Left to right: Chief of Staff of the US Air Force Academy Col. R. R. Gideon, Academy Superintendent Lieut. Gen. H. R. Harmon (holding ‘Mach I’) and Harold Webster, falconer.
HUNGRY AND MR GALILEO
With almost inevitable logic, USAF falcons have made it to the moon. In July 1971, standing by Apollo 15’s Falcon landing module, Commander David Scott grasped a feather from a USAFA mascot prairie falcon called ‘Hungry’ in one gloved hand and a geological hammer in the other. Unrecorded by stills camera, this episode exists only as blurred video footage, a strange, charged mix of science and popular entertainment. Scott’s voice breaks enthusiastically through the white noise of the lunar transmission:
One of the reasons we got here today was because of a gentleman named Galileo a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields . . . The feather happens to be appropriately a falcon feather, for our Falcon, and I’ll drop the two here, and hopefully they’ll hit the ground at the same time . . .20
They fall in tandem to the surface of the moon. Pause. ‘This proves that Mr Galileo was correct in his findings,’ Scott announces. Wondrous symbolism: rather than a hammer and sickle, here is a hammer and an American falcon feather, bathed in stark sunshine through an auratic haze of lunar dust. Scott’s recapitulation of a crucial experiment is broadcast as the summation of science’s triumph in the conquest of space – America claiming the right to prove the laws of nature. And training a hawk can prove one’s patriotism, too. ‘In the final analysis,’ cadet falconer Cadet Peterson explains earnestly, the US Air Force Academy’s falcons ‘don’t have to impress us, we’ve got to prove to them that we are worthy of their trust.’21
Lying on the moon, a prairie falcon’s curved flight feather and a geological hammer offer an all-American riposte to the Soviet hammer and sickle.
Fittingly for a bird so meshed with national and martial iconographies, twentieth-century falcon stories are rich with espionage. Sometimes it’s merely literary: in The Hooded Hawk Mystery, the Hardy Boys’ peregrine foils a gem-smuggling ring by slaying ruby-carrying racing pigeons. And Hasbro Toys’ 2000 Falcon Attak [sic] Action Man comes with a natty fringed leather arm-brace and a surveilling cyber-falcon you can launch across the room. Sometimes it’s real, and just as peculiar. Back in 1940 a New York Times headline ran: ‘Hints At Goering Aim In Visiting Greenland: Ex-Air Corps Pilot Suspects A Purpose Beyond Falconry.’ Below it, Captain Meredith suggested that ‘now Germany has taken Denmark, considerable significance might be attached to the “falcon expedition” sent by Field Marshal Hermann Goering to Greenland in 1938’. ‘To be sure,’ he remarked drily,
Field Marshal Goering is, like myself, an amateur falconer, but at a time when Germany was undergoing such economic and political changes one wonders why he would go to all the trouble and expense just to get six Gyrfalcons. five members of the expedition spent almost six months in Greenland, and during that time they could not have escaped a lot of general, and perhaps specific, observations.22
Strange symmetries existed: Goering and Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, commanders-in-chief of Luftwaffe and RAF respectively, were keen falconers both. So was the most infamous American spy of the 1970s, Christopher Boyce. Boyce worked at US spy satellite manufacturer TRW, where his extra-curricular activities included flying falcons in the California hills, making daiquiris in the top-secret-document shredder, and selling secret spy-satellite information to the Soviet Union under his nom de plume ‘The Falcon’. Boyce was played by Timothy Hutton in John Schlesinger’s 1985 film The Falcon and the Snowman. Schlesinger leans heavily on the familiar falcon symbolism, bringing the camera in to linger on the dark eyes of the peregrine as FBI agents close in to arrest Boyce: grand motifs of freedom, infinite vision and mastery of the sky.
FALCON 2020
But surely, one might ask, what about eagles? Wasn’t it an eagle that Roman centurions carried on their battle standards, the eagle on the seal of the United States, or the German and Austro-Hungarian flags? Agreed: but these eagles map to nation-states, not to modern war. Eagles are large, impressive, powerful. They connote old-fashioned styles of warfare: huge armies, large-scale infantry movements and massive and deliberate strength. Falcons, however, are small. They possess immense speed, mobility and range. Falcons, not eagles, are the iconic animals of post-modern, network-centric war, built on the concepts of global vision, surveillance, rapid deployment and lightning strike. They allow a naturalization of what cultural commentator Paul Virilio describes as ‘pure’ weapons, weapons whose destructive capability is a function not of their massive power, but ‘the rapidity and extreme precision of [their] delivery – and this as much in the sighting or surveillance of enemy movements as in the selectiveness and stealth of the strike’.23
In blue-sky documents such as Joint Vision 2020 the US military dreams of future battlefields.24 A digitized world, a seamless integration of biological units – soldiers, pilots and so on – with high technology. Military superiority is built on knowing where everything is, coupled with the ability to intervene in near real-time. Drenched in the terminology of complexity and air-power theory, it is a dream somewhat sullied by recent events in Iraq; winning a battle is different from strategic victory. Built on speed and omniscience, C4ISR is the preferred acronym for this metaphysical mix: Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. Such is the fearsome hunger of this dream of digitized war that these military networks extend beyond the merely human and beyond the exigencies of landscape to incorporate animals too.
The idea of incorporating wild animals into military surveillance networks for conservation ends was first mooted in America in 1966 at a NASA-sponsored wildlife conference. Speakers Frank and John Craighead were no longer excited teenage falconer-photographers: they were now eminent wildlife biologists and ex-field-intelligence operatives who’d written the US Navy’s Second World War survival guide. Satellites could be used to track wildlife movements, they suggested. Perhaps one could integrate wildlife-tracking data with Landsat imagery or spy-photographs from the USAF/CIA U-2 surveillance programme. Their paper was prescient.
One champion of the peregrine during the DDT years was F. Prescott Ward, a falconer and chemical and biological warfare expert who worked as an ecologist at the US Army’s chemical weapons testing ground in Maryland. He helped the Peregrine Fund organize a spectacularly successful release of young peregrines from an old chemical-shell-testing gantry. Swords to ploughshares. But Ward had bigger plans: a large-scale study of the migratory habits of the tundra peregrine. These beautiful, pale, diminutive peregrines congregated on east coast beaches on their way southwards in the fall. So tame you could practically walk up and touch them, they’d been trapped by falconers for years. Falconer trappers like Alva Nye and Jim Rice knew these falcons bred in the far north, and wintered in the south. But no one knew exactly where, or the routes they took. What had been a wistful conundrum in the 1930s and ’40s became an important question in the post-DDT era. For while DDT had been banned in the continental United States, it was still used further south. These migratory populations were still threatened.
And so Ward and his co-workers on the project trapped and banded migrating peregrines on the east coast; other falcon-minded researchers, like arctic specialist William Mattox, who was central in instigating the Greenland Peregrine Falcon Survey in 1972, banded falcons far further north. Others went south, hoping to spot wintering peregrines. Overall the project was as politically fascinating as it was biologically; it involved international agreements signed by the US/USSR Working Group on Wildlife, and White House staff joined the research team. But politics were no help in re-encountering banded falcons: this required luck, and the resulting migration data sets were inevitably sparse. What everyone really wanted, of course, was to capture the entire spatio-temporal pattern of a migration. So, after experimenting with falcon-mounted radiotransmitters tracked from light
aircraft, the idea of miniature backpack-mounted satellite tags was mooted.
A satellite-tagged peregrine shortly before release.
One-kilogram satellite transmitters had already been produced by the 1980s: splendid for tracking polar bears and caribou but clearly a little impractical for birds. Joint military-university research soon triumphed, however, with a new generation of miniature satellite transmitters. Known as Satellite Platform Transmitter Terminals (PTTS), they initially weighed around 200 grams – swan and goose-sized birds alone could carry them. They now weigh less than 20 grams. The PTT is mounted on the bird’s back using a soft, carefully designed, temporary harness. And then the bird is released, its location determined remotely from the Doppler shift in the carrier frequency transmitted by the tag as the receiving satellite passes overhead. Service Argos, the French-operated sensor system carried on NOAA weather satellites, picks up the signals, and calculations of the bird’s position are conducted at data-processing centres in France and Maryland – and the Air Force Space Command tracking facility in Colorado provides orbital elements for each satellite.
‘IN GOD WE TRUST: ALL OTHERS WE MONITOR’25
CCRT’s logo shows America as a montage of predatory animal gazes.
The peregrine migration study rolled into the twenty-first century under the aegis of the US Department of Defense’s ‘Partners in Flight’ programme, and the private/university/government partnership the Center for Conservation Research and Technology (CCRT). The Department of Defense is the third largest landowner in the US and is legally obliged to protect endangered animals on its land. Proving grounds and missile-testing ranges are not optimal habitats for roving field biologists, so remotely tracking animals by satellite or radio is a practical solution. Yet monitoring animals in this way has ideological benefits for the US military, too. Back in the 1940s Aldo Leopold introduced the notion of the ‘land mechanism’ in ecology, metaphorizing ecosystems as complex engines of cogs and wheels. It was a conception of nature fitted to the discourse of technocratic militarism. CCRT biologists describe satellite-tagged peregrines as ‘taste-testers’ discovering ‘hot spots along their route of dangerous pesticides and other threats to survival’.26 Here the falcon is a biological probe sent out to assess the environment, a hybrid of Predator UAV and miner’s canary. And satellite-tagged peregrines are more than mere monitoring instruments. CCRT biologist Tom Maechtle mused on how satellite tracking ‘turns the animal into a partner with the researcher’. ‘You can think of a peregrine as a biologist who has been sent out to find and sample other birds,’ he explains.27
Maechtle’s words are familiar: once again, here is a falcon biologist identifying strongly with his subject, just as the Craigheads saw their young, adventurous field-biologist selves mirrored in the eyes of the peregrine. And Los Angeles Times science writer Robert Lee Hotz is at pains to point out that this new kind of science doesn’t threaten the old ways. Not all modern biologists stare at computer screens under fluorescent strip-lights, listening to the hum of climate control instead of birdsong. ‘Despite these advanced tracking technologies,’ he writes, ‘the biologists . . . still must catch the birds by hand.’28 The social identity of the adventurous field biologist is unthreatened by satellite tracking. Stamina, field-craft, practical skills: these are all still required. And thus, high technology and global vision are linked with individual heroism and the soul of the wild frontier.
A heady mix. For while their conservation benefit is unarguable, the inner logic of these defence-funded tracking efforts is breathtaking. As each individuated falcon is tracked across global space, it carries far more than simply its location. CCRT calls the tagged bird a ‘sentinel animal’. Each symbolically extends US technological and military dominance even as it offers myths of ‘one world’ environmentalism: global surveillance systems track ‘American’ falcons as they penetrate airspace as far south as Buenos Aires and the headwaters of the Amazon. These augmented falcons join together two incommensurable worlds – those of military/war and nature/peace. These concepts seem naturally opposed, but the satellite-tagged falcon closes the divide. The myth of falcon-as-warplane meets the myth of falcon as unparalleled symbol of wild nature, the tagged falcon a halfway house between the two systems of nature and culture, between national defence and the defence of national nature. One might see the satellite-tagged falcon as an ultimate naturalization for the military, which not only defends nature, but also promotes the notion of an ecosystem as just another complex technological system, something entirely integratable into C4ISR systems.
A new generation of bird-borne PTTS will carry advanced sensors to detect speed, temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure, digital audio capture systems and even miniature video cameras. Sound familiar? Over the past few years, developments in US military unmanned aerial systems have produced tiny Kevlar and carbon military drones that hover or fly hundreds of feet above the battlefield, tracking military vehicles and sending live video feeds to the laptops of unit commanders. And in Idaho military training grounds, CCRT has satellite-tracked raptors in conjunction with the Deployable-Force-on-Force Instrumented Range System (DFIRST) to demonstrate the feasibility of integrating automated military tracking systems with natural resource management technology, simultaneously tracking the movement of raptors and military vehicles. The bird is tracked as an object in a system of objects. And those other objects happen to be military.
Strategic Air Command meets Animal Planet: a graphic of the travels of a satellite-tagged falcon.
Indeed, in Alaska, the US Air Force has designated peregrine nests as surface-to-air missile sites. ‘By designating known nests as simulated “threat emitter sites (areas that pilots must avoid as part of their routine training program)”,’ reports explain, ‘the Air Force has continued realistic training while simultaneously protecting nesting peregrine falcons. This species is now recovered.’29 The wording is highly ambiguous, suggesting that by including peregrine nests on TacAir training maps, the USAF has defended and saved the peregrine. In terms of one particular strand of falcon iconography, that might very well be true. Nature and the military achieve a discursive equality – they become symbolically equal when their positions are read through battle software, on a battle map. Defending the falcon is defending the nation. Attila would have been proud.
six
Urban Falcons
Even in a big city, the falcon’s world is different from man’s, and the two converge only at rare moments when we humans make a special effort to meet the falcon on her own terms.1
YOU SHARE AIRSPACE with the peregrine over London in Charles Tunnicliffe’s 1923 woodcut, and its aviator’s vantage too: that sense of power over, and separation from, the city below. And you and the falcon both possess that other ferociously modern ability, that of being able to set yourself against the sweep of history. Here is Roger Tory Peterson, writing in 1948:
Man has emerged from the shadows of antiquity with a peregrine on his wrist. Its dispassionate brown eyes, more than those of any other bird, have been witness to the struggle for civilisation, from the squalid tents on the steppes of Asia thousands of years ago to the marble halls of European Kings in the seventeenth century.2
One of the less obvious roles of wild animals is to signify history. They can do so because they are perceived as immortal. Clearly, animals aren’t immortal in the physical sense, and nor is this the animal immortality espoused by academic theoreticians, among whom at least one thinks that animals are technically immortal because they possess no language.3 This form of immortality rests on a far more straightforward phenomenon: that a falcon is a falcon. The same falcon. Whenever it’s lived, wherever it is. A fourteenth-century gyrfalcon is as indistinguishable from a modern gyrfalcon as is the peregrine photographed at its eyrie in the 1920s from the peregrine photographed there today. Civilizations rise and fall, fashions change, but feathers remain the same. And so all falcons, past, present and future, are routinely represented
as if they are a single bird. A symbolic type specimen. This is the ‘immortality’ that gives animals an extraordinary facility for the signification of history. Like an antique vase, the falcon gains value and meaning from the hands it has passed through. Today’s gyrfalcon is lauded because, in one sense, it’s the same bird that Henry VIII or Genghis Khan flew, the same bird that’s nested for millennia on ice-capped Arctic cliffs. And this is how Peterson’s falcon partakes of what Nietzsche described as the superhistorical spirit of the modern age.
Tunnicliffe’s peregrine has a name: but it is a family name; it too is immortal. For this is Chakcheck, Henry Williamson’s supreme icon of aristocratic romanticism, and the hero of his 1923 nature fable The Peregrine’s Saga, a tale far more disturbing than Tarka the Otter. The Chakcheck lineage is ancient, ‘older than the gods of man’, explains Williamson, establishing the falcon in a longue durée framework of essential Britishness. ‘A Chakcheck surveyed the Battle of Trafalgar,’ he continues. ‘Another slew the Frenchman’s message-pigeons before Sedan. One was in Ypres before the first bombardment.’ And on he goes:
A Chakcheck was hunting the airways of the Two Rivers’s estuary as the ships went over the bar to join Drake’s fleet; centuries before, when Phoenicians first came to trade; long, long before, when moose roamed in the forest which stood where the Pebble Ridge of Westward Ho! now lies – the trees are long since gone under the sand, drowned by the sea.4
A peregrine falcon high over London in an illustration by Charles Tunnicliffe for Henry Williamson’s The Peregrine’s Saga (1934 edition).
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