky bloomed pink, expanding my miniature headlight world into a silvery panorama of waves and dunes that glistened through haze so dense it let me look directly into the rising sun, against whose coral ball a great blue heron lifted out of the surf and, like a pterodactyl, labored seaward. I waited for it to turn back, but the heron’s slow cadence brought it only to the center of the sun, where it hung, growing smaller and smaller until it vanished into the light.
In the other direction were the flats. It took a while to lever the Honda up and then down the far side of the brush-covered ridge that backed the beach, but beyond the dunes was another world. A few miles to the west lay the Intracoastal Waterway, yet the flats’ murky tidal cosm was so surreal in its emptiness—so spooky, even—that old wilderness hands sometimes came in for good after only a couple of days’ hunting.
Mostly it was the loss of perspective. Faintly corrugated, the laguna’s sandy verges melted into an absolutely level, featureless plain that at the indeterminable horizon dissolved into a marbled sky, flat as a scenery backdrop. In that hallucinatory vastness familiar definitions lost distinction, and before midday I had become a Brobdingnagian intruder, rumbling across a shrunken topography where for miles nothing reached higher than my instep.
Yet I was not alone. In the pastel distance what looked like a sheet of waving paper proved to be the snowy wing of a cattle egret—still lofted, over its carcass, by the wind. I shivered: feathers unrumpled, the egret still bled from the surgical incision that sliced its belly. Only a peregrine would scissor apart prey with such precision. As I spun in circles searching the haze with binoculars, a nearby slab of driftwood caught my eye. Beneath it were painted off-white spatters. Mutes, or droppings, they could have been left by a gull or cormorant, but as I pulled up to the timber I could see that, along the rough bark, shreds of down had lodged where a falcon had bent to scrape its bill.
Here, in the dimness of dawn, a peregrine had returned with prey. I ran my fingers down the wood. Among the feather scraps were spots of flame, bits of orange and white plumage, and beside the log I found their owner. Its untouched black head showed it was a Baltimore oriole—a male—but as I pulled it from the sunken girder’s shadow I realized the oriole was weightless. Gutted. Below its throat nothing remained but its harlequined wings and tail and its apricot flanks that still glowed with the gaudy hues of the tropics.
Reflexively, I glanced up. The hazy sky held nothing, but as I followed the horizon’s circle, with my 10 × 40s I glimpsed a fleck of movement. Then a dark shadow came rippling in across the sand. Suddenly, 15 feet above me the shadow’s maker—a clear, perfect peregrine—was etched against the sky. On one buoyant wingbeat it pulled up, and for a slow-motion instant our eyes locked; then with a scream the falcon flared away on the wind.
Where would it go next? I did not yet know peregrines well enough. All I could see was the picture this one had etched, beginning—as it always did with falcons—with that huge, shining dark eye, bordered by a ring of yellow skin, broader toward the pearl-gray beak. From this bird’s size—it was nearly half again as large as a male, or tiercel—I could tell she was a female, and from her brown-mottled breast, a youngster, what the trappers called a hatch-year bird.
Her coppery crown and golden cheeks and throat meant she was a young tundrius, now on her first springtime trip back to the Arctic. That made her a survivor—one of what was thought to be a minority of adolescents that, southbound in autumn, reach the Gulf Coast again the following year. She was also hungry, or she wouldn’t have checked me out, poaching her fresh egret and the dried remains of her oriole.
Maybe hungry enough, I thought, to come back to her most recent kill; so with shaking hands I slipped one of the pigeons into its noose jacket, a leather vest sprigged with loops of slip-knotted 20-pound monofilament. At the slightest touch the nooses would cinch tight, snaring any talon that brushed their transparent tendrils, momentarily tying a falcon both to the pigeon and to an attached drag weight light enough not to pop the line when the falcon took off but heavy enough to limit how far it could fly with its prey.
Stashing the dead egret on my ATV, I set my pigeon in the center of the scarred sand that marked the egret’s struggle, hit the starter, and rolled a quarter mile directly into the wind. Then I turned back to face the now-invisible pigeon.
With a mammal who would pick up your scent you’d avoid an air current like that, but with a falcon it was the only angle of approach because, aloft or alight, peregrines live in the wind. Across blustery tundra or continental coastline, the press of moving air sculpts their lives as surely as falling water shapes the form of millrace trout, and like swift-water fish, peregrines are always angled into the current. If my falcon returned to her kill she would be more likely to do so by traveling into the wind, facing me as she came in and continuing to do so while she fed. That way she could see me clearly, but I could approach her more easily because always in her mind would be the possibility of the ready escape she could make by gusting away downwind if I got too close.
That was the theory, anyway. From my vantage point on top of the Honda’s cargo box, through my binoculars I could just make out the capped, sand-filled PVC cylinder that was my anchor drag, and for the rest of the day I gazed at that progressively blurring ashen dot. Maybe my passing youngster hadn’t killed the egret after all; she could have just happened by after I’d flushed away its real owner, and with no memory of a kill she had no reason to come back. So just before sunset I scooped up my pigeon and set out across the algae mat.
It was even weirder than the mudflats. A lumpy carpet of blackened seaweed stranded when the baywater periodically swept out to sea, the algae was crusted with desiccated clams and marooned marine life, offering a vaguely biblical reminder that the endless plain around me could, at any moment, again become ocean.
Strangely, falcons loved the algae. Out on its glutinous surface peregrines were so hard to see I finally realized that the dried seaweed’s attraction was as camouflage. Against the laguna’s pale sand a distant falcon stood out as a sharp black speck; on the algae its mottled plumage was part of the background.
Not far ahead, part of that dark background showed a twitch of movement. It was too low for a falcon—a probing shorebird, I guessed. Then, damn! I’d gotten too close. In a flash of wings a peregrine, maybe the female adolescent I’d seen earlier, detached itself from the algae and vanished into the dusk. Its departure was so sudden that I needed to salvage some evidence it had really been there at all, so I eased the Honda forward, studying the ground.
Next to a rick of leaves lay its kill: a purple gallinule, marked only with a crescent of scarlet blood ringing the base of its skull. It was instantly clear why there had been no profile: the falcon had been bent to her killing. But she had not had time to feed, so I picked up the gallinule and set another of my now-terrified pigeons in its place.
If the peregrine returned and was the adolescent I’d seen, at first she probably wouldn’t hurt the pigeon because most first-year falcons have yet to learn the high-impact dives their elders are famous for. If the pigeon stayed on the ground it would seem to be a sick or injured bird—prey near which a peregrine might simply land, then stride warily up to. The pigeon’s leather vest was good armor against that sort of attack, but after the falcon grabbed it I’d have to get in fast, before the hawk lowered her deadly beak.
I only wished the pigeon was in on the plan as, aware of its peril, it crouched like a stone against the seaweed, watching the distant flicker of falcon wings working back and forth in the growing gloom. The peregrine had seen me near her kill, but not realizing the gallinule was gone, she was coursing the area in search of it. The surrogate pigeon was obvious to her, but its extra plumage of leather and fishing line seemed to put her off, and just beyond the patch of sand where she’d taken the gallinule, she hovered for a moment and then set down. With the short, toed-in strides peregrines use on the ground, almost like a parrot she trotted back and forth, scrutinizing every grain of mud. Then she glared at the pigeon.
That was too much for it. It started to creep back toward the distant shelter of the ATV, pricking the hawk’s attention and gradually drawing upon itself the focus of her hunger. There was time for me to feel crummy, but not much, for the peregrine pushed off into the wind and, one wingtip brushing the ground, banked toward the pigeon. It froze, then flattened itself as she ripped by an inch overhead. As she swung back on a crosswind pass I saw that the first time wasn’t a miss. She was trying to flush the pigeon into the air.
But her quarry, which knew instinctively that it would be most vulnerable on the wing, wouldn’t budge. Playing possum was its only chance, for most peregrines are reluctant to strike a target on the ground, and the longer the pigeon stayed down the more likely the falcon was to be distracted by other prey.
But that wasn’t figuring on the darkness. As it deepened, the peregrine fluttered to the ground beside my quivering pigeon, squirted out a dropping, and fluffed her feathers. Aware somehow that her tethered prey could not escape, she had decided to save it until morning. Neither the pigeon nor I could have stood the suspense of that, so to break the spell I edged a little closer on the ATV. More secure now in the growing gloom, the falcon bristled at my approach. Then she turned to the pigeon and, like some bush-jacketed sportsman posed with his trophy, clamped a proprietary foot onto its back.
That was what I’d been waiting for. As I hit the gas the falcon flared her neck feathers and leaped into the air, carrying the pigeon with both feet. She was a big bird, and when she reached the end of the tether cord her momentum sent the drag weight skipping over the seaweed. Flying into the wind she couldn’t gather speed, though, and I was gaining so fast that with a scream she dropped her cargo.
Or tried to. As the pigeon fell, its nooses snagged one of the falcon’s middle talons, dragging down her suddenly imprisoned leg and catalyzing a wing-flailing panic that lifted her 30 feet off the ground. Betting she couldn’t keep the whole train aloft, I bailed off the Honda at a dead run and in seconds was directly beneath her.
That was a mistake. Getting so close before she had tired gave the peregrine an extra shot of adrenaline, and she cut back over my head. There, buoyed by the wind, she began to gain altitude. As the pigeon’s drag bounced clear of the sand for the last time, I dove for it . . . and, unfortunately, connected. There wasn’t even a shock at my end of the line as that single toe-holding strand of monofilament let go.
SUNBURNED AND WEARY, I lay facedown in the rotting algae. Of course the line snapped. That’s what it was supposed to do—slow a peregrine enough to eventually wear it out and bring it down, yet let the falcon break off easily if it got away from the trapper.
Like some pirate victim buried to the nostrils, I watched rows of wavelets, forerunners of the incoming tide, advance toward my face. Then the pigeon’s soggy wingbeats brought me upright, and I felt even more guilty. Except for being damp the pigeon was all right, though, so I put it back in the wooden cage on the ATV. By then a warm demi-surf had risen around my ankles, stifling the algae’s benthic smell as all the water that the onshore wind had formerly swept out into the Gulf came flooding back into the laguna.
Within an hour, a shallow sea stretched all the way to the mainland, and even by starlight I could see that for miles nothing protruded above the surface except me and my small machine. The Honda’s carburetor had a snorkel that kept its motor running, so it became my small, mobile island, burbling along like a tugboat, churning a pale bow wave.
Then the moon rose and the sea’s surface lit up so brightly that I shut off my headlamp and followed the silver path of light that, at the horizon’s seam, stitched me to its lunar source. A Shining Path. Appropriated by Peru’s revolutionary leftists, it was a name I’d heard constantly in the Andean highlands—one of the places I led nature tours—the site held by some ornithologists to be the enigmatic winter home of tundrius. The peregrines I saw there, though, on the mossy precipices above the Urubamba River, were resident birds of the local cassini race.
Wherever today’s lost juvenile had spent the winter, during April Padre was only a momentary stopping point for her, because across its pastel desert the force that had brought her here reached on, perhaps 3,000 miles to the arctic cliff where she was born. It was a path without markers, an airborne passage whose coordinates lay plaited among the synapses of her brain, inscribed there by generations of success and failure.
But what lay within her was more than merely a route. Partly learned and partly instinctual, the pathway this young falcon followed was only the smallest part of the mystery of her migration; most of its riddle lay in the enigmatic power that was, even now, driving her on, day after day. Toward the Far North, toward the tundra: Greenland, Nunavut, Alaska. It was an ancient yearning, separate and apart from the world of man, and realizing that in some way I had almost touched that force, I plowed my small wake on across the bay toward Deer Island, a knoll where there was dry ground to camp.
IF THERE were ever any deer on Deer Island, during some of the nights I camped there they’d have been up to their bellies in storm tide. Above the waves only a few dozen square yards of dune remained: a cartoon desert island that lacked only a single leaning palm. On that little knoll I fed and watered the pigeons and crawled into my sleeping bag, flopped next to the Honda’s fat rear tires for protection from the wind. Out of the Army’s larder I’d drawn combat rations—cans of spaghetti, biscuits, and Spam—plus water and half a case of Gatorade jugs.
The Gatorade was the most important. Dehydration is a constant threat on Padre’s desert of mud, and I ordinarily drank one of the quarts with my C-rats, the other later in the night. For easy access I wedged one of the big glass jars into the sand next to my head.
I don’t know how long I slept, but suddenly something was wrong. A funny scent. I reached for the Gatorade, but there was only a depression in the sand, and with a shudder I recognized that musky smell: 18 inches from my nose a pair of coyote prints dented the ground.
I knew why they were there. The day before, trying to pick out a ground-perching hawk from the frieze of driftwood lining the skyline, I’d seen movement in a gray lump of flotsam. In the evanescence of the flats it could have been a nearby godwit or a far-off jackrabbit. But it was alive, and as I idled toward it the distant shape gradually resolved itself into a trotting coyote.
As it noticed me the little wolf broke into a lope, heading east toward the shelter of the barrier dunes. Yet in the soft sand he couldn’t run well, and as I pulled up on him I could see his heaving flanks and hear his staccato pants and the scrunch of his paws on the crust. He seemed no more than a thin, scraggly dog, and I remembered hearing that the year before, a half-grown coyote had snatched one of our bait pigeons, whose veil of monofilament had snagged in its teeth. Had the harness then shaken loose, its pigeon-baited nooses adrift on the flats might have destroyed a peregrine, so after a 10-mile ATV chase the trapper had run down and killed the hapless coyote.
For all it knew, today’s little wolf faced the same fate, yet 5 yards ahead of my oncoming machine, he made no desperate sprint: facing his poor set of options, he watched me over his shoulder and galloped resolutely on. Ashamed, I cut the throttle. But it was too late to turn away unconfronted. The coyote had made his choice and, with Zen-like resignation, turned to face me. As he gasped for breath, his pink tongue lolled from the side of his jaw, but his flaming yellow eyes, lit as if by yellow candles, were riveted on mine. For almost a minute our gazes remained locked; then I glanced away, and in that instant he was gone.
Digging deeper into my bag on Deer Island, I wondered if tonight’s coyote could have been the one I chased, come back in the night to gnaw the heavy glass of the Gatorade jug. Dehydration was his enemy, too, since most of Padre’s land animals live off the sea. They swallow salt with every bite of food, and in their stomachs those saline ions draw in less-salty liquids from their blood and tissues, leaving their bodies constantly on the brink of fluid starvation, which is why you can’t survive by drinking even a little salt water.
Ocean-dwelling reptiles—like the Ridley’s sea turtles that recently nested by the hundreds on these beaches—purge extra salt through specialized glands located in the corners of their eyes; shorebirds are sustained by the acceptably brackish body fluid of marine worms and crustaceans; and peregrines live off the blood of other birds. But the barrier island coyotes have no regular source of water, and I rolled over, rooting for the bold little canid who had waded ashore to crack the glass and lap my Gatorade.
Turning over let me see, through a notch in the island’s low dune ridge, the orange skein of bulbs glowing over an offshore oil-drilling rig, anchored like a cruise ship out in the Gulf. But its carnival brightness already belonged to another world, far from the half-imagined realm these peregrines were leading me toward. It was a domain of noblemen, serfs, and sorcerers, an ancient kingdom where the falcons’ annual arrival from the icy wastes beyond the known world so stirred the dreams of men tied always to their fields that they named this bird peregrine: the wanderer.1
SOMETIME BEFORE dawn the wind swung around to the north and calmed the waves enough for me to hear, drifting down from the quieted sky, faint peeps. They sounded ghostly and sad, but they were really cries of happiness, issued by excited songbirds coming in from the Gulf with the mainland now in sight. Among them were more orioles that a day or two ago, on the shores of Yucatán, might have fed on the same ripe mangoes as the peregrine-killed male I had held that afternoon.
A momentary morsel to its captor, the oriole had lived a life no less epic than that of the peregrine that snatched its bright Halloween colors from the sky. The day before it died it had fluttered, 400 miles to the south, among tropical foliage, plucking caterpillars from the leaves and probing fallen fruit for its sweet pulp and wriggling fly larvae. Then, sometime between noon and darkness, it had launched out over the waves. All night, high above the sea it had held its course, pumping out four wing- and heartbeats every second for sixteen or more hours. By morning, from nearly a mile up, it would have seen the thin brown line of the Texas coast.
Again this evening other orioles, traveling in waves that included grosbeaks, tanagers, flycatchers, thrushes, and more than a dozen species of warblers, would gather their collective force of will, there on the northwest shore of Mexico’s coastal horn. Carrying their race’s genetic hope for the future, they would leap onto their fragile wings, eager to surmount the void of wind and wave and vast distance that lay between them and their breeding territories a continent away to the north.
In the still air, most of tonight’s voyagers had made that crossing. But with no way to anticipate what lay ahead, tomorrow’s flocks might not. Two or three times every spring a mass of cold air surges down from the north and meets the migrants partway across the Gulf. If they hit its storm-ridden headwinds near the Mexican coast, almost all the birds turn back to try again another night. But those who have passed the halfway point, radar has shown, choose to continue, fighting the wind. Some of the strongest, like the kingbirds, usually knife on through. But among the lightest and most delicate pilgrims—buntings, wood-peewees, weak-winged thrushes, and especially the tiny warblers, vireos, and hummingbirds—thousands fail to make their Texas landfall.
For the most part they don’t falter because of exhaustion; it is a lack of fuel. Birds’ fuel is not food held in their stomachs, which are minimal, or even in their crops, which are larger. Birds’ fuel is fat. Unlike that of mammals, avian muscle isn’t laced with lipids; birds’ gas tanks are the flat pockets of yellow suet deposited along their breastbones, in the lateral hollows of their necks, and in their wing pits. When these supplies are exhausted, individuals flying in laboratory wind tunnels don’t gradually lose muscle strength from lactic acid buildup, like an exercising mammal; when they are truly out of fuel birds just come to a halt and quit flapping altogether.
Because the stakes are so high, songbirds migrating over open water can continue for a desperate while after their fat is gone by consuming their own bodies. But the only fodder their bodies have is flight muscle, and cannibalizing that brings them down to their last hope: the boundary layer of air just above the water’s surface that offers a bit of added lift. Riding it, many migrants fight on the last few miles to land, but if the north wind remains strong, each spring huge numbers of songbirds fall unseen into the waves. Then thousands of small bodies—a tiny fraction of those who perished in deeper water—wash ashore with the morning tides.
I’d seen those urgent comings-in.
Like some sort of alien bee, a ruby-throated hummingbird had whirred past the offshore boat on which I was working as a teen and cut a quick 180-degree turn. Three feet off the water, barely holding himself aloft on boundary-layer buoyancy, the hummer made it back to our rigging, where he rode most of the day as we chugged slowly toward land.
Farther up the coast, at High Island, the same springtime comings-ashore happen daily. Unlike Padre, this is not really an island but a chenier, an almost imperceptibly elevated little plateau of ancient riparian deposits that bulges up just enough from the surrounding saline marshes to let copses of live oak and magnolia, greenbriar, locust, and prickly-ash dig in their roots.
In good times, most songbirds have enough flight capacity to continue on, high above the inhospitable coastal marshes, to descend, 50 to 100 miles inland, among the canopy of East Texas’s tall hardwoods. But when northerly winds press small passerines down onto the land’s salty edge, High Island’s cheniers save millions of songbird lives.
But the birds that reach those diminutive shoreline forests are changed creatures. Wariness is a lost priority: all that matters is food. In and out of every trailside bush, no more than two or three arms’ reaches away, I watched chestnut-sided, sky-blue cerulean, orange-bellied parula, and oriole-colored blackburnian warblers, bold as they never would be in the high-tiered northern forest where they breed. Above the warblers, a brace of summer tanagers had taken turns picking off bees emerging from their tree-crevice hive, and a notch higher, rose-breasted grosbeaks—sparrow-like females as well as medallion-chested males—pulled off every reachable mulberry, ripe or not.
For birds unable to reach the cheniers, even making landfall could be disastrous. After fighting an all-night headwind, flocks of indigo buntings had fluttered onto the beach, the weakest ones plopping down right beyond the surf—some on the sand, more on the sparse lawns of beach cottages. Most had enough left in their wings to soldier on a few more yards to the barbed-wire fences bordering Texas Route 87, where, after a minute’s rest, looking like bright confetti, wave after wave of them set off across that 20 feet of black asphalt.
Heedless in their need to reach the insects of the grassy fields on the other side of the road, a yard above the ground the survivors of that long ocean crossing set out—only to be met, sometimes five or six at a time, by the 70-m.p.h. rush of spring-break-vacationer traffic. From the roadside, where hundreds of brave migrants lay crushed, I’d screamed at every passing vehicle to slow down until—ignored as a madman from behind air-conditioned glass—I finally accepted the futility of trying to intervene.
Storms have always taken a heavy toll on these voyagers, and passerines’ high reproductive rates historically managed to offset the losses. But that was before the coming of mankind, before the human glacier that now bears down on every continent in the world. To an animal, of course, death is just death: it doesn’t make much difference if its end comes in the talons of a peregrine or on the grille of an SUV.
But overall it matters. It matters when technology obliterates not just the life but the heroism of other species, takes all the heart that has carried tens of thousands of generations of buntings or warblers across a vast dark sea to the far springtime shores from which they can find their way home—and smacks all that soul and immense bravery into oblivion. Falcon kills don’t do that. The swift raptors that patrol the borders of the migrant stream are part of the stream, and the relative handful of birds they devour—sometimes the weak and sick, but usually just the unlucky—nevertheless still go on, the nutrients of their bodies fueling their predators’ part of the same vernal tide that they, with such enthusiasm and trust, committed their lives to joining.
AT MIDDAY,