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On the Wing: To The Edge of The Earth With the Peregrine Falcon - Hardcover

Tennant, Alan

 
9780375415517: On the Wing: To The Edge of The Earth With the Peregrine Falcon
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375415513 ISBN 13: 9780375415517
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

An illustrated study of the transcontinental migration of the peregrine falcon follows the majestic raptors from the Texas barrier islands to the Arctic and then back south through Mexico, Belize, and the Caribbean, chronicling his own adventures along the way.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan Tennant is the author of numerous books on wildlife and nature, includingThe Guadalupe Mountains of Texas, which won the Southern Book Award, Western Books Award, and a best nonfiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters. He currently lives in West Texas and conducts natural history trips around the world.

Aus dem Klappentext

In this extraordinary narrative, Alan Tennant, a passionate observer of nature, recounts his all-out effort to radio-track the transcontinental migration of the peregrine falcon an investigation no one before him had ever taken to such lengths.

On the Wing transports us from the windswept flats of the Texas barrier islands where the tundra falcons pause during their springtime journey north to the Arctic, and then back south, through Mexico, Belize, and into the Caribbean, in a hilariously picaresque and bumpy flight. At the helm is Tennant s partner in falcon-chasing, George Vose, a septuagenarian World War II vet who trusts his instincts as much as his instruments. As the two men nearly lose their lives and run afoul of the law in the race to keep their birds in view and their rattletrap Cessna gassed up and running, Tennant renders with gorgeous precision and skill the landscape and wildlife they pass on the way and the falcons that direct their course.

On the Wing is a breathtaking encounter with these majestic birds the icons of pharaohs, Oriental emperors, and European nobility whose fierce mien, power, and swiftness have fired the human imagination for centuries. An unforgettable and mesmerizing tale that speaks to all our dreams of flight.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.
PARTNERS

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 Gulf Coast's 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 its sounds, too: the whistle of arctic wind, and in the suddenly 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 the soul of 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 that flickering speck of brown below, now embarked on a lonely quest toward her unknown, almost inconceivably distant home.

Then Janis looked up and motioned for George to turn. Reluctantly, I felt, 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 a visiting helper attached to 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 military 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. Presumably toward the cliffs of Greenland, most of these continued on. 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, with 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, a generation older than even the parents of his Army supervisors, he'd logged more wartime military years and on-the-edge long-distance, 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 a close 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 storm's had flooded the mudflats where we trapped the Army's study 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 durn 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...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375415513
ISBN 13 
9780375415517
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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