LORD OF THE WINGS
The tops of the cottonwoods are just beginning to warm in the morning sun when Bishop local Sierra Solnit starts climbing.
She moves slowly and deliberately, ascending a rope thrown over the tree’s branches and working her way toward a Swainson’s Hawk nest.
Cottonwoods are difficult trees to climb. Many are old, and they can rot from the inside without showing it from the ground. A climber has to assess every branch and every movement.
At the nest, Solnit collects the nestlings and secures them in a bag. A few minutes later, they are lowered to the ground, where Hal Batzloff waits.
Batzloff measures the birds, checks their condition and places a small identification band on each leg. Then the birds go back into the bag and are raised back to the nest.
The process is quick, but the information it produces can last for decades.
Batzloff, 74, is the leader of this small group of volunteers in the Eastern Sierra helping raptor biologist Peter Bloom document birds. They find nests, band young birds and record what they can about the animals and the places where they live. The goal is to build a long-term record of the birds, and of the landscape that sustains them.
As summer wraps up, so does the group’s biggest push of the year to do this work.
Batzloff has always been drawn to birds. As a child, he kept parrots and dreamed of becoming a wildlife biologist. But life got in the way, he said, leading him through a string of other careers, including stints as a respiratory therapist, stock broker and, eventually, law enforcement.
In retirement, he finally found a way back to birds. He began working with Bloom as an equipment-carrying volunteer, spending two years learning the work before eventually earning his own banding permit.
Bloom, founder and vice president of Bloom Biological, has spent more than 40 years studying, banding and tracking hawks, eagles, kites, condors and owls, with more than 40 peer-reviewed papers and technical reports to his name.
Now nine seasons into his raptor research work, Batzloff trains other volunteers, including climbers such as Solnit.
“After training with [Bloom], I learned his very specific way of doing everything,” he said. “I’ve trained under him, I’ve learned under him, and so the people who come with me, I train them, too.”
A band on a young hawk may seem like a tiny piece of information. By itself, it is. The real value comes later, when somebody sees that same bird again.
“What we want are at least two points of data: banding them and then having somebody resight them at a later date,” Batzloff said. “One point, when we band the young, doesn’t do us any good. It tells you we banded this bird. It’s where they go after that.”
A second sighting can reveal where the bird went, how far it traveled and, eventually, whether it returned to the area where it was born.
That question – where young birds go after leaving the nest – is one of Bloom’s particular interests.
“In general, they stay close to where they were hatched,” Batzloff said. “They’ll have a migration while they’re young, and they’ll go 100 miles away. But when they decide to breed, they come back here.”
Swainson’s Hawks make that journey on a remarkable scale. The birds arrive around April 1 after migrating from Argentina, which is roughly a 14,000-mile round trip.
“You can’t depend on them to come back to the same nest,” Batzloff said. “They usually do, but they don’t always. So if you don’t see them nesting in the same nest, you’ve got to go find it. That’s part of the fun. That’s part of the challenge.”
For the people doing the surveys, that search is part of the appeal.
“The moment that just gets our blood going is when we see the female incubating eggs,” Batzloff said. “She has a specific posture, and that’s the exciting moment when we go, ‘Yeah, okay, we’ve got an active nest.'”
The researchers also look at what the birds are eating and what remains in the nest, like fur, feathers and skeletons.
“They’re at the top of the food chain,” he said. “So, they reflect everything underneath them, so to speak.”
In wet years, there can be more food. In dry years, there may be less. The timing matters, too. Precipitation that arrives when small mammals are reproducing can have a greater effect than precipitation at another point in the year. The birds can therefore become a kind of biological signal.
“They can tell us when it’s not a good year,” Batzloff said.
That signal became especially visible after a severe windstorm on May 18, when winds reached roughly 75 mph for 18 hours. The storm destroyed about one-third of the nests the team was monitoring. Some trees were uprooted entirely.
For Batzloff, the research effort suddenly became a search-and-rescue operation. He went from nest tree to nest tree, checking the ground for fallen young for two days afterward.
“We found about a dozen. Most of them were alive, thank God,” he said.
The injured birds went to Sierra Wildcare, a wildlife rehabilitation nonprofit that has partnered with the survey team for several years. Executive Director Danielle Manriquez said the relationship has been in place for at least three or four years, predating her own tenure as director.
During that wind event, Manriquez estimated the facility took in roughly 20 storm-related patients over the following few days, including six to eight raptors, on top of its typical annual caseload of about 400 animals.
“We had a stage there where we were like, if we get one more thing, we’re going to have to say no, because where would we put it?” she said.
Most of the surviving injured birds can be nursed back to health using puppets to prevent them from imprinting on humans (Manriquez has a puppet for just about every raptor species.) If a nest was destroyed, the young birds are usually fostered into another one nearby.
“We have a lot of documentation where we’ve got band recoveries months and years later of a bird that we orphaned out,” Batzloff said. “The parents took care of them, which was a great thing.”
What Sierra Wildcare does, Manriquez said, largely just reverses the impact of human development. Most injuries at the care center, from barbed wire to car strikes, are human-caused in the first place.
Development is a driving force behind the surveying, too. The purpose of the research, Batzloff said, is to provide enough information for people to make better decisions.
“There’s this tension always between man going forward, trying to better people’s lives, and at the same time the impact that it has on the animals, who are innocent and are just trying to breed and live,” he said. “We can’t live in a vacuum and never impact the animals. It’s just what we do.”
Raptor research generally does not pay for itself, so almost all of the work is unpaid, which keeps the volunteer pool small. Still, in the climbing hub of Bishop, there are a number of people, like Solnit, willing to sacrifice their weekend to climb trees for no money.
Since starting out volunteering in 2021, she’s recruited several of her friends, looking for people who are smart, methodical, and care about birds to join her. And these new climbers have become increasingly important.
“The older I get, the less I carry, and the more I get them to carry,” he said of the Bishop climbers.
Even so, Batzloff is not particularly interested in slowing down. He has banded about a thousand raptors, and he still considers the next one the most exciting.
“I don’t get tired of it,” he said. “I have a passion for it.”
