And today we have three new babies. Happy Spring! If you go here, at 1:56 you see a tiny white snowball with black eyes and tiny beak, dot dot dot like a child’s drawing, looking wide-eyed and up and seeing its daddy perhaps for the first time in its new life. Blink. EC, aka Esteban Colbert, takes off on a grocery store run for pigeon-flavored formula. The mom, Clara, is still at the nestbox as another chick breaks out the top, and a few seconds later Clara has her head lowered talking to a third, looking satisfied as its egg splits at last and a tiny head suddenly dots its eyes too.
One more egg to go.
When I was growing up, most big birds were nearly gone from the entire planet, their eggs thinned by DDT and breaking at incubation. I remember my parents’ great joy at seeing, as we drove through the Sierras when I was ten, a bald eagle in a tall pine, free and alive in the wild! The chances of a sighting were so slim then, and their thrilled reaction and teaching us about them made it so that I would never forget their awe. Nor the eagle.
Now my children and future grandchildren get to see them and other raptors after all, due to the great dedication of the few who were convinced they could make a difference.
Glenn Stewart describes being denied funding on the grounds that the peregrines were already lost. He and a few peers at UCSC watched eyries with binoculars anyway for hours and days, waiting for hard incubation to commence, the point at which the peregrine parents decide, okay, all the eggs are laid, it’s time now to start seriously sitting.
Then he would rappel down the cliff, replace the eggs with wooden dummies, hatch them in a lab while trying to simulate a parent’s presence, rappel again, and return them to their nest.
Which is why this magnificent bird went from two nesting pairs in all of California and total extinction on the East Coast to an estimated 20-25,000 nesting pairs in California. They are back. I can only imagine the intensity of the satisfaction he and his peers must find in that.
Peregrines mate for life and are so focused on having a territory and a mate of their own that if the male in a breeding pair should die while there are chicks in a nest, another male will move in and adopt them and care for them, defending them from intruders, feeding them and teaching them to fly and hunt as if they were his own, and he will stay with their mother for the rest of his days.
God is a poet, teaching us by all that life offers around us. I’m so glad these are still written in His notebook.