There is something instantly mesmerizing about looking into the face of a raptor, a wordless communication between two species which are both entirely foreign to one another, and at the same time share a kind of kinship, an approach to existence based in freedom, individuality, and keen use of intelligence, that have long made raptors the particular companion of choice for a certain stripe of humanity that holds those characteristics dear.
Raptor specialists are something of a species unto themselves. Working with ruthlessly efficient predators calls forth people of strong, over-achieving scientific bents, while the majesty of the animals, the heart-arresting beauty that is an eagle in flight, is something which calls to those with poetic natures, those capable of, and eager to experience, awe. Because these individuals are part scientist, part artist, we as a society are often somewhat at a loss for how to support them, and the road to becoming a raptor conservationist is often a difficult one.
That journey, with all of its ins and outs and unexpected turns, is exemplified in the person of Jadn Soper, Raptor Specialist II at the Peregrine Fund, one of the world’s leading organizations in bird of prey conservation. She was born and raised in Boise, Idaho, a city of artists and dreamers set within a state largely known for its conservative approach to social and scientific issues. Her story is like that of many who grew up in Boise in the early years of this century - loving the natural wonder around her, exploring it often with her family, but also yearning to be part of the larger world, to see people and interact with communities that Boise simply couldn’t offer.
From youth, she found two constants that underlay the usual changes that go with growing up and learning more about yourself - a drive to seek out and accomplish hard and out-of-the-way things, and a love of animals. She attended Renaissance High School, often ranked the best and most rigorous high school in the state, and the list of animal-related volunteering opportunities she undertook during those years reads like the stuff of a college admissions officer’s dream. In fact, when I asked her what advise she would give to up and coming students, this was the aspect of her academic career that leaped immediately to her mind - to seize as many volunteer opportunities as you can, while you are still young and have the time to do them, not only to determine early whether a certain profession vibes with you, but to get precious time in with people who can help you later on your career’s path.
Now, traditional high school counselor wisdom holds that after graduating you head straight to college to get yourself locked into a program as soon as possible, keeping one’s self within the academic grid in order to keep competitive in a crowded university landscape. Soper, however, had the courage of her instincts which told her that experience was more valuable after high school than more treading of the well-worn educational prerequisites. She applied for the Global Citizen Year program, and against all of her own expectations, was not only accepted, but provided with a ninety-five percent scholarship that allowed her to go to Ecuador, where she worked with a program in a tiny town in the Andes mountains that cared for animals that had been bought illegally and were seized from their owners.
While there, she happened to get in with the group of people running a raptor program, where she fatefully made the acquaintance of a sick and injured peregrine falcon, whose tenacious grasp on life, and powerful elegance even when wounded, struck a chord with her. It would not be long before she and the peregrines would cross paths again, but in the meantime, there was the small matter of going to university. While working three to five jobs simultaneously to support herself, she was left to scour for the means of going to college abroad, the US academic system lacking any kind of financial support structure for people seeking that educational path. Finally, she was able to attend the University of Salford in 2019, a dream posting due to its targeted wildlife conservation program that focused on a combination of both zoo biology and field conservation, all with attentive individual mentoring, a particularly useful bit of human connection as a fair chunk of that time fell during the Covid era, when studying was hard enough for those who could live at home, but was a double difficulty for those stuck overseas, far from their traditional support networks.
Soper excelled in her studies, however, and was first in her class for two of her three years of study in England. Graduating in three years with honors, she returned to Idaho and to the reality faced by hundreds of willing, whip-smart individuals who are ready to devote themselves to the good of the environment, but who often lie languishing, their talents unused, because of the paucity of resources given over to the maintenance of the nation’s natural resources and species. She applied to forty different base level jobs around the world in species conversation, and heard back from none of them, a sort of crushing silence that might have deterred somebody of a less determined nature.
Fortunately, Soper’s diligent past served her well when the world’s Covid-fractured scientific funding infrastructure had let her down, and her time volunteering with the Peregrine Fund in high school led to an offer to join the organization, first as a Sales Coordinator, and then as a Raptor Specialist. And now that we have come to the part of the story where Soper has at last found her intellectual and spiritual home, it is time to talk a bit about the amazing story that is the Peregrine Fund. In the 1950s and 1960s, the peregrine falcon, the world’s fastest animal (reaching speeds in excess of a hundred miles per hour during its dives, with some researchers putting the number at nearer two hundred), stood on the verge of extinction thanks to the destruction wrought by DDT, a popular insecticide which farmers carpeted the nation with before its role in softening bird egg shells was known and publicized by Rachel Carson in her 1962 classic Silent Spring. The chemical would bioaccumulate in falcons, interfering with the birds’ ability to fortify their eggs with calcium, resulting in shells that broke before the chicks inside had reached maturity.
The Peregrine Fund was founded in 1970 to confront head-on the tumultuous decline in the species, developing new techniques in breeding, releasing, and tracking the birds which, working in conjunction with the banning of DDT as a pesticide, resulted in the peregrine falcon’s removal from the endangered species list in 1999, and which would in the 1980s be employed to rescue that other critically threatened bird, the california condor. Since that time, the Fund has expanded its work to other birds of prey that are threatened with extinction due to human activity, and is either directly running or advising programs in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Panama, and the Dominican Republic to maintain dwindling bird populations there by giving the native populations conservation alternatives that realistically present better options for them financially than the present practices that threaten bird habitats and life cycles.
The organization does incredible things, and if life ever takes you to Boise, visiting the Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey there is something you simply have to do (I love visiting the harpy eagle they have, and listening to the giant swoosh of the condors’ massive wings as they fly down from their tree branches, but after some prodding to pick a favorite, Soper came down decisively on the red-tailed hawk as her raptor of choice). Here you will find people, from the volunteers up to the specialists, all devoted to educating the public, and creating practical methods that better the survival chances of some of our planet’s most magnificent living creatures. As a Raptor Specialist, Soper’s day contains a multitude of tasks that her combination of scientific and artistic talents have well prepared her for - mornings of working with the birds, weighing them, preparing their diets, and running them through their training - and then afternoons involving a sprawling array of responsibilities, from running off site bird encounters at schools, to enclosure construction and design, to the facilitation of volunteer encounters, to answering the public’s questions. She and the Peregrine Fund know that the work they do can’t be done in a bubble, that it requires bringing people into the work and impressing upon them not only its importance, but the realization that they have the power, through lifestyle choices and contributions, to be a part of that work themselves, and to make sure that the mesmerizing experience, of being face to face with an eagle or a falcon and feeling that small jolt of electric recognition, is something that future generations will be able to know for themselves.
There is no telling what the future holds for Soper, or indeed any public scientist in this day and age. Field work always calls, but requires a myriad of practical things to take place first - paying down of university loans, nailing down of grants, the completion of reams of paperwork most of which will never be read by human eyes. Luckily, she has a dream job at present, but there are so many like her out there who do not, whom we allow to go deeply into debt to develop the talents that will ultimately be employed to our benefit, whom we ought to be thanking for the dedication of their time, energies, and intellect, but whom we permit to linger in academic purgatory for years, abilities unused to our own detriment.
Take a walk through the halls of the Peregrine Fund, however, and look at the pictures of the raptor biologists out in the field and raptor specialists with their favorite birds, and what you’ll see is people who, in spite of all the financial sacrifices they have made to get where they are, and how many they will continue to make in the future, experience moments of pure connection with the animals they love and respect that we can all envy, and support, however we can.
For those wanting to support The Peregrine Fund in its work, membership and donation links can be found here!
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