falconspace

When New York City set out to bring bald eagles back to Inwood Hill Park in Manhattan three years ago, parks officials chose a colorful character to head the program: Thomas Cullen, a master falconer whose showmanship had made him the region's acknowledged expert on birds of prey.

Mr. Cullen was well known for hiring out his birds to shoo sea gulls from Kennedy International Airport and chase pigeons (and one unsuspecting Chihuahua) from Bryant Park. He had hunted with luminaries like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and worked briefly with the naturalists who established an urban eagle program in Washington, D.C.

But Mr. Cullen, who has run the New York City program for the past 33 months, also has a history of questioned activity, and at times criminal activity, involving exotic birds. On Friday, after city park officials were questioned by a New York Times reporter about bird smuggling charges that Mr. Cullen faces, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe summoned Mr. Cullen to his office and suspended him, without pay, from his $53,951-per-year job, pending an investigation into the current indictment.

In 1984, Mr. Cullen was arrested in Australia and pleaded guilty to participating in an international bird smuggling ring that included a publishing magnate and the former animal keeper from the Playboy mansion.

He is under indictment on federal charges that he orchestrated a scheme to illegally import three goshawks on a British Airways flight into Kennedy Airport in 2000.

Beyond those legal issues, Mr. Cullen has also been accused by officials in New York and New Jersey of mistreatment that led to the death of two bald eagles. Last month, New Jersey's attorney general charged him with violating regulations protecting endangered species by harassing an eaglet to the point of death on an island in the Delaware River. He had been working for a developer who wanted to build a resort on the island. And records with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation show that during the early days of the Inwood Hill Park program, an eagle died of dehydration while it was locked in a cage outside Mr. Cullen's home in Goshen, N.Y.

Mr. Cullen said in an interview last week that he was confident he would be cleared of the federal charges, and insisted that after devoting his life to raptors, he would never intentionally harm an eagle.

Many wildlife advocates say they are relieved that Mr. Cullen has finally received scrutiny for what they call a cavalier attitude toward endangered birds.

But other naturalists argue that Mr. Cullen has been the victim of professional jealousy, bad luck and reaction to his rather aloof demeanor.

"Tom's like a lawyer or a doctor: he views the birds professionally rather than trying to bond with the persona of each individual bird," said Alexander Brash, the former New York City Parks official who hired Mr. Cullen for the eagle program. "But he has always treated birds well, and he's been incredibly successful."

Mr. Cullen's suspension on Friday was the latest odd twist for a man whose 30-year career has veered through the peculiar extremes of the bird world, from the Australian Outback to Petty's Island, a political minefield on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River where developers and environmentalists are fighting over whether to build a golf resort or establish a wildlife refuge.

Mr. Cullen, 53, was raised in Goshen, N.Y., and said he became entranced with raptors as a child, when he saw the Disney film "Rusty and the Falcon." During the 1970's and early 80's, he spent seven years lecturing at the Falconry Center, in Gloucester, England, a world-renowned center for exotic birds.

After returning to the United States, however, Mr. Cullen soon found himself enmeshed in the aviary underworld. In 1984, Australian authorities arrested Mr. Cullen, who was carrying a hatchet, 100 feet up a tree, trying to snatch eggs from the nest of a red-tailed cockatoo. Nearby were Mr. Cullen's accomplice and an incubator, powered by a car battery, containing 29 eggs with a black market value of $2,000 to $5,000 each. Mr. Cullen pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, and the investigation eventually encompassed dozens of arrests in an intricate network of smugglers around the globe.

Testimony in the case offered a rare peek into the shadowy market for exotic birds, revealing how an army of poachers used specially designed vests and underwear to keep their pilfered eggs warm and concealed on transcontinental flights. If any eggs hatched during the flight, the smugglers were instructed to flush the chick down the plane's toilet before its chirps blew their cover.

In the late 80's and early 90's he built a lucrative business breeding saker falcons and Eurasian eagle owls and conducted dazzling falcon displays at fairs, parties and bird shows. When Ron Nixon, a bird expert he had met in England, set up the eagle program in Washington, Mr. Cullen worked briefly as a consultant there. In 2002, when New York City Parks officials contacted Mr. Nixon, saying they wanted to bring eagles to New York City to symbolize the city's recovery from the 9/11 terror attack, Mr. Nixon suggested they hire his old friend Mr. Cullen.

After consulting with the federal wildlife experts, city parks officials decided that a misdemeanor criminal record from 18 years earlier should not disqualify a man with Mr. Cullen's experience handling raptors. On July 23, 2002, amid patriotic fervor, Mr. Cullen appeared on the nationally televised program "The Early Show" along with Mr. Benepe and a bald eagle named Betsy, who had been leased to help promote the program.

But a week later, Mr. Cullen informed Betsy's caretaker that he had found the bird dead in its cage. An autopsy found that she had died of dehydration.

During an interview on Friday in the office of his lawyer, Peter Ginsberg, Mr. Cullen said that the death was a fluke, most likely attributable to the withering heat wave that gripped the Northeast at the time. In addition to providing Betsy with ample water, he said, he bathed her with a hose every night, including the night before she died.

"This bird was a rehab bird that may have done something stupid to get itself injured in the first place," he said. "So could it be that it did something stupid on the day it died?"

But Ward Stone, the New York State wildlife pathologist who conducted an autopsy on Betsy, said he believed that the bird received inadequate care.

"They survive in the wild," Mr. Stone said. "So they don't die of dehydration in captivity if they are given water and the proper food."

City and state officials never publicly disclosed the dehydration death. Despite opposition from some naturalists, who considered the city's program a mere publicity stunt, New York's eagle program was still widely regarded as a success, because only 2 of the 12 birds released into the wild had died - a better-than-average survival rate.

So last year, when Cherokee Investment Partners, a development company, found its plan for Petty's Island stalled by the fact that eagles were nesting there, they contacted Mr. Cullen, whose company, T.C. Management, described him as an expert in urban eagles.

Cherokee paid Mr. Cullen $45,760, according to the contract, to observe the nest using binoculars, from locations off the island. Several weeks into the program, however, Mr. Cullen moved closer - watching them while paddling by in a kayak, and on the island itself.

Even though most wildlife protocols call for humans to keep 1,000 feet or more from eagles during breeding season - and Mr. Cullen's Inwood Park program used plastic tape and fences to keep the public 100 feet or more from the eagles' nests - he eventually set up a small duck blind 94 feet from the eagle's nest on Petty's Island. The investigator's report said that Mr. Cullen made repeated observations from that site, including one on June 4, the last day that volunteer eagle watchers saw the chick in its nest.

A week later, when a truck driver found the eaglet on the side of the road, clinging to life, investigators for New Jersey's Department of Environmental Conservation discovered the tent and eventually tracked down Mr. Cullen. In an interview with the lead investigator, Lt. Todd Eisenhuth of the Division of Fish, Game and Wildlife, Mr. Cullen said he played no role in the eaglet's death. He did acknowledge, according to the investigative file:

"I don't like eagles. They have an attitude."

Mr. Cullen said on Friday that he did consider eagles more difficult to handle than falcons, but said it was ludicrous to suggest that he had frightened an eagle to death on a place as bustling as Petty's Island.

"These eagles set up between two big cities, not in the wilderness," he said. "There are trucks and traffic on that island. A tent is not going to disturb them."

# posted by Unknown : 8:30 PM