BY DAVID STEINKRAUS
Journal Times | Posted: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 12:00 am
RACINE - On Tuesday, Greg Septon escaped without incident during his annual foray onto the courthouse roof. Last year, as he retrieved peregrine falcon chicks from the nest box, the female got him right on the forehead.
She had left the box, ignored the other people on the roof, and went straight for Septon. His hockey helmet, with full face shield, absorbed the force of the attack. This year there was just a lot of screaming from the female, who stayed in the box, and from the chicks. The male was nowhere in sight, although Carl Johnson, an attorney with the State Public Defender's office, still held up a broom to discourage attacking birds.
Septon manages the falcon recovery program in eastern Wisconsin - 13 nests from the Illinois border to Green Bay and five more sites that are inland several miles in places like Jefferson and Kaukauna. He's in the midst of his spring task of banding all the chicks from this year's hatch. There's a green band coded to identify each bird, and a purple band required by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Banding is done at 18 to 24 days of age when the birds are small enough to be controllable yet old enough that their legs have reached adult size. He also draws blood samples which are sent to the University of Minnesota for DNA analysis, part of a long-term project to track falcon lineages.
That isn't as odd as it sounds because the birds do move around. In the Chicago area are nests of about a dozen Wisconsin birds, he said, and a falcon hatched in Milwaukee is nesting in Pittsburgh.
Racine chicks
This year the Racine nest produced two females and one male. The number of chicks is typical, Septon said. But this nest has historically produced more males, added Wayne Johnson, Carl's father and a retired county worker who has been involved for a long time with the falcon project.
This year's male was named Arthur. The females are Laurel, after Racine astronaut Laurel Clark, and Chiwaukee Joan, after local conservationist Joan Rohan.
Although all the reports aren't in yet, Patricia Manthey, an avian ecologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said she's comfortable in saying there are 25 to 30 breeding pairs of falcons in the state this year. There were 26 or 27 pairs last year, and falcon numbers have been increasing slowly but steadily.
Most of these birds are in eastern Wisconsin despite the fact that they are cliff dwellers by nature and historically nested on the bluffs along the Mississippi River near Winona, Minn., in Door County, and along the Lake Superior shore. This illustrates how dependent the birds are on human intervention, she said. "The vast majority of the sites are still nest boxes on various buildings and smoke stacks." On their own falcons will show interest in buildings, "but most buildings aren't ideal without a little help."
The falcon population now matches what it appears to have been. Reliable bird counts showed only 24 breeding pairs in the state in the 1950s, Manthey said. "This is an extremely rare species. It's the top of the food chain so there are going to be less each step as you go up the food chain." Falcons are very specialized in what they eat (other birds such as sparrows and pigeons) and in their nest sites. They don't build nests, she said, but depend on finding a high place where they scrape aside debris to form a depression to prevent eggs from rolling out of the nest.
Chemical curse
Falcons fell prey to the widespread use of DDT. The insecticide changed female falcons' bodies so their eggs had thinner shells, meaning they broke easily when adults tried to incubate. By the early 1970s, the 300 breeding pairs in the eastern United States had disappeared. The DNR began releasing birds into Wisconsin's wilds in 1987.
The falcon program in eastern Wisconsin has added about half a dozen nest boxes in the last year, Septon said. "They were not put up on speculation. They are put up because we saw peregrines there." There's a box now at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he said, and the Mayfair mall management put up a box, too. That has attracted a pair, but it's probably too late in the year for them to do anything.
The presence of a box doesn't guarantee a hatch. It took years before a falcon pair settled in atop the Racine County courthouse, and it's not the same pair today. Lily, the female, came about seven years ago, but the male Beaster has replaced the previous occupant, Scott. "So I think Beaster pushed Scott out of here," Septon said. Scott is now nesting at the Oak Creek Power Plant.
The management goal for peregrines in Wisconsin is 20 breeding pairs, Manthey said, yet they remain on the list of endangered species because extinction remains a real possibility in the absence of human intervention. "I think the recovery of this species is another one of those tributes to what humans will do right after we've done something wrong."