A baby peregrin falcon.
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Bookish birds
A pair of the fastest animals on earth nest atop the Du Bois Library serve as living teaching tools.
Professor Kathleen Arcaro likes to start off Environmental Sciences 112: Fundamentals of the Environment” by talking about peregrine falcons. The first day of class, the environmental toxicologist in the Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences puts up a slide that shows a “hacking” box perched on the roof of the Du Bois Library. In it, a peregrine couple raise their young every summer. Arcaro talks about how, in the mid-twentieth century, the pesticide DDT worked its way up the food chain so that eventually its presence in the peregrines caused the shells of the eggs they laid to be so thin and brittle that they couldn’t support the parents’ weight. In the Northeast, this problem led to the native population of peregrines disappearing. Thanks to the banning of DDT, a captive breeding program, and other conservation efforts, Arcaro explains, peregrines can once more be seen in western Massachusetts and other parts of the country.
Arcaro’s areas of research are aquatic environmental pollutants and breast cancer, not peregrines, but she makes good use of the latter to illustrate “the impact of humans on the environment, of how social and cultural practices affect other species,” as she puts it. When students hear about a struggle for survival right in their own backyard, they immediately get what environmental science is all about.
The peregrines nesting atop the library are excellent teaching tools. The fastest animals on earth, they are also good theater. Plenty of people on campus have looked up to see one of them, about the size of a crow, swooping down on their prey—mainly birds, but sometimes squirrels, if anecdotal evidence is to be believed. Capable of reaching more than 200 miles per hour during a “stoop,” when they hold their wings in and dive down upon its prey, they’re the “combat air patrol” of the campus, according to Dick Nathhorst in Facilities and Campus Planning. They keep the pigeon population in check, killing three or four a day when they are raising their young, and also go after cowbirds and starlings, populous and invasive species. Nathhorst has noticed that although mockingbirds usually like high places, here they keep a low profile:“I saw one on a treetop one day and I thought, you’d better not perch there. The next minute, it was a puff of feathers.”
Massachusetts was one of the first states to pass laws protecting peregrines, back in 1934. In 1948, legendary state ornithologist Archie Hagar ’21 (described by another state ornithologist as “ a veritable mountain of knowledge and scientific integrity”) came upon broken peregrine eggs at nearby Quabbin Reservoir; according to current state ornithologist Tom French, that was the first evidence found of DDT weakening the shells. During the forties and fifties, the state went from having 375 nesting pairs to none; by 1966 there were zero peregrines anywhere on the east coast. Using birds bred by falconers, the Peregrine Fund at Cornell began restoring the birds to the wild; Massachusetts’s Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program had its successful peregrine release in Boston in 1984. UMass Amherst got its first pair in 1988.
Nathhorst is among the volunteers on campus who still keep an eye on the library peregrines, namely, making sure the box is maintained. Last year Mass. Wildlife banded three chicks, in 2004, four. “You don’t always have to spend a million dollars,” Nathhorst points out, “to have a positive impact on the environment.”
The campus raptor population also comprises kestrels, a smaller breed of falcon, who like the fields by the UMass Amherst horse farm, and red-tailed hawks, which have been known to fly in pursuit of prey practically over the feet of people walking near Whitmore. “My sense is that the ornithology of the campus is good; we have a healthy bird population,” Nathhorst says. “UMass Amherst is very good to wildlife, with grassy areas and woods.”
He knows of four red-tail pairs with nests on the outskirts of campus: “They are death on the wing for squirrel and other rodents from deer mice up to small rabbits—definitely ‘very red of talon and beak’ predators.” As for the peregrines, he says: “Every time I look into our mother peregrine’s wild eyes, I know that she would eat me if she were large enough to do it.”