Baby hawks

This discouraging story appeared in the Times on May 13. The excerpts below are for those who can’t read it online. I suppose it’s remarkable that hawks try to raise families in Manhattan at all.

Three nestlings born in recent weeks to red-tailed hawks in the south end of Riverside Park in Manhattan are believed to have died, bird experts said on Monday.

The body of only one young hawk — or eyas — has been recovered so far. The city’s avid bird-watchers have confirmed that the other two babies are not in their West Side nest and are feared dead as well....

“On Sunday morning I went out at 7 a.m.,” Dr. [Leslie] Day said in a phone interview on Monday. “Standing at the nest, I could see there were no babies. They had become so large, standing at the rim, strengthening their wings.” ...

While the cause of death awaits a toxicology analysis, Dr. Day suspected that the parents may have fed the nestlings pigeons or rats that contained lethal levels of poison — a common cause of death for the delicate hawks.

In his website palemale.com, where the photo above appears, photographer Lincoln Karim later wrote, “UC Davis lab results are in for the 1st retrieved baby hawk from Riverside Park: Blood/organ samples contained lethal levels of two anti-coagulant rodenticides.... All poisoning of animals must stop now! Starting with Riverside Park and Central Park.”

Edward Wisner, “Father of Reclamation”

Edward Wisner (1861-1915) is described in The Wisners in America as the “father of reclamation” due to his success in draining swampland in Louisiana.

For a number of years Edward Wisner was an editor and banker at Athens, Mich. Because of ill health he was compelled to give up those activities. So he travelled extensively in the South, locating finally in North Louisiana, where for many years he carried on land colonization and lumber selling. He also edited a newspaper at Monroe, La.

In 1900 he moved to New Orleans, and he and his associates acquired more than a million acres of swamp lands in the delta of the Mississippi, largely lands west of that city.

The book quotes from “his close friend and associate, Judge R.E. Milling,” who spoke in 1917 at the unveiling of a fountain in honor of Edward Wisner:

“About twenty years ago a passenger on one of the Southern Pacific trains was standing on the platform of the rear car observing the country, and after having passed through miles of the low-lying prairie of St. Charles and Lefourche Parishes, inquired of someone standing near why such lands were not in cultivation. The person addressed happened to be a native — yes, not only a native, but one of that knowing kind who especially knew all about those lands, and he proceeded to enlighten the stranger to the effect that what appeared to be land was not real, but what was known as trembling prairie, formed by decayed vegetable matter, upon lakes that existed in the country, that what he saw was a mere coating and underneath was water of great depth. The passenger then asked, If such was the case, how did the railroad bed stand. He was answered that the railroad company had hauled in vast quantities of dirt and stone and built the road-bed. He remarked: ‘That is possible, but, if your statement is correct, what holds up the telephone poles? Why don’t they sink down into the great lake of which you speak?’

“Such was the introduction of Edward Wisner to the low-lying marsh or prairie lands of Southwest Louisiana. He did not accept the statement made by the native as such statements had been accepted by hundreds of other persons making such inquiries, but he returned and investigated, and upon investigation he found that what was presumed to be water underneath was blue clay which was rendered almost liquid by the amount of water it contained. Making this discovery, he at once saw the possibilities of the development of these lands.”

Disappearing Bats

First frogs, then bees, and now bats…

Over the last few months there have been reports of a massive die-off of bats in the Northeast. As the article at Bat Conservation International puts it, “Hibernating bats are dying by the tens of thousands in the northeastern United States, and a growing circle of top scientists is anxiously trying to figure out why. The mystery affliction, reported in New York, Vermont and Massachusetts, is dubbed ‘white-nose syndrome’ because many affected bats had visible halos of white fungus around their faces.”

I’ve always been fond of bats. On summer evenings at the family camp on Skaneateles Lake, when I was growing up, I would wait for dusk and watch them dart around for insects. In Arizona I once visited a wildlife refuge where hummingbirds visited feeders filled with sugar water during the day, and bats came to the same feeders at night. (This photo of an Arizona nectar bat is courtesy of Charles W. Melton.) And in Kathmandu I once saw giant fruit bats hanging from tree branches all day like big leather packages, then unfurling themselves at dusk and flying low over the city, flapping their wings in slow beats like albatrosses: an eerie and beautiful sight.

Reverend Henry Wisner and the Wolves

The page and a half devoted to the Reverend Henry Wisner (1807-1878) in The Wisners in America doesn’t promise much excitement at first. Wisner was born in Camillus, New York, to a family “all noted for their sturdy, moral and religious integrity.” At the age of twelve, Wisner “became the subject of divine grace” and began teaching school.

“His great modesty, which was almost a mental disease, long kept him in the background, but in 1830, unsolicited on his part, he received his first license as an exhorter, and the following year his license as a preacher. The same year he was married to Miss Byancy House, a woman worthy to be his companion.”

No examples are given of Rev. Wisner’s extraordinary modesty. Two paragraphs later, his eulogy is being read, and he is praised as “a man with an unsullied reputation.”

Then comes the good part.

About the same time (November 9, 1878) Mr. DePew wrote a long article in the Yates County Chronicle (New York), giving a thrilling account of how Rev. Henry Wisner spent a night in a tree in the mountains of Pennsylvania in 1835, being trapped by pack of wolves after he had lost the trail in crossing the mountains, one night in his itinerary. To console himself and to pass away the time, while suffering all sorts of discomforts in the tree, he preached a long sermon on that occasion taking as his text, “There shall be no night there.”

To prevent freezing, for it was the 12th of November and a sleet storm was raging, he grabbed the branches over his head and lifted himself up as far as he could and then he would suddenly drop to the branch on which his feet rested, a gymnastic exercise, or a species of dance, the music of which came out of the thick walls of darkness in the nature of blood-curdling yells of the blood-thirsty wolves.

George W. Wisner, Abolitionist Reporter

On my way to work, at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, I pass by the clock of the old New York Sun paper, turned pistachio green with verdigris and bearing the slogan “It shines for all.” It was a treat to discover recently that my ancestor George W. Wisner was not only a reporter for the Sun, beginning when it was founded in 1833, but was a boisterous abolitionist.

The Wisners in America quotes from a serial article called “The Story of the Sun,” which appeared in Munsey’s Magazine beginning in May 1917:

When George W. Wisner, a young printer who was out of work, applied to the Sun for a job, Benjamin Day told him that he would give him four dollars a week if he would get up early every day and attend the police court, which held its sessions from 4 A.M. on. The people of the city were quite as human then as they are today. Unregenerate mortals got drunk and fought in the streets. Others stole shoes. The worst of all beat their wives. Wisner was to be the Balzac of the daybreak court in a year when Balzac himself was writing his “Droll Stories.” ...

The big story on the first page of the fourth issue of the Sun was a conversation between Envy and Candor in regard to the beauties of a Miss H., perhaps a fictitious person. But on the second page, at the head of the editorial column, was a real editorial article approving the course of the British government in freeing the slaves in the West Indies:

“We supposed that the eyes of men were but half open to this case. We imagined that the slave would have to toil on for years and purchase what in justice was already his own. We did not once dream that light had so far progressed as to prepare the British nation for the colossal stride in justice and humanity and benevolence which they are about to make. The abolition of West Indian slavery will form a brilliant era in the annals of the world. It will circle with a halo of imperishable glory the brows of the transcendent spirits who wield the present destinies of the British Empire.

“Would to heaven that the honor of leading the way in this Godlike enterprise had been reserved to our own country! But as the opportunity for this passed, we trust we shall at least avoid the everlasting disgrace of long refusing to imitate so bright and glorious an example.”

Thus the Sun came out for the freedom of the slave twenty-eight years before that freedom was to be accomplished, in the United States, through war. The Sun was the Sun of Day, but the hand was the hand of Wisner. That young man was an Abolitionist before the word was coined.

“Wisner was a pretty smart young fellow,” said Mr. Day nearly fifty years afterward, “but he and I never agreed. I was rather Democratic in my notions. Wisner, whenever he got a chance, was always sticking in his damned little Abolitionist articles.”…

Wisner was stretching the police-court pieces out to nearly two columns. Now and then, perhaps when Mr. Day was away fishing, the reporter would slip in an Abolition paragraph or a gloomy poem on the horrors of slavery. But he was so valuable that, while his chief did not raise his salary of four dollars a week, he offered him half the paper, the same to be paid for out of the profits....

The influence of partner Wisner, the Abolitionist, was evident in many pages of the Sun. On June 23, 1834, it printed a piece about Martin Palmer, who was “pelted down with stones in Wall Street on suspicious of being a runaway slave,” and paid its respects to Boudinot, a Southerner in New York who was reputed to be a tracker of runaways. It was he who had set the crowd after the black:

“The man who will do this will do anything; he would dance on his mother’s grave; he would invade the sacred precincts of the tomb and rob a corpse of its winding-sheet; he has no soul. It is said that this useless fellow is about to commence a suit against us for libel. Try it, Mr. Boudinot!”

Continuing the story, The Wisners in America says, “When Wisner’s health became poor, in the summer of 1835, he expressed a desire to get away from New York. His partner, Day, paid him $5,000 for his interest in the paper — a large sum for those days. Wisner then went West and settled at Pontiac, Mich. There his health improved and he became a noted lawyer and was a member of the Michigan Legislature.

“Reference to the charts will show that George W. Wisner was a brother of Moses Wisner, the Governor of Michigan from 1858 to 1860.”