Few birds better exemplify the marvel of being a bird than the peregrine falcon, and few places better encapsulate that species’ dramatic saga than the country of Jamesland.
The peregrine is a paradox. Ranging more widely around the globe than any other wild land bird, its demanding dietary and habitat needs have nonetheless often made its survival precarious. John James Audubon, after celebrating the species’ “astonishing rapidity” and “reckless daring,” went on to note that it had been scarce earlier in his lifetime (this would have been the very early nineteenth century) but had unaccountably rebounded. As of 1942 the breeding population in the eastern United States amounted to some 350 pairs, a low but seemingly stable number. That year a survey in Virginia turned up twenty-six active nest sites. Most were on remote mountain cliffs at spots like Jump Mountain (Rockbridge County) and Nichols Knob (Allegheny County), although two pairs were discovered using old osprey nests along the Eastern Shore.
This picture began to change drastically after the war, as the pesticide DDT—which had been used to stem the spread of malaria among overseas troops—became commercially available for the first time. Populations of peregrines and other large birds began to plummet, and though it took decades to connect the dots, it was ultimately proven that the accumulation of DDT up the food chain and into the birds’ tissues caused them to lay eggshells that were perilously thin. By that time breeding peregrines in the East had been effectively wiped out. When the species was added to the federal endangered list in 1970, the assumption in places like Virginia was that the move was too little, too late.
But it was only a few years later, facing the disappearance of one of America’s most iconic animals, that authorities decided to take the plunge on an unprecedented reintroduction program. Virginia took up the challenge with more gusto than most states, carrying out its first falcon releases in 1978. Over the following decade-plus over two hundred birds were set free in the Commonwealth, following an intensive process known as hacking (which involves placing young chicks in a nest box at a likely site, supplying them with prey, and gradually acclimating them to hunting and flight). Release sites spanned much of the montane and coastal regions of Virginia and included Elliott Knob (Augusta County) and Cole Mountain (Amherst County), from which sixteen falcons were successfully fledged between them.
Not all of these birds survived or stuck around. Some succumbed to great horned owl predation, some simply failed to thrive, and many wandered off to parts unknown. Yet over time some of these birds and their descendants gradually established a new foothold as a local breeding population. When two chicks hatched on Stony Man Mountain in Shenandoah National Park in 1994, it proved to be the first successful wild peregrine nest in the Virginia mountains in a generation.
The birds really took off along the coast, where they gravitated to the high bridges that span the broad Tidewater waterways. The Benjamin Harrison Bridge over the James at Hopewell and the James River Bridge at Newport News are two of the spots where peregrines and their nests can be spotted today. Thanks in large part to these adaptable shore-dwellers, the species’ Virginia population has climbed to around twenty pairs.
None of those pairs enjoys as much celebrity as the beloved peregrines of downtown Richmond. The city’s skyscrapers and abundant pigeons have turned out to be a fine stand-in for the falcon’s ancestral cliffside nesting and hunting grounds. Hacking efforts began in the city in 2000, and it was only three years later that a pair of the birds built their first nest on a 17th-floor ledge of the old First National Bank building (fittingly enough, Richmond’s first skyscraper). The city’s human citizens christened the birds “Ozzie and Harriet” and followed their lives together for a remarkable fourteen years, during which time they moved once, to the 21st floor of the Riverfront Plaza’s west tower. Although Ozzie and Harriet passed away, another pair soon moved in to make use of the same nest site. The adventures of the current occupants and their offspring can be monitored by the public 24/7 in season through the popular Richmond Falcon Cam.
Over four hundred wild bird species have been recorded within Jamesland’s boundaries—403 at last count, to be exact—a testament to the nation’s tremendous environmental diversity. If you arrive here during the warmer months by the traditional route–sailing into the river from the Chesapeake–the odds are good that the first living things to greet you will be feathered. In fact these will be extremely hard to miss, because a tiny island at the mouth of the James now hosts one of the busiest seabird breeding colonies in the mid-Atlantic.
This story begins in the early 1980s, when a few pioneering birds started taking advantage of the recently completed Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (linking the Phoebus neighborhood of Hampton with Norfolk’s Willoughby Spit). On the more southern of the roadway’s pair of artificial islands, where northbound cars plunge into the tunnel section that carries them under the final stretch of the James, common terns and black skimmers began scraping out little depressions in the sand for their speckled eggs–seemingly unfazed by the roar of traffic or the bustle of construction. Within a decade their rising numbers were supplemented by a small population of gull-billed terns, a state-threatened species that had been displaced from many former sites by beach erosion, human crowds, and disturbance by domestic and feral animals. The unlikely sanctuary now qualified as a site of critical conservation importance.
Then the situation got complicated. Gulls of several species, more aggressive and opportunistic than the terns and skimmers, discovered the spot and were soon nesting there by the thousands. The original occupants were increasingly displaced to more marginal nest sites–some of them directly adjacent to the I-64 roadway. A series of accidents ensued as drivers tried to avoid wandering chicks and their concerned parents. With the colony now the subject of some controversy, its fate was then thrown into uncertainty by the 2017 approval of a major expansion project for the bridge-tunnel. The plans called for not only doubling the number of lanes but for fully paving over the artificial islands–which would mean curtains for their thousands of avian residents.
With the birds’ days numbered, what followed was a hectic two-year scramble by state wildlife officials and scientists to assess their options and implement a backup plan. Coded bands and GPS transmitters were attached to many of the birds in an attempt to gather intelligence on their movements. A number of alternate breeding sites were scoped out, some as near as Grandview Beach in Hampton and others as distant as Clump Island near the Maryland border. None seemed likely to work; the requirements of suitable habitat, lack of predators, and freedom from human meddling proved tough to meet. But a solution was found in the end–and it turned out to be right under everyone’s noses.
There is a third artificial island at the mouth of the James: a fifteen-acre scrap of land known as Rip Raps, which is attached to the bridge-tunnel’s south island by a short causeway. This island began its life shortly after the War of 1812, when a nation shocked by the British burning of Washington determined to build an impregnable network of coastal forts. One of these, known informally as Castle Calhoun after the current Secretary of War, was to be built on a foundation of ballast stones in the water where the James entered the Chesapeake. Castle Calhoun was renamed Fort Wool during the Civil War, and enjoyed its career highlight when it was used to fire an experimental long-range cannon at the CSS Virginia during the nearby Battle of the Ironclads. The fort was decommissioned after the second World War and was converted by the city of Hampton into a park of sorts, visited by sightseers via ferry.
The real estate on Rip Raps that was available to nesting birds was small, and would need to be spruced up. But it was worth a shot. The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources spread sand across a couple of acres of the island, floated a few old barges just offshore to add some acreage, and declared the old fort off limits to the public. The 2019 nesting season had wrapped up, and the birds had moved on to their wintering grounds far to the south. When they returned in the spring, their former home would be paved over, and a new one would be waiting. Would they make the transition? All anyone could do was wait.
The Rip Raps gamble turned out to be a smashing success. The 2020 season saw as many as 12,000 birds make their nests in the new location. The colony is thriving today, dominated now by royal terns–one of our largest tern species, with a stout orange bill and a dashing crest. Over eighty percent of Virginia’s royal tern population now breeds in this one colony, where their raucous cries mingle with those of several other species of gulls, terns, skimmers, pelicans, and egrets.
However, this solution is a temporary one. Because of the limited space, the cost of keeping the barges in place, the proximity of the birds to traffic and construction, and ongoing interest from Hampton in restoring public access to the old fort, there is a major incentive to find something more sustainable. The Army Corps of Engineers has already drafted a proposal for a $16 million project to build yet another island: this one a 10-acre, horseshoe-shaped stretch of sand flanked by riprap. The location would be on the Hampton Bar, a shoal about a mile south of downtown Hampton, on the upstream side of the bridge-tunnel.
Beyond the terns of Rip Raps and the falcons of the high bridges, tidewater Jamesland is home to a number of other notable birds. Yellow-crowned night herons, a species of crab-eating, partially nocturnal waders, build their nests in the spreading branches of the old Algernourne Oak at Hampton’s Fort Monroe. Craney Island in Portsmouth, the site of a naval supply center and a longtime dumping ground for dredge spoils, lives up to its name by hosting shorebirds by the thousands on its expansive mudflats; species like American avocets and black-necked stilts are easier to find here than virtually anywhere else in the mid-Atlantic. Closer to the Fall Line, the tidal wetlands at Dutch Gap–flanking an old bend in the river that was cut off by a Civil War-era canal–are a paradise for wintering waterfowl and a breeding ground for the elusive least bittern. And the Great Dismal Swamp offers a slice of the Deep South, with distinctive songbirds like prothonotary and Swainson’s warblers thriving in its deep cypress swamps and canebrakes.
The Piedmont province lacks the big wetlands and signature waterbirds of its downstream neighbor, but has a characteristic suite of species of its own. Summer tanagers, blue grosbeaks, indigo buntings, yellow-breasted chats, and prairie warblers are among the typical birds of this region’s mosaic of mixed woods, brushy old fields, and pastures. The tall sycamores and maples that line the James and other rivers host other species like northern parula, yellow-throated warbler, and acadian flycatcher. The songs of eastern meadowlark, grasshopper sparrow, and northern bobwhite can be heard here in open rural country.
As you climb the Blue Ridge the birdlife changes dramatically. The characteristic songbirds of the lowlands are replaced by a set of species with a more northern flavor, extending their breeding range down the Appalachian corridor. These include rose-breasted grosbeak, dark-eyed junco, blue-headed vireo, veery, and a profusion of warblers such as cerulean, Blackburnian, black-throated green, chestnut-sided, and Canada. Each September sees a flood of migrating raptors funneling down the ridge, highlighted by some ten thousand broad-winged hawks.
The high Alleghenies along Jamesland’s western border serve as yet another world in terms of birds and other wildlife. Allegheny Mountain in particular hosts some northern species that reach their absolute limit here as breeders, along with others that can only be found well to the south where the peaks reach five thousand feet. Birdwise that list includes mourning, magnolia, and golden-winged warblers, alder flycatcher, hermit thrush, yellow-bellied sapsucker, and red crossbill, to name a few. Below the Allegheny forests of spruce and northern hardwoods, the cool grassy valleys of Highland County attract unusual breeding birds like bobolink and vesper sparrow, along with winter visitors from the far north such as golden eagle and rough-legged hawk.
Not to be overlooked is another national emblem: the bald eagle. With multiple nests in the Lynchburg area I can now enjoy periodic visits from these majestic raptors, soaring over my house on their travels up and downriver–a sight that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.
Known as opotenaiok by the Powhatan and prized for their white feathers (which were used for fletching arrows as well as decoration), resident eagles had been a fixture of the mid-Atlantic for thousands of years when the first colonists arrived. But as with the peregrine falcon, the chemical onslaught of the twentieth century spelled serious trouble for these birds. The population had already been in decline for some time when, in the spring of 1963, birder Charlie Hacker found a female eagle convulsing on the ground on Jamestown Island. Her condition would soon prove fatal and would be conclusively linked to DDT poisoning. By the 1970s the devastation wrought by the pesticides would be complete, and over a several-year stretch zero eagle nests would be found along the entire James River.
Thankfully, the birds proved extraordinarily resilient, and no intensive reintroduction program would be necessary. Pesticide and hunting bans and habitat preservation took rapid effect, and by the eighties eagle numbers were steadily climbing. According to the most recent data, over three hundred eagle pairs are now on territory each year along the James–including no fewer than eight on Jamestown Island.
That figure of 403 species for Jamesland’s bird list is far from a static number. The region’s army of hardcore birders and backyard enthusiasts have been regularly adding to it in recent years. Notable debutants lately include:
- A snail kite at a neighborhood pond in Charlottesville in May 2024 (the second-northernmost record ever for this mostly tropical raptor)
- A gray-crowned rosy-finch on the top of Mount Pleasant in February of the same year (the southeasternmost record ever for this alpine songbird)
- A white wagtail at Fort Monroe in April 2021 (one of a handful of East Coast records for this Eurasian species)
- A buff-bellied hummingbird at a backyard feeder in Norfolk’s Larchmont neighborhood in January of that year (the second-northernmost record ever for this Mexican and south Texan specialty)
- A pink-footed goose at Shirley Plantation in December 2020 (the southernmost American record for this waterfowl species, which breeds in Greenland and Iceland and normally winters in Europe)
As unexpected as these sightings were, trumping them all was a visitor that showed up here back in 1978. One day in December of that year, a suburban couple in a Henrico County neighborhood spotted a tiny, strange bird wandering the streets on foot. With bright pink legs and a bill like a piece of candy corn, it did not remotely resemble anything in their field guide. After a “short chase” they were able to catch the bird, which seemed unwell, and bring it to the VCU biology department. With a bit of research and the suspension of some disbelief, a professor there managed to ID it as a paint-billed crake—a shy marsh bird of South America, which as a pint-sized recluse and reluctant flyer seemed like one of the least likely candidates to embark on an intercontinental voyage. This baffling record still remains only the second one ever for the species anywhere north of Venezuela.
All of the cases above were of one-off vagrants, unlucky individuals that got somehow blown off course and may or may not ever be seen here again. There are other species that have moved into our area recently and seem likely to stick around. The Mississippi kite, for instance, an elegant, insect-eating raptor of the South, has developed a fondness for suburbia and is expanding its range up the I-95 corridor; a growing number of its nests can now be found in Chesterfield and Henrico neighborhoods. Headed in the other direction is the yellow-rumped warbler, which spends its summers in cool coniferous forests; formerly unknown as a Virginia breeder, it has now been documented nesting on several of our high peaks including Allegheny, Shenandoah, Warm Springs, and Salt Pond Mountains.
At least one bird has offset this trend by bidding farewell to Jamesland within my lifetime. That’s the Bewick’s wren, once a common sight in our highlands, and across much of greater Appalachia and the Midwest. A sweet singer and creative nest-builder, this species had a predilection for raising its young in the barns and sheds of the countless small farms of the region. During the twentieth century, however, it experienced a catastrophic decline that remains highly mysterious. Whether it was competition for nest sites from pushier house wrens and starlings, changing human land-use practices, or some undocumented stressor on its wintering grounds, these wrens are now all but gone from the eastern United States. The last known nest in Virginia was in Highland County in 1989.
A similar fate threatened to befall the common merganser, a dashing duck of cool, forested streams. Known to breed in our area in the mid-twentieth century, it could not be found doing so in a comprehensive survey of Virginia’s birds in the eighties. Water pollution and hunting were identified as the main culprits behind this fish-eater’s disappearance from a broad southern swath of its range. Yet the pendulum has now swung back in the other direction, and mergansers can now be seen with their ducklings on several of our waterways including the upper James, Cowpasture, Jackson, Maury, and Rivanna.
Last but not least are two birds that have been lost not only from the Jamesland list, but from the roster of living species on Earth.
The early English settlers of the Tidewater were pleasantly surprised to find, among the more expected fauna of this temperate latitude, a type of small parrot. Called maskowhinge by the Powhatan, these bright green, yellow, and orange birds in their chattering flocks lended a dash of tropical flavor to the Virginia landscape—even in the dead of winter. At first their presence seemed pleasant and even auspicious. Jamestown’s Francis Perkins wrote home in March 1608 and included mention of “the prettiest parrots that can be seen,” while his neighbor William Strachey called the “Parakitoes…very beautyfull” and gushed that they had “given vs somwhat the more hope of the neerenes of the South-Seas.” Strachey’s successor as secretary of the young Virginia Colony, Ralph Hamor, added in his own 1615 account the detail that the “many flockes of Parakertoths” tended to appear “in Winter about Christmasse.”
By the following century, with the novelty of the New World fauna largely worn off, the South Seas fantasies deflated, and everyone’s spelling cleaned up, the published mentions of the Carolina parakeet had become more practical. The pretty bird had turned out to be a bit of a pest. Even in a piece of blatant propaganda like the 1737 Natural History of Virginia, or the Newly Discovered Eden (written to entice Swiss settlers and long ascribed to Richmond’s founder William Byrd, though actually drawn heavily from the writings of Carolinas explorer John Lawson), the parakeet was presented as less than Edenic. “These birds do great damage to the fruit trees, since they pick up the fruit and eat the kernels out of it.” The good news was that in addition to being a nuisance it was a “very good and delicious tidbit; for this reason many are caught or shot.”
Delicious was a stretch, for other accounts suggested that the toxic cockleburs in the birds’ diet made their flesh unsavory and maybe even poisonous. But this note begins to explain why parakeet reports quickly became fewer and farther between. Farmers greeted the marauding flocks with shotguns; the birds did themselves no favors by swirling worriedly around any fallen comrade, making for even easier pickings. Lower Jamesland had likely always been near a northern extremity of the species’ range. Before long the flocks stopped coming that far north, and retreated toward their stronghold in Florida. The final nineteenth-century collapse may have been hastened by the destruction of wetlands, the millinery trade, nest site competition from introduced honeybees, and disease. The blend of factors is still debated, but by 1918 the last known Carolina parakeet was dying in a Cincinnati zoo.
Less mystery surrounds our other extinct bird. The passenger pigeon’s story is the stuff of tragic legend, its key plot points familiar to many of us today: the great migrating flocks of millions or billions that blotted out the sun for days at a time; the rapacious hunts, with sixty birds brought down by a single shotgun blast, thousands swept up in giant nets, and squabs swatted down from their nests by poles; the sad end, with lonely Martha in her zoo enclosure passing with her species into oblivion. (The same zoo, in a fateful twist, that would witness the formal end of the Carolina parakeet just a few years later.) It is the ultimate cautionary tale to counter the colonists’ visions of limitless, providential abundance.
Much effort has gone into reconstructing the species’ range and its major nesting and roosting grounds. The core breeding area was certainly in the upper Midwest and Northeast, but peripheral areas like Jamesland still witnessed major flights. Jamestown’s Ralph Hamor in 1615 included in his list of animals “wild Pidgeons (in Winter beyond number of imagination, my selfe have seene three or four houres together flockes in the Aire, so thicke that even they have shadowed the Skie from us.” Records from the mid-Atlantic are few and far between over the next two centuries, although newspapers did document a major roost a few miles south of our border, along Hat Creek in Campbell County. If the reports are to be believed, some 100,000 pigeons were killed there over the course of a few days in 1858. (This may have been a long-recurring tradition, as the nearby town of Gladys was originally named Pigeon Run.)
As eye-catching as that figure is, it may have been outdone by a nesting event that occurred in Nelson County a few years later. The story was recounted in the posthumous memoirs of Paul Brandon Barringer, an amateur naturalist and an early president of Virginia Tech, though he’s largely remembered today for his prominence in the eugenics movement. As a teenager in the spring of 1874, Barringer was taking classes at the Kenmore prep school near Amherst when—to the boys’ “excitement and fervid interest”—they caught wind of a massive gathering of pigeons in the Blue Ridge not far to the north:
First we would see flocks of several dozens, then flocks of hundreds, and ere long, flocks of thousands, all heading for the Three Ridge Mountain some miles off. We did not get up early enough in the morning…to see their morning flight, but of course we saw the evening flight, and when I state that the sun would oft times be literally darkened, I am not exceeding the truth…At times, their passing overhead concealed the whole heavens.
The Kenmore headmaster indulged the boys’ curiosity (and probably their appetite), loading them into a couple of wagons and making the trip to the nesting ground. There Barringer faced the daunting task of wrapping his mind around the scale of this phenomenon:
I limited myself to one side of the ridge and therefore cannot speak as to the real size of the area on the other side. There must have been seventy-five or a hundred acres on this side of the ridge in which primitive nests and young covered every available inch of space on the trees. I am told that a neighboring peak, the Priest, also had miles and miles of area devoted to these same hatcheries…
We used to stand on the high hill behind Kenmore, and using BB shot, we fired until the guns were dangerously hot. We ate the pigeons until we were nauseated and gave the surplus to the kitchen…But ere long, by mild suggestions that the young were hatched and the death of each pigeon would result in useless suffering for the young, Mr. Strode broke up the wanton shootings.
This long-overlooked anecdote is quite significant, as the last big pigeon nesting on record occurred just four years later in Michigan. Headmaster Strode’s restraint is also significant, as wantonness was very much the order of the day. The advent of the railroads had allowed a new breed of commercial pigeon hunter to harvest the birds by the millions and ship them to urban markets, and a disbelief still prevailed that even these industrial depredations could make any lasting dent in the species’ numbers. That illusion, of course, was soon to burst; by the time Barringer turned sixty the pigeons, all of them, were gone.
There is a final footnote to add to Jamesland’s modest contribution to the pigeon’s tale. Among the several contenders for the honor of the last wild pigeon sighting was one that occurred right here within our borders. The date was 1907; the setting was a rural cabin in southern Albemarle County (incidentally not thirty miles from the nesting ground experienced by Barringer); and the observer was none other than the sitting President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt.
The cabin was called Pine Knot, and despite (or because of) its complete lack of modern conveniences, for years it was T.R.’s favorite retreat from Washington. An avid birdwatcher since his youth, the president loved roaming the surrounding woods and keeping lists of his sightings. His first published work, in fact, had been a study of the bird life of the Adirondacks written as a biology student. So he brought ample experience to bear on his very noteworthy sighting of May 18th of that year, which he later wrote up as follows:
On May 18, 1907, I saw a small party of a dozen or so of passenger pigeons, birds I had not seen for a quarter of a century and never expected to see again. I saw them two or three times flying hither and thither with great rapidity, and once they perched in a tall dead pine on the edge of an old field. They were unmistakable; yet the sight was so unexpected that I almost doubted my eyes, and I welcomed a bit of corroborative evidence coming from Dick, the colored foreman at Plain Dealing. Dick is a frequent companion of mine in rambles around the country, and he is an unusually close and accurate observer of birds, and of wild things generally. Dick had mentioned to me having seen some “wild carrier pigeons,” as he called them; and, thinking over this remark of his, after I had returned to Washington, I began to wonder whether he too might not have seen passenger pigeons.
Roosevelt enjoyed a visit shortly thereafter from his friend John Burroughs, one of America’s foremost naturalists. Skeptical of the president’s claim, as he himself had been searching for evidence of the beleaguered species’ survival, Burroughs was ultimately convinced of the veracity of Roosevelt’s sighting as well as Dick McDaniel’s. He vouched for the president’s keen eye and deep store of knowledge, noting that he was able to identify some seventy-five bird species at Pine Knot during Burroughs’ visit alone (including the Bewick’s wren, which was new to Burroughs). A crucial detail was that a few mourning doves, the only local species likely to be mistaken for pigeons, had been present at the moment of the sighting to allow for direct comparison.
There would be many more claims of pigeon encounters from around the country over the following years, with a wide range of plausibility and zero hard proof. While it’s very unlikely that Roosevelt was truly the last human to lay eyes on the species, he may well have been the last credentialed naturalist to do so and make a convincing case. He was also one of the few to fully appreciate the gravity of the pigeon’s disappearance, later comparing it to the destruction of the Reims cathedral during the Great War.