fieldnotes

• The Kittens That Roared
• The Making of a Classic
• Richard Pough Man of Action
• The Tallest Tallgrass Prarie
• Follow That Blaze
• Blands Have More Fun
• If It Absolutely, Positively Pollutes
• Mickey Muck's Macaw
• Reborn Moms
• Waah, Waah. Tweet, Tweet
• Move Over, Smokey!

Endangered Species
The Kittens That Roared

Photo by Joe McDonald/Corbis

The stationary signals Tanya Shenk was receiving from six radio-collared lynx last May were a potentially ominous sign. After all, not long after the wildlife researcher and her colleagues at Colorado's Division of Wildlife had released 41 of the rare cats into the wild four years ago, she had watched in horror as the tracking signals of more than half of them stopped cold—the first indication that the animals had been run over by cars or shot, or that they had starved to death as they tried desperately to adapt to their new, apparently inhospitable surroundings.

Most of the 88 animals freed in two subsequent releases fared better. Yet none had been able to take the next essential step in any reintroduction of a federally threatened species: linking up with a mate and bearing offspring.

So it was with a mixture of excitement and dread that Shenk and her research team tracked one female to the base of a spruce tree high in the mountains of southwest Colorado. "Either she was dead or she'd had kittens," Shenk recalls of the moment when she first approached the animal's den on a steep slope at 10,200 feet. She soon heard a deep, low growl as the lynx appeared and then slunk off about 30 feet. Seizing her chance, Shenk immediately moved in, reached down, and pulled out two furry kittens so young that they had yet to open their eyes.

She weighed and tagged them quickly so as to disturb them as little as possible, then snapped a slew of photos to show off the fruits of the mother's labor. "We stayed for only 11 minutes," recalls Shenk. "But it was the most wonderful 11 minutes I've experienced in the last four years."
During the next month she and her team were able to find another 14 kittens in five additional litters, clear evidence that the lynx, which had been imported from Canada and Alaska, could survive—maybe even thrive—in a region where the species had not been seen for 30 years. "This changes the picture entirely," says Marc Bekoff, a University of Colorado animal-behavior researcher who had been critical of the initial reintroduction effort, the only one of its kind in the nation. "They had a very rough start. But it appears that patience is finally paying off."

He and others believe the recent success is due largely to changes in the way the animals were released into the wild. While the first batches were let loose amid a flurry of airplane rides and media camera flashes, in later releases "we fattened them up for a while and let them get acclimatized before we let them go," says Greg Walcher, executive director for Colorado's Department of Natural Resources, which oversees the program. "That made a huge difference."

Reintroductions of about 100 more animals planned for the next two years will follow the same "soft release" protocol. Yet the program's ultimate success will depend on whether the kittens from last spring's litters can survive the harsh high-country winter. "And then we need those kittens to have kittens of their own," says Shenk, who notes that lynx can reproduce after just 10 months. Such an achievement would be a clear sign that lynx are finally back in the Rockies to stay.

—Alex Markels

Q&A
The Making of a Classic

Photo by Lincoln Karim

Frederic Lilien abandoned his native Belgium, a law career, and a New York City hair salon before landing on his feet as an award-winning documentary filmmaker. His debut film, Pale Male, tells the story of the first red-tailed hawk known to have nested in modern-day Manhattan—on a Fifth Avenue penthouse overlooking Central Park, no less. In the film, Pale Male's costars are the park's hawk watchers, many of them members of New York City Audubon. Not long ago Audubon caught up with Lilien at a screening that was held in a packed auditorium and where the film received a standing ovation.

Question: When did you first see Pale Male?
Answer: I was having lunch in Central Park, eating a sandwich, and he landed right above my head. I was so amazed! I grew up in a small town in Belgium. I never thought I'd see a hawk in New York City.
Q: What fascinates people about Pale Male?
A: The flying. As humans we want to be able to soar, to fly. And he's a predator, at the top of the chain. He brings the thrill of the kill. He's not like a little chicken eating corn on the ground.
Q: The film has a strong narrative beyond just the hawk. How did you develop it?
A: When I picked up the camera, I thought, "I'm going to do a nature film." But when I saw the people involved, I realized there's another story here. I saw that people were going crazy, and I thought, "Pale Male is the reason these people are coming together."
Q: The film is very funny at times. What do you think is the most humorous part?
A: The montage of the people camping out waiting for the babies to fledge is very funny, because the classical music we selected fits so well with what's on the screen. In a nature film, you need to keep the viewer's attention, and humor is definitely a way to do it.
Q: How have the people on the so-called "hawk bench" reacted to the film?
A: They love it. Now they are movie stars!
Q: Where did the fledged baby hawks go?
A: They're not tagged, so we'll never know exactly. But there are hawks in all [of New York's] five boroughs. There are a few nesting on buildings; maybe that's something they learned from Pale Male.

—Abigail Wheeler

For a copy of Pale Male, go to www.palemalethemovie.com. The price is $19.95 (DVD or VHS), plus $4.95 for shipping and handling.

Tribute
Richard Pough: Man of Action

"Look at many of the truly impressive land-preservation achievements of the last 70 years," says John Flicker, president of National Audubon, "and you will discover Dick Pough was there at the beginning. He was a great conservationist and a dedicated Auduboner throughout his life."

Richard Hooper Pough (pronounced "Poe"), who died in June at the age of 99 at his home in Chilmark, Massachusetts, was a virtuoso at combining his own ideas and other people's money to get things done. Few people knew the extent or variety of his achievements. By publicizing the slaughter of raptors in Pennsylvania during the 1930s, he promoted support for the establishment of the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. In 1936 Pough joined Audubon to keep an eye on "persecuted species." He spent two months living in a cabin in Louisiana's Singer Tract, monitoring a lone female ivory-billed woodpecker that called constantly but did not find a mate. During World War II Pough was one of the first to spread the alarm about the potential hazards of the new "miracle" insecticide, DDT. After the war he wrote the popular series of Audubon Bird Guides, which sold more than a million copies.

But mostly Pough was a wheeler-dealer developer turned inside out, reaching for great swatches of land not to exploit but to retire in perpetuity. In 1950 he became a founder of the Nature Conservancy, and later its president. "I only propose alternatives," he said. "If someone complains that a majestic forest is about to be cut down, I ask, 'Are you a man or a mouse? Don't cry about the forest. Go out and buy it!’' "

Some of the finest Audubon sanctuaries, including Corkscrew Swamp in Florida and Francis Beidler Forest in South Carolina, owe their existence to Pough's initiative long after he left Audubon. His greatest coup came through his contact with Katherine Ordway, an heiress to the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company fortune. "She wanted to take part in philanthropic work, and Dick helped persuade her to buy up prairie land, which he considered the most neglected of America's ecological systems," recalls Flicker, who worked with Pough on prairie acquisitions. Ordway channeled her millions through her Goodhill Foundation, which Pough administered and served as president of after her death. All told, he helped parcel out nearly $55 million for priceless prairies, forests, and shore lands. Dick Pough was never a mouse, always a man.

—Frank Graham Jr.

Green Building
The Tallest Tallgrass Prairie

It may bill itself as "The Prairie State," but in Illinois, native prairie has dwindled to a mere fraction of what existed when European settlers arrived. The good news is that native prairie is growing again, in this instance, 11 stories above the street, atop Chicago's City Hall. What's more, similar green spaces are sprouting up throughout the city's concrete jungle.

Planted between 2000 and 2001, the 20,000-square-foot City Hall garden contains more than 160 different plants, including natives such as big bluestem and prairie crabapple and hawthorn trees. They grow in special lightweight soil designed to minimize weight and maximize water absorption. "Green roofs are part of combating air pollution and making Chicago a healthy city," says Marcia Jimenez, the city's commissioner of the environment.

Traditional, dark-colored rooftops absorb sunlight and radiate heat, making cities 5 to 6 degrees hotter on average than surrounding areas. And because higher temperatures intensify the photochemical reactions of airborne pollutants and increase energy consumption, dark roofs mean more smog. For urban areas like Chicago, where a sudden downpour can lead to the discharge of raw sewage into waterways, a green roof's ability to absorb rainfall is an added benefit.

Currently, nationwide, the Environmental Protection Agency is assessing various rooftop alterations, such as using sun-reflective materials, painting roofs lighter colors, and covering them with vegetation. The City Hall garden in Chicago is one of this program's showcase projects.

Rooftop gardens first appeared in Germany three decades ago, and since then they have spread across Europe and into Canada. In this country they have recently appeared on houses, commercial buildings, and parking structures from Seattle to Washington, D.C. Besides curbing smog, the gardens result in heating and cooling savings.

To date, there are nearly 50 public and private buildings scattered throughout Chicago, with a total of more than 600,000 square feet of garden.

—Joe Bower

Fire Ecology
Follow That Blaze

Photo by Raymond Meeks

Some people fight fires. Others, like Paul Belanger, state education coordinator for Montana Audubon, prefer scouring a burned area of the Bitterroot National Forest for birds. He's not alone. This past summer Belanger led a team of nine citizen scientists that included local residents, high school students, and chapter members from Five Valleys Audubon and Bitterroot Audubon. Their mission: to count the black-backed woodpeckers, three-toad woodpeckers, and other cavity-nesting birds they were able to find in the charred hollows of trees in a recently proposed Important Bird Area (IBA).

"Early postfire habitat supports unique bird communities, and we're interested in maintaining that biodiversity," says David Lockman, a U.S. Forest Service biologist in the Bitterroot National Forest. In 2001 he nominated 10,000 blazed acres for IBA status; the area was part of 350,000 acres that had burned in the forest the previous year. (Today Montana Audubon is working toward nominating the entire Bitterroot forest as an IBA.) Pioneered by Montana Audubon and state officials, the potential IBA now serves as a conceptual model for a new class of IBAs known as "ephemeral" because the designation lasts only as long as the nesting birds rely on the burned habitat.

Although IBA status carries no regulatory standing, it is an effective way to protect threatened or endangered birds by formally drawing attention to critical habitat.

The groundwork for ephemeral IBAs was laid more than a decade ago when University of Montana biologist Dick Hutto began looking at bird communities in burned forests and found a surprising diversity of species, including many targeted for conservation. "We're hard-pressed to find black-backed woodpeckers anywhere but in burned areas," Hutto says.

Like black-backed woodpeckers, however, logging companies value the timber left standing after a fire. Belanger and his group of citizen scientists are determined to show that a burned forest is suitable for more than just salvage logging.

"We need to change the perception people have of fire and postfire habitat," says Belanger. "We want to be sensitive to those who have been affected by fire, but we have to show this [fire] is what keeps a forest healthy."

—Ken Kostel