You’re in the zone – zooming down the highway, an endless conveyor belt of repetitive white stripes, inconspicuous mile marker signs, a steady green smudge of trees streaming by. Expressionless you appear through the windshield, the world of the commuter’s corridor as mundane and predictable as the sun-induced puddle mirage ahead that blurs into sky as you close in on it.
Suddenly, look though! It’s a red-tailed hawk soaring in, rising over a thermal updraft long enough to suspend itself until you approach. It breaks its overhead pause with a wing flap that sends it soaring right over you, almost like it waited there on purpose just for you to witness.
I know I am not alone in the driver seat with my excited reaction – a gasp, a flutter, an outstretched neck – because hearing Vinny Milone from the Mass Audubon Blue Hills Trailside Museum speak passionately about raptors, I sense he gets just as excited over such a sight.
For Milone, a teacher and naturalist, learning about and caring for animals is his calling. On July 7, Milone shared his particular fondness for the feathered species during the Birds of Prey event at the Marion Natural History Museum.
Belonging to the class of “birds of prey” are the hawks, eagles, falcons, owls, and osprey, to name a few.
Birds of prey are a specific class of birds knows as raptors. Raptors are predatory birds possessing particular physical characteristics that make them the highly specialized hunters that they are – sharp strong talons, keen telescopic eyes, wings tailored to pursue the type of prey they hunt, and sturdy curved beaks for tearing apart flesh.
Milone says the best way to learn about an animal – in this case a raptor – is to study these features, which help us learn the most about them, for each animal has its own individuality, its own thoughts, its own life, and as the “compassionate species,” we humans can observe our animal co-inhabitants of this planet and help them survive.
One of the major functions of the Blue Hills Trailside Museum is to rescue injured animals and those that, for whatever reason, cannot survive in the wild on their own. Sick or injured animals are nursed back to health and some become permanent residents of the museum. Just like the raptors Milone brought with him on Friday night, the animals become part of the community outreach educational programs at the museum, helping to cultivate an interest in the species, build knowledge, and spread awareness.
The first raptor introduced was a broad-winged hawk that was rescued as a baby after some humans began feeding it and then left the home, as well as the baby on the porch awaiting food that would never come. The hawk, as well as all the animals at the museum, has no human-designated name, “Just so we remember that they are from the wild,” said Milone. “Not that we don’t care about them.”
When Milone carefully withdrew the peregrine falcon from its carrier, the room let out a collective enraptured “aawww!”
“This is the fastest animal that we know of in the history of the Earth,” said Milone, impressing the audience. The highest recorded speed of a peregrine, in fact, was 242 miles per hour.
During the 1950s, the use of the pesticide DDT resulted in a rapid decline in peregrines, as well as pretty much all other raptors. Raptors, being higher up in the food chain, would consume rodents that consumed insects tainted with the deadly chemical. The raptor eggs in the nest would crush beneath the weight of their parents, the eggs’ structural integrity compromised by the chemical pesticide. By 1960, there were zero peregrine falcons left this side of the Mississippi River.
Naturalists like Milone essentially saved the species by pushing to ban the dangerous pesticide, and resettled pairs of peregrines into cities. The peregrine thrives in cliffside habitats, but peregrines could not yet reestablish their numbers in their natural habitat. Their main predator, the great horned owl, would repeatedly wipe out the transplanted residents, which had to be brought to the cities where they could still hunt from tall buildings but without the presence of predators.
There are currently 16 peregrine pairs in the State of Massachusetts, thanks to those like Milone.
Once it was time for the peregrine to return to its carrier box, out came the tiny, elusive, kill-you-with-cuteness eastern screech owl, no bigger than a pint of beer. His feathers a little ruffled, the tiny owl opened its eyes one at a time and greeted the audience with a facial expression that straddled a fine line between sleepiness and surprise.
Little masters of camouflage, the screech owl is virtually invisible in the wild, blending in perfectly with the bark design of the tree trunk in which it dwells, facing out from a hollow, watching all unnoticed from its perch. In fact, most of us, said Milone, probably pass at least one screech owl every day and never even realize it.
Most of the time, the only evidence of the presence of a screech owl is its spooky monotonic shrill and haunting, descending trill after dusk.
“I’ve been told,” Milone added, “that every time you see a robin there’s a screech owl around.”
There is so much we can learn from the animal world, Milone said. The best place to explore animals, and Milone’s favorite place to be, is outside in the woods in their natural habitat. There are simple skills one can acquire out of curiosity, even if we are no longer children.
“There’s still so many things to learn and ways to train our senses,” Milone said. “All it takes is a little practice.”
And because we have this ability to learn of them and from them, we have the ability to help them, the choice to help them.
Milone called the human species the “compassionate species.” Sometimes that can be a tough one to believe in, but who can really say for sure besides the person looking back at you from the mirror whether or not we are the compassionate species? And even then during times of doubt, we look to people like Milone for reassurance that we as a species do indeed deserve the designation.
By Jean Perry