When it was discovered that five of our seasoned adult Peregrines were missing from their nests at the onset of the nesting season, Kathy swiftly organized the team to retrieve the memory cards from our Little Egg Cams. This was a crucial step in assessing the extent of the situation.
Things got worse rather quickly. When Melissa arrived at the first igloo, she was confronted with the sight of a decomposing adult. The following two nests were occupied but by newly paired adults. The fourth igloo checked was empty and lifeless.
As the news trickled in and the loss of adults remained at 100% while the numbers of the missing kept growing, I wrote tributes to Jo Durt as quickly as I could. I wanted to mourn that loss because it was clear I was becoming completely overwhelmed by the scale of the losses occurring this spring. It felt ominous. The turnover of adults each spring was predictable and barely noticeable. And now, suddenly, everyone vanishes all at once? I don’t mean this coldly, but it was transforming from sad to… strange.
Thank goodness for Kathy Clark. It would feel as traumatic and chaotic as the apocalypse right now if not for Kathy’s cool head and complete focus on looking at what is in front of her. It’s calming, and it’s inspiring. In a world where everyone, from the most qualified experts to the most ignorant laypeople, is prodded and encouraged to abuse science to make or win some point or argument, where we are mostly too lazy to really care or grapple with the hard truth that the truth is often confounding and multi-faceted and love easy explanations, Kathy Clark is a gem. And she’s now earned the lofty label “hero” because this situation probably hurts her more than anyone.
I asked her directly: How did you feel when you first considered that we’d lost five adult Peregrines in Ocean County?
“That’s hard to answer,” she replied. “It’s like a big hole has appeared, a hole in my view of the coast. The continuity that I’ve seen for so many years is suddenly broken. We need to see how this plays out because we don’t even know that we’ve lost five adults yet.”
In other words, this isn’t a time for feeling yet. It’s a time for looking.
Slowly but surely, thanks to our cameras, more things are being uncovered, and more pieces falling into place. A missing adult was recently caught on not just one of our cameras but has now been seen on three different cameras. What is she up to? Zac finally climbed to one of the last sites, the Atlantic City water tower, and found both adults and their eggs just beginning to hatch. And Ben & I finally made it out to Sedge. While we found no Peregrines at the historic nest, which was now, bizarrely, home to two young Osprey, the cameras showed us it was a garden-variety nest loss for the Peregrine pair. We have some confidence they are out there somewhere. I never thought I’d be happy and relieved to find “only” a nest lost to predation.
V was the first adult lost in early winter. Her autopsy results are back. It’s clear to Dr. Erica Miller that she had a fight with another falcon and died of blunt-force trauma. There were no obvious signs of flu in her organs. She was an example of the normal turnover of older females. Jo Durt, I’m not so sure. There is little to suggest she survives, but so many unusual, unexpected things are occurring; only time will tell. But by Kathy’s count, we’ve lost one falcon. The rest just haven’t been seen yet.
This would have been much easier to comprehend if every Peregrine had died of the flu. However, the reality is proving much more complex. There is still a lot of bad news, but hope is appearing.
So, for now, it’s more looking. And more cameras. Thanks to everyone who supports and has supported the Little Egg Foundation. Our cameras have been invaluable this season. The increased visibility they provide seems to be providing more questions than answers, but we shouldn’t want it any other way.