7 Disaster Leads To Survival

minutes won't matter." Frightful straightened up. Ducks were not prey. She was still Sam's falcon. Waterfowl did not interest her. "Cree, creeee, cree," Duchess cried. The Muscovy heard the falcon cry and flapped in terror. Calmly turning her back, Frightful took a bearing on the sun's position and beat her strong wings. She flew straight for the one mountain among thousands, the one tree among millions, and Sam. IN WHICH Disaster Leads to Survival

The wind carried Frightful speeding down the side of White Man Mountain. As she came over a logging road, a man walked out of the leafless November woods. He was dressed in a tan jacket and pants and strode with a gait as free as Sam's. "Creee, creee, creee, car-reet." Frightful called Sam's name. With a swift wing beat she alighted above a transformer on an electric utility pole. The man was not Sam. She lifted her wings to fly. A wind gust knocked her off balance. She tipped, spread her flight feathers like fingers, and braced herself against two wires. Sparks sizzled and burst upward. A powerful electric current shot through Frightful. Her feathers burned. She could not move. The electricity held her prisoner. She passed out. Jon Wood saw Frightful get zapped. He grabbed a fallen branch, climbed a boulder under the utility pole, and tried to knock her off the wires. He brushed her, but could not dislodge her. Taking the long branch in both hands, he swept it back and forth. Frightful's left wing was pushed from the

wire. The circuit was broken. She fell to the ground. Jon Wood picked her up and folded her wings to her body. He looked at her burned flight feathers. He saw her cloudy eyes. "A fabulous and rare peregrine," he mumbled, "and she's dead." He stroked her still-warm breast. "Another utility-pole disaster," he said to himself. Then went on, "I get so angry about this. It doesn't have to happen." Smoothing Frightful's seared feathers, he opened a large pocket in his jacket and placed her in it. He would report her death to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Albany. They kept records of the endangered peregrine falcons. The birds, once down to zero in the East, were gradually making a comeback, thanks largely to a falconer, Heinz Meng. He had bred the first peregrines in captivity and, using an ancient technique called hacking, had been able to free them to the wild. Other falconers learned from him, and the peregrine began to recover. Jon thought of Heinz as he stood on the mountain road.

First it was DDT and other pesticides that killed the great peregrines, he mused. Now it's death on utility poles. His warm brown eyes narrowed. "This does it!" he said to himself. "All the utility companies have to do is lower one wire so the birds can't touch those two parallel hot lines and complete a circuit. One little adjustment—that's all—and thousands of these great birds would live." He opened his pocket and peered down at Frightful, thinking, I've written the utility- company manager so many times, my fingers hurt. Today I'm calling the company president. He strode on down the mountain to the road where he had left his car. Saddened and angry, he drove home, parked near his barn, and walked to a large bird mews. "Hello, Sammy," he said to a magnificent bald eagle. Sammy was recovering from an accident with an automobile. "Kak, kak, ka, kleeeek," the bird replied. Jon smiled and looked from the handsome eagle to his own home. He was proud of it. As a young man he

had built it himself on acres of field and forest deep in the Catskill Mountains. The house was dug into the hillside to conserve heat. It was shingled with handmade shakes. Jon had trained a falcon to hunt with him. He had planted his own vegetables. When his land was flourishing, he went back home and married a young woman named Susan. He took her to his mountain with some apprehension. "Do you like it?" he had asked. "I want to live here all my life," she answered. As Jon worked the land and flew his falcon, he saw how important the raptors were to the environment. Some kept the excess birds under control; some kept the rabbits from destroying his garden; others cleaned up the rats, mice, and voles. He studied and became a master falconer with a license from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He taught his raptors to fly free and come back to the lure, and the next thing he knew, he and Susan were visiting schools with their birds to tell the children of the importance of the birds of prey. Jon Wood paused before opening the door to his house. He looked out over the silent white

mountains and braced himself to tell Susan the bad news. "Susan," he said as he walked into the kitchen, where she was feeding an owl. "Another zapped peregrine." He reached into his pocket. "Hey!" Frightful was moving. Astonished, he lifted her up and rested her on the palm of his hand. She looked at him out of bright eyes. Jon grinned in disbelief. "Susan," he said. "She's not dead. I can't believe it. She | was zapped, burned, fried on a utility pole." "Oh, Jon," said Susan, coming closer. "She looks awful. We should take her to the vet." "Let's wait," he said. "She looks amazingly perky. We'll jess her and I'll check her out." Susan opened a cabinet and took out a pair of leather straps. They were jesses. Falconers for three millennia in e Asia and Europe had put the exact same kind of straps on the legs of their falcons, hawks, and eagles. The jesses were held in the fingers or clipped to a leash to keep the birds from departing. Jon stroked Frightful's wings and breast, then held her feet in his hand and her body along his