Peregrine Quest: From a Naturalist's Field Notebook by Clayton M. White
Western North American Naturalist
Peregrine Quest: From a Naturalist's Field Notebook by Clay ton M. W hite
C. Riley Nelson 0 1
Western 0 1
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1 C. Riley Nelson Department of Biology Brigham Young University Provo , Utah 84602 , USA
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BOOK REVIEW
It is good to know what you like early in your
life; then you can accomplish much with it.
Clayton White found that he liked falcons early in his
life and has been traveling the world or, as he
says, following “trails” ever since: “In a sense,
one’s life experiences are like a series of
interconnected paths, or trails, each leading from the
past to the future in directions that are
sometimes familiar, sometimes unexpected. This book
is about those trails and how I have found
meaning in life’s expressions” [page xxi]. It is very
important to read the prologue of this book
because it provides the reader with a frame of
reference for the author’s experiences as he
presents bits, chops, chips, and flakes along the way.
Oh, that we all better understood our
motivations for doing the things we do each day! The
lifetime of biological research summarized in the
field notebook section comes out as brilliant
flashes of insight scattered in the mundane
movements and data recording of a field
biologist’s day-to-day life. This book is worth reading
for those insights alone.
Early on, White witnessed the decline of the
Peregrine Falcon to dangerously low population
numbers across broad bands of its range. He
clearly admits that this decline allowed him to
see the world through the eyes of this wandering
bird, which is probably the most widely
distributed species of terrestrial vertebrate on earth.
His own peregrinations for this wandering bird
have taken him nearly from pole to pole. From
Alaska and the Aleutians to Argentina, Australia,
the Amazon, central Asia, and Fiji, White has
literally gone to land’s end to understand this bird
on its own cliffs.
In all these travels, Alaska clearly holds a
special place in White’s psyche. Perhaps the
interconnected trails he speaks of earlier converge
there, as do the ranges of several of the Peregrine
Falcon subspecies that he loves. Others might
have found professional, parsimonious, and
efficient satisfaction by learning of relatedness from
tubes of tissue in a laboratory. White first went to
the birds on the cliffs, riverbends, and islands
where he filled the tubes; then he sought
secondary confirmation (or sometimes refutation) of
his ideas about phylogeny, ecology, and life
history from the lab-bench sequencers and
computer simulators. He experienced the search in
real time and space, and loved the research at
scales not relevant to day-to-day encounters, but
informative in a reductionist modality. He sought
out collaborators for his field research and for
the lab work as well. A thoughtful reading of his
sections labeled “Side Trips” and “Postscripts”
will give you access to White’s aesthetic, earned
by working both with falcons and with an
amazingly wide variety of people.
Because he worked with such a high-profile
conservation icon as the Peregrine Falcon, White
can also speak of dealing firsthand with politicos
and decision-makers. He pulls few punches in
noting the relative intelligence and honesty of
the various players with whom he rubbed
shoulders during his quest to help the falcons recover
from decline. And amid all this self-interest, bias,
and fervor, White concludes that the amazing
return of the Peregrine Falcon from the brink of
annihilation to the brink of building cornices and
far-flung cliffs worldwide may have simply been
a natural event, not necessarily mediated by the
watchful care, which scientists predicted would
be needed based on results from countless
surveys, artificial rearings, and transplantations.
However, it is quite clear that he would agree
with a paraphrasing of Thomas Jefferson that
“the price of free falcons is eternal vigilance.” By
carefully watching the individual components of
the living world, namely species, we will gain
confidence (and inspiration) that we will see
positive changes, which will indicate that more efforts
such as White’s are needed. Read the book. (...truncated)