Grayson isn’t the type of friend I normally make when I travel. For one thing, while I enthusiastically count Grayson among my friends, he doesn’t even know I exist. For another, Grayson looks a bit different than most of my friends. Grayson is a harpy eagle, and he is one of the ambassador birds at the Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho.
Magnificent in shades of gray and white, Grayson is pretty big. Harpy eagles can weigh up to twenty pounds, and that size, combined with their gray headdress feathers, give them a rather menacing appearance. But I’m not fooled, and I’m immediately in love with my new friend.
Grayson is one of more than a dozen new friends I make in an afternoon spent at the center, which operates as the visitors side of the Peregrine Fund’s headquarters. The birds here are ambassadors, mainly having been raised in captivity, likely unable to survive in the wild if released. They serve to educate people on the importance of the Peregrine Fund’s work breeding and maintaining these magnificent birds of prey that are so integral to their natural environments and the balance within them.
The Peregrine Fund was founded in 1970 by Cornell ornithology professor Tom Cade in response to its namesake species, the peregrine falcon, being added to the US endangered species list. Cade believed that breeding the birds in captivity and then releasing them into the wild would help the population, which had drastically fallen due in large part to the pesticide DDT, which weakened falcon eggshells and led to a decline in births.
In 1974, a breeding center opened in Fort Collins, Colorado. Ten years later, in 1984, the entire operation relocated here to Boise. (The story given to me is that a brewery wanted a highway exit that would go through the Fort Collins property. With the money they received for selling that property, the Peregrine Fund relocated here, combining that cash influx with a land donation by Morley Nelson. More on him in a moment.)
The breeding program was a stunning success. Between 1974 and the end of the century, the Peregrine Fund released more than 4,000 peregrine falcons into the wild, leading to the removal of the species from the endangered list! (Actually, the majority of current wild peregrines descend from these birds that were bred in captivity.)…