Mark Nash will never forget the time he went to an inner-city Toronto school to do a presentation to students on peregrine falcons, which are his passion.
The driving force behind the Canadian Peregrine Foundation brought along one of the raptors which make the school visits so special.
The students were enthralled with the magnificent bird. However, at the end of his talk, a young student asked Nash a question that absolutely perplexed him. “The next time you come,” the little girl asked, “can you bring a cow please?”
Nash thought it was a joke until the principal explained later that the little girl, from a single-parent family, had never been out of the city and had never seen a real, live cow.
That’s when the critical importance of engaging the public and students in the fight to save the peregrine falcon really struck home to Nash.
It looks like he and all the falcon lovers old and new, may have the fight of their lives on their hands if the American federal government proceeds with proposed legislation that could badly damage the recovery of the birds in Ontario.
When DDT virtually wiped out the species and governments realized they had a crisis on their hands many years ago, they turned to an unlikely source for help, the falconers who have passed down the tricks of breeding and training the birds for centuries. In order to ensure survival of the species, officials seized birds that were legally owned by falconers, with little or no compensation, to be used in the recovery programs that were launched.
Those programs, including the one in Ontario which has seen broods of falcon chicks raised at the Mississauga Executive Centre, St. Lawrence Cement and Lakeview Generating Station in Mississauga, have made such good progress that the Ontario government recently “down-listed” the falcon from an endangered to a threatened species.
If American federal authorities get their way (and wildlife departments in many affected northern states such as new York, Ohio and Michigan are fiercely opposed to the legislation), those birds will face a new hazard on their annual migration south to places like Costa Rica. In a long-promised payback to the falconers who lost their birds, the U.S. Wildlife Service wants to allow them to sit in wait along well-known migratory routes and capture the birds for training in captivity.
Nash would have no problem with that principle except for one crucial fact: the population of birds in Ontario is simply not well-enough recovered to withstand the losses.
“While there are about 70 territorial areas occupied in Ontraio, there are still only about 140 birds here,” he notes. The effects of West Nile, avian flu and fire retardants called PBDEs which are showing up in alarming concentrations are still not known. Any one of those problems could set the recovery program back very quickly.
American authorities have said that any birds coming from Canada, which have been banded as part of recovery programs here, will be released.
The problem with that is that 80 per cent of the Ontario falcons are located in an area north of Thunder Bay. They nest on cliff faces that are inaccessible by anything other than helicopters. So those birds can’t be banded.
Now, because of the downlisting and the ongoing budget restrictions that have left them woefully short of money and staff, the Ontario Natural Resources Ministry is saying it may not do its traditional annual banding of the “urban’ bird populations, the ones we can get at.
Nash can hardly believe it. “You can’t tell me that there isn’t enough money to put a 29 cent band on a bird” that could save its life, he says.
The Foundation is also seeking a corporate or individual sponsor for a web cam for the site on Executive Centre site on Robert Speck Pkwy. That’s not just because it makes for great computer-viewing, but for much more important reasons.
With a camera in operation, the exact day of hatching can be determined and the ideal time for banding, which is a window of just 9-10 days, can be set.
It is horrible to think that the hatchlings from Mississauga would end up being nabbed on their first flight south for want of a band. Despite his misgivings, Nash “remains hopeful that the provincial authorities will continue to protect our Canadian wildlife resources.”
At least some of our Mississauga birds will be exempt from trapping in the U.S., by dint of their odd behaviour.
Although their young migrate south, many of the urban-raised falcons including those in Mississauga and Toronto, stay here all winter. They can be seen flitting through the city centre all year round. The experts aren’t sure why they stay all year round.
Maybe they read the papers.