CEDAR GROVE - The red-tailed hawk banked west into the stout breeze and appeared to hover motionless for a long moment 150 feet above the Lake Michigan plain.
Then in a flash it augured its body into the wind and dove swiftly toward a grassy opening at Cedar Grove Ornithological Research Station in Cedar Grove.
The migrating raptor had been fooled. The white pigeon wasn't a sitting duck on the ground but a lure used by researchers to attract birds of prey toward a trap.
Four people watched the hawk descend through a viewing slit on the north end of the station.
As the redtail landed, a switch was triggered, a hoop net flipped and the bird was covered.
"Got it!" said Rick Hill, a CGORS board member.
Charlie Giannini, a seasonal intern at the facility, burst through a side door, sprinted to the trap and quickly extricated the bird.
"Hatch year redtail," Giannini announced as he carried it back to the building. Less than one year old, the bird had yet to develop its namesake tail coloration.
Over the next 10 minutes the hawk was measured, weighed, assessed and fitted with an aluminum leg band. Then without hesitation it was released to continue its life in the wild.
The unique identification number on its band will be shared with a world-wide network to allow its life history to be tracked.
All banding, marking and sampling is conducted under a federal bird banding permit issued by the U.S. Geological Society.
It's all part of the work done each fall at Cedar Grove.
This year marked a milestone - it was the station's 75th year of operation. The anniversary added to Cedar Grove's standing as the oldest, continuously-operated raptor banding facility in North America, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
It's likely the most important raptor research site you've never heard of.
The station was started in the 1930's by the Milwaukee Public Museum but was later abandoned and vandalized. Its fortunes changed in 1950 when two Milwaukeeans fresh out of high school - Daniel Berger and Helmut Mueller - learned about it and took over its operation.
They caught just five birds the first year.
"The equipment sucked and we didn't know what we were doing," Mueller told me in 2009. "We gave Rube Goldberg a bad name. But we learned."
Learned is an understatement. Berger and Mueller pioneered techniques to safely trap birds of prey; many are still used across the world.
Their work produced more than 70 academic papers. They helped proved the migratory nature of northern saw-whet owls. And the long-term data set allowed observation of trends in raptor numbers during the use of DDT and after it was banned in the U.S. in 1972.
The chemical caused birds to lay thin-shelled eggs and resulted in extremely poor survival. Once it was outlawed, the numbers of most raptor species steadily increased.
The men, who were notoriously averse to publicity, invited me to a 60th anniversary gathering at the station.
"They say the first 60 years are the toughest," Berger said at the time.
Mueller puffed on his pipe and advised me of the rarity of my visit.
"The last reporter we invited was Gordon MacQuarrie," Mueller said, referencing the late Milwaukee Journal outdoors editor who visited in the early 1950s.
The men graciously extended more such offers to me over the coming years. And though they passed away (Berger in 2016, Mueller in 2020) their successors have continued operation of the facility and added research projects to its portfolio.
And this year, for the 75th year of banding at the station, CGORS board president Steve Holzman invited me back.
"It's an awesome responsibility to keep this going," Holzman said.
The Cedar Grove property, owned by the state since 1948 and now managed by the DNR, was designated a State Natural Area in 1952.
The site is leased to the nonprofit research station.
Similar to its origins, it's run by volunteers and interns on what most would consider a shoe-string budget of donations and an endowment with the Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin.
Danny Erickson of Wauwatosa is the master bander at the station and controls all banding activities.
Holzman, Hill, Andrew Reinke and other board members spend many days pitching in through the fall.
This year two interns, Giannini from Chico, California and Bridget Schmidt from Cincinnati, Ohio, were hired to work at the station from mid-August to mid-November.
The oldest bander at the station now is John Bowers, 87 from Cedar Grove, who has been volunteering for the past 36 years.
Work at the station continues almost around the clock, seven days a week. From 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. hawks and other diurnal raptors are counted, trapped, banded and released. After a break for dinner, at 5 p.m. owl trapping starts until 6 a.m.
Then it repeats the next day.
The facility has played a significant role in banding birds for two new research projects in recent years. One, the Red-Tailed Hawk Project initiated by Bryce Robinson of Cornell University, is studying the ecology and evolution in that species. Board member Susan Kaehler is the point person at CGORS for that work.
Another, led by Erickson, is looking at a disease called capillaria in sharp-shinned hawks. The disease was first detected in the species in 2016 at Braddock Bay Raptor Research in New York.
Cedar Grove is a perfect site for sharp-shinned hawk research. Over the last 75 years, sharpies have been the most banded species at the facility.
This fall Erickson fitted nine adult sharpies with transmitters (six GPS/satellite units and three Motus radio tags). The birds were checked for prevalence of the disease and will be tracked for movement and survival. The work is expected to expand knowledge of the life cycle and landscape use of the species as well as impacts of the disease.
The redtail and sharp-shinned hawk work will be published in coming years, adding to the legacy of CGORS.
The station maintains anearly 1900s cabin vibe. Electricity was added in 2005, a porta potty in 2014, a well in 2016 and WiFi a couple years ago. The station also recently added a website and an online donation link.
The walls of the shack remain papered with newspaper headlines and bumper stickers.
"We're looking at nature," says one above the viewing slit. "Do pigs have wings?" reads another. Nearby "Falcons fly sort of high" and "Hawks start slow, heat up."
The station is tucked in a grove of trees just 100 yards from the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Since migrating raptors prefer to fly over land, not open water, the birds are concentrated along the eastern edge of Wisconsin by prevailing west or northwest winds.
The same tendency but with a different orientation benefits Hawk Ridge Observatory in Duluth.
At Cedar Grove, the lakefront location and skill of the researchers and volunteers resulted in the banding of 47,309 birds of prey from 1950 through 2023.
This year the crew operated the facility Aug. 15 through Nov. 26.
Holzman said it was an unusual year, with frequent days of east or south winds and warmer than normal temperatures.
Such weather often results in lower than average numbers of raptors observed and banded at the facility.
The station banded its 500th on Nov. 11, the day I visited. When they closed up shop for the year, they tallied 514.
The most banded species this season was the northern saw-whet owl at 142 birds, followed by the sharp-shinned hawk (136), red-tailed hawk (117), merlin (49), Cooper's hawk (41) and peregrine falcon (14), with the balance made up of a handful each of long-eared owl, American kestrel, northern harrier and a few other species.
In a paper they published in 2010 in the Passenger Pigeon of the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, Berger and Mueller wrote "It has been an enjoyable 60 years and we are looking forward to the next 60."
The men passed away since they wrote that article. But their spirit lives on at CGORS.
And the next generation to take the reins at the facility feels the same way as the founders did.
"It would be awesome if we could have another 75 years," Holzman said. "And there is no reason we can't. We continually find young people who have a strong interest in raptors and wildlife and we feel the future for Cedar Grove is bright."