Allamakee County's a hot spot for rare, rebounding birds

It's been a good spring for birds in Allamakee County with confirmed reports of a new peregrine falcon nest on the bluffs north of Lansing, the county's first successful hatch of trumpeter swans in about 140 years and a profusion of rare cerulean warblers in the big timbers bordering the Mississippi River.

PEREGRINE FALCONS

Bob Anderson of Decorah, the godfather of peregrine falcons on the Mississippi bluffs, recently discovered a new nest on a bluff about two miles north of Lansing.

“This is the real McCoy - wild falcons nesting on historic bluffs with no help from people,” said Pat Schlarbaum, a wildlife diversity biologist with the Department of Natural Resources.

Anderson discovered the nest on a bluff ledge overlooking the Mississippi in early June, after the four young falcons were already too big to tolerate banding.

On June 23, he met with Schlarbaum, DNR wildlife diversity biologist Bruce Ehresman and DNR Director Chuck Gipp to observe the falcons and celebrate the comeback of “the fastest animal on the planet,” a species that was perilously close to extinction in the 1970s.

The disappearance of falcons led researchers to discover the deadly impact of the insecticide DDT on raptor species, and their comeback is the conservation success story of the century, according to Anderson, who is perhaps better known for his development of the nest cam that has made the Decorah eagles a household name than for his critical role in re-establishing falcons on their native bluffs.

Renowned ornithologists said it could not be done - that great-horned owls would kill falcon chicks as fast as they could be placed in hack boxes on cliffs.

Anderson, with support from Ehresman, Schlarbaum and the Iowa DNR, figured out how to do it.

In a nutshell, when live falcons were extremely rare, Anderson figured out how to “make” them for the restoration effort, using artificial insemination to breed captive females at his acreage near Decorah.

Anderson's chicks, released at nest boxes attached to bridges and power plant smokestacks, have produced 1,500 progeny - a decisive factor in the birds' removal from the endangered species list.

Still, those birds would not “cross over” to the Mississippi River bluffs until Anderson devised a technique in which the chicks were released from simulated rock hack boxes atop a bluff at Effigy Mounds National Monument, imprinting in the brains of the young falcons the concept of cliffs as nest sites.

As for the great-horned owls, the experts underestimated peregrine parents' ability to defend their eyries, according to Anderson.

“I feel sorry for any great-horned owl that goes near

one,” Anderson said.

Gipp said the successful reintroduction makes Iowa and the world a better place.

Calling it “a testament to patience, innovation and hard work,” Gipp said it has provided a model for other conservationists to follow.

TRUMPETER SWANS

For the first time since the 1870s, trumpeter swans successfully nested this spring in Allamakee County.

On May 5, bird expert Ric Zarwell of Lansing confirmed the nest in the backwaters of Pool 9 of the Mississippi River about 4.4 miles north of Lansing.

Then on June 2 Zarwell confirmed and photographed three cygnets with the male, with the female still incubating. Later that same day, Zarwell reported that a Department of Natural Resources employee saw “a minimum of five cygnets” at the site.

The Lansing swans are the product of a successful DNR reintroduction program that began in 1998. About 50 wild pairs of trumpeter swans now nest successfully each year in Iowa, and the number is gradually increasing, according to Vince Evelsizer, forbearer and wetlands biologist with the DNR.

The reintroduction has succeeded to the point that the DNR is scaling back its involvement, leaving additional releases and relocations primarily in the hands of county conservation departments, he said.

CERULEAN WARBLERS

Cerulean warblers, considered one of the rarest nesting birds in Iowa and one of the most beautiful, are much more common in the large timber tracts of northeast Iowa than researchers had previously believed.

Working without a day off from May 12 to July 1, researcher Jon Stravers of McGregor has documented 165 active cerulean territories in a bloc of northeast Iowa timber that includes the Yellow River State Forest, Effigy Mounds National Monument and Pikes Peak State Park.

Stravers, who has been conducting bird research along the Upper Mississippi for 30 years, said he used to get excited just to find a few ceruleans. “If someone would have handed me the report I am about to write with these kinds of numbers three years ago, I probably would not have believed them,” he said.

Support from a range of partners including Effigy Mounds, the Department of Natural Resources, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Iowa Ornithologist Union and the Audubon Society has enabled Stravers to immerse himself in the big timbers of northeast Iowa.

Though he seldom actually sees a cerulean warbler, which frequent the upper stories of tall trees, Stravers has learned to identify the distinctive song of the males, which is a nearly sure sign of a mated pair.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to list the cerulean warbler as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, despite population declines of 3 percent a year for the past 40 years.

Those declines are attributed to destruction of their habitat in South American wintering areas and North American nesting areas.

Stravers has plotted with global positioning system coordinates the exact locations of all the ceruleans he has documented. The next step, he said, is correlating that data with habitat features and forest management history to learn more about the birds' needs and preferences.

“If we can give these birds what they need, they can flourish,” he said.