CLINTON, Iowa — The third time was a charm.
After two failed attempts on Friday to install nest boxes on cliffs overlooking the Mississippi River to attract peregrine falcons, Bob Anderson finally succeeded in getting a box installed in Eagle Point Park.
To put up the boxes, Anderson rappels over the side of a cliff while colleagues at the top stand ready to lower materials he will need — tools, hardware and the box itself (a hefty 3 feet wide, 22 inches tall and 22 inches deep), plus the pea gravel that lines it.
As Friday’s efforts proved, the operation doesn’t always go as planned. In the first location on private land near Sabula, the cliff overhang proved to be too far out, and the rappellers couldn’t get close enough to the cliff.
It wasn’t for lack of trying.
“They went over 15 times,” Rhoni Hartsock, of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service at the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife Refuge in Savanna, Ill., said.
A second location about three miles away didn’t work, because once the rappellers got on the cliff face they found too many trees — there wasn’t enough open area and “the falcons wouldn’t be attracted to it,” Hartsock said.
So, they tried the third location in Eagle Point and that worked — the latest step in a nearly 20-year effort to reintroduce the once-endangered peregrine falcon into Iowa and Illinois and throughout the nation, an effort that is lauded as an environmental success story.
To date, Iowa has gone from having no peregrine falcons at all to 14 known nesting pairs — largely in the Quad-City region — that fledged 21 young birds this past season, said Pat Schlarbaum of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
There are 22 known nesting pairs in Illinois.
To celebrate the success, there will be a program at 11 a.m. today in the north shelter in Eagle Point Park.
Historically, peregrine falcons nested in cliff areas throughout Iowa and Illinois. But in the mid-1900s, their populations were decimated by the use of the pesticide DDT, which caused egg shell thinning, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
The recovery effort in Iowa began in the early 1990s when young falcons, raised in captivity, were placed into boxes at the MCI building in Cedar Rapids, the Elsie Mason Manor building in Des Moines and atop the Stanley building in Muscatine.
Eventually, there were sufficient numbers that wildlife workers began putting nesting boxes on tall structures, such as power plant smokestacks with the expectation that falcons could find them and begin raising their own young, Schlarbaum said.
That is what happened, and now the reintroduction is in another phase in which the nesting boxes are being put in natural areas — the cliffs where they lived originally and the last place they were found before their populations crashed, Schlarbaum said.
The advantage of putting boxes on the cliffs is that they protect the eggs and young birds from raccoons, who are a troublesome predator.
At the third site in Clinton on Friday, Anderson knew right away — the first time over the cliff — that the location would work, Hartsock said. The installation took about two hours. In addition to watching out for loose rock, Anderson has to work his legs so they don’t fall asleep.
The number of nesting pairs in Iowa and Illinois is a vast improvement from 20 years ago, but there is room for improvement, said Ed Britton, manager with the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife Refuge.
Once listed as an endangered species in both states, the peregrine falcon now is listed as “threatened” in Illinois and a “species of special concern” in Iowa.
“We’re getting there,” Britton said. “But 22 pairs in a state that’s 300 miles long — that’s not very many. We’ve got a long ways to go.”
The hope is that once peregrines get used to the cliff environment, they will begin building their own nests in Palisades Park and in the bluffs around Bellevue, Anderson said.
Anderson, now of Decorah, Iowa, is a nationwide leader in the preservation of falcons, eagles, ospreys, hawks and owls. In 1988, he founded the Raptor Resource Project and pioneered the practice of putting up nest boxes at power plants, beginning in 1988 in Minnesota.
“It was a unique marriage,” he said.
Since then, 1,500 young falcons have fledged from power plant nests, he said.
Bob Anderson, founder of the Raptor Resource Project, rappels down the side of a cliff to install a nest box.
