Tracking At the end of May this year, an egg in a nest on a building called Thilmany Mill in Kaukauna, Outagamie County, Wisc., cracked, and following Nature’s marvelous scheme that is repeated billions of times every year from hummingbirds to ostriches, a baby bird was hatched.

The bird was a peregrine falcon. Near the end of November this year, that same bird, by now a fierce hunter at the top of the food chain, got into trouble in the industrial clutter of the inner harbor of Corpus Christi, and broke its wing.

I don’t know the details of its beginnings or its accident yet, but ARK worker Guy Davis picked the bird up at the harbor and found that it had been banded. Through the magic of the Internet and the number on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife band it was wearing, I tracked the bird back to its beginnings near Appleton, Wis. Because of the Thanksgiving Day deadline for the South Jetty, you’ll have to wait until next week to hear more details, but I give you pictures from Guy’s cell phone.

A peregrine falcon was identified by its leg band after it was found in the inner harbor of Corpus Christi with a broken wing. It’s about 1,500 miles if you were to drive from Kaukauna to Corpus Christi; less as the peregrine flies. The bird, by the way, is a male called “Squirt” by the people who watched it hatch and fledge and banded it.

It is now at the Oso Creek Animal Hospital being examined by our consulting veterinarian, Dr. Tim Tristan. Lynn and I were enjoying a weekend at a friend’s ranch in the Hill Country, and I have no time left to write before deadline, so I’ll give you a late evening picture of a white tail doe (small boast: the picture was handheld using a 30 year-old manual 600mm lens weighing in at 9 pounds at 1/80th of a second exposure).

Tony Amos is a research fellow at The University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas and director of the ARK (Animal Rehabilitation Keep).