We’re up here for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as a team of four: myself and another cinematographer, a camera assistant, and a wilderness guide. And over the next three weeks, we’re floating 160 miles attempting to film the hawks and falcons that come here every year to nest on the cliffs above the Colville River.
The real emblem for this place is the Arctic Peregrine Falcon, the northernmost nesting peregrine in North America. And the one bird on this trip that we absolutely have to film.
[Gerrit onscreen]: We’ve come about a half a mile, and we’re already seeing our first Arctic peregrine nest over here on the other side of the river. It’s either on eggs or really small chicks, it’s starting to nestle back into the nest.
[Gerrit onscreen]: Most of the hawks, eagles, falcons up here nest on cliffs.
[Gerrit voiceover]: The thing that makes nesting on these cliffs so appealing to raptors is an obstacle to filming them. They’re situated to keep terrestrial predators away, which essentially, we are.
[Gerrit onscreen]: We’re just watching it from a distance. So, we’re in a place we can’t really film, but we’re going to keep on floating and see what else we can find.
[Gerrit voiceover]: The Colville River originates in Alaska’s Brooks Range. It drains one of the largest Arctic watersheds in the world and runs more than 400 miles to the Arctic Ocean. It’s the longest river in Arctic Alaska, and forms much of the eastern boundary of the 23 million acre National Petroleum Reserve. To protect nesting Peregrine Falcons and other biological resources, a corridor along the river was designated in 1977 as the Colville River Special Area.
At the time, the Peregrine Falcon was listed as an endangered species and the Colville River was known as a place where they once thrived and could potentially recover.
[Gerrit onscreen]: This river cutting through the tundra, has produced an enormous number of cliffs and bluffs, and just the kind of places that raptors like to nest. And the Peregrine Falcon feeds on the birds that migrate up here. As you go down the river, the vegetation becomes very tall and attracts songbirds from around the world. And then eventually, the river spills out into the Arctic coastal plain, where waterbirds, shorebirds, waterfowl all come to nest.
It’s just an amazing bounty of birds. This place just has everything a falcon needs to survive and to produce the next generation.
Day after day, we would float the river until we found a place where we thought we had nests we wanted to film. We’d set up a field camp, and we begin the process of observing and hiking and looking at nest sites. At each nest site, we would evaluate; what kind of light would it get? Would we be able to get close enough? Are the adults that are tending to the nest shy, or are they alarmed by our presence in a way that felt too invasive?
So, you’re looking at that big, like, slab of rock? Rough-legged Hawk. Okay.
[Gerrit voiceover]: Rough-legged Hawks primarily spend the winter across southern Canada and the northern United States, and many return here each year to breed.
When raptor chicks are this young, they’re at their most vulnerable. And this female Rough-legged Hawk spends most of her time taking care of the nest and the chicks, while the male hunts the tundra for voles and lemmings. She tries to chase off the biting flies and other insects. She cleans and refurbishes the nest.
When it’s hot, she shields her chicks from the sun. When it’s cold and raining, she hunkers down to keep them warm, and she preens them and interacts with them.
She also spends a lot of time waiting, looking skyward and calling for her mate to bring her food. These hawks are off to a great start this year. But it’ll take a lot to raise all of these chicks to fledging age.
[Gerrit onscreen]: I think we should leave tomorrow. That rough-leg was amazing. But even in the next 3 or 4 miles of river, there’s some really nice cliffs. Hopefully we can find another peregrine.
Whoa! Huge bear poop right there. Oh, God. Oh, man. This is the spot where the Gyrfalcons pluck their prey. Ptarmigan feathers. Ptarmigan feathers.
There’s a few mosquitoes.
We’ve got a little ledge, a good distance from a nest.
Been hot and sunny all day. We get in the boat – deluge. A little wet, buddy?
Well, a bit of a sad moment here. We’ve been watching this single Gyrfalcon chick really struggling to eat. And we’ve been suspecting that it’s got a bone or something caught in its throat. Really was not looking well, especially yesterday. And after that, we had about 24 hours of just a pounding rain and the female’s soaking wet, disheveled on the nest, but still committed.
Sitting there, trying to keep the chick warm. After a while she started calling incessantly. The male brought her some food, and she just started eating voraciously. I didn’t see the chick a single time during this whole episode. And then when she was done, she got up, started poking around the nest, and my worst fears came to fruition.
The chick had died. She picked up the chick and kind of walked out to the edge of the nest and flew off with it. And just a couple of minutes after that, she came back. She landed up on top of the cliff here and just kind of started running around from rock to rock and peering down and looking into the nest.
Instinctually, she’s been sitting on this nest, incubating the eggs, hatching the eggs, feeding these chicks, and then suddenly, it’s just an empty nest. She’ll be back next year. Maybe to the same spot. Maybe a spot close by. And her, and perhaps the same mate, will try again.
[Gerrit voiceover]: There’s success or failure for these birds each time a predator is just able to reach your nest on a cliff ledge. Or each time you catch a ptarmigan or just miss. Or in the resilience of your chick to withstand another hour or two in a rainstorm. These large landscapes support all of those variables falling either way every year and ultimately is what keeps these populations viable over decades, over millennia.
[Gerrit onscreen]: So, we just left our camp, and an incredible white morph Gyrfalcon was on the next cliff. Really mature chicks on a beautiful overhang. So, we’re up this steep scree here, trying to build some platforms to figure out some angles, but it’s looking pretty good.
[Gerrit voiceover]: These big chicks are right on the verge of leaving this crowded nest for the first time. They’re exercising their wings, losing their last bits of down, and getting ready for their first flight.
Gyrfalcons are more successful raising chicks in years when there are high numbers of ptarmigan. They are big, powerful birds capable of catching ptarmigan and carrying them in flight to feed their chicks.
The female Gyrfalcon brought food to the nest and instead of leaving it, she flew off with it, enticing one of the chicks to fly from the nest to the food left on the rocks down below.
The chick fed and then used its limited flight skills to aid its long climb up the cliff to rejoin its siblings. Within days, all of these chicks will be out in the world. And those that survive their first few years may return to the cliffs of the Colville to breed.
[Gerrit onscreen]: As we traveled down the river, we were continually amazed by this incredible abundance of raptor nests.
You see nest after nest after nest, wherever there’s available cliff faces to nest on. Some of them are old nests. Some of them are active nests. But the sheer density of nests for miles and miles is just astonishing.
Even where I’m sitting here right now, this cliff complex beside me, we had a Rough-legged Hawk nest, a Gyrfalcon nest, a Rough-legged Hawk nest, a Peregrine Falcon nest, and then another Peregrine Falcon nest. All within eyesight of where I sit right now.
Filming the peregrines has been by far the hardest part of this trip. The farther we went down the river the more and more nervous we got that we were not going to find a nest that was suitable to film.
But finally, we were able to find an absolutely stunning nest.
[Gerrit onscreen]: The one to the right of that is where the male’s been sitting.
We’ve just made about a three-mile hike and climb to finally get up here and do some filming, and we’re in our last 48 hours and for the first time in about a week, all of a sudden, it’s decided to start pouring rain.
And it just looks like rain as far as you can see. So, we will be sitting here as long as it takes and hopefully, be able to move a blind in somewhere where we can start filming the birds.
Finally, I’ve gotten the camera set up on the peregrine nest. There she is.
It’s a little brighter.
[Gerrit voiceover]: We return to the National Petroleum Reserve in the Colville River, three weeks later at the end of the nesting season to film the wilderness landscape as winter approached, and a check on some of the birds we had gotten to know. You know that footage with the little white, Rough-legged Hawk chicks? That’s one of the chicks grown up, up there on the hill begging.
[Gerrit onscreen]: That’s pretty awesome. Look at that. This juvenile peregrine is still up here. They’re going to pick up any day now and start moving their way down to South America. Absolutely incredible. These birds could be in downtown Buenos Aires chasing bats this winter. And they’re returning back up here to this incredible landscape.
Very few people have the opportunity to come someplace like this. But just knowing that beyond the farthest horizon, there are still wild places. Places where creatures like bears and wolves and falcons roam, is something that we as Americans are so fortunate to have.
And these special areas in the National Petroleum Reserve in America’s Arctic, these are remarkable lands.
They’re irreplaceable. Not only for these birds. But for our own spirits. They should always be protected.
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