AECI helps to restore peregrine falcon

Associated Electric Cooperative Inc. is participating in efforts to restore the once-endangered peregrine falcon, successfully raising and releasing young falcons along the Mississippi River and in north-central Missouri.

Partnering with the Missouri Department of Conservation, AECI employees have released three sets of falcon chicks at the cooperative's New Madrid Power Plant in southeast Missouri. Employees then expanded the program to AECI's Thomas Hill Energy Center in north-central Missouri, releasing the first set of four falcon chicks from that site in spring 2007.

AECI employees have driven the effort to be part of the bird's continuing recovery from the federal endangered species list. New Madrid Power Plant employees initiated the program at the cooperative, researching the falcon and its successful nesting at electric utility structures and building the hacking and nesting boxes. They then helped employees at Thomas Hill begin a similar program.

Although a nesting pair has not yet returned to the New Madrid Power Plant, one of the birds (named Bessie and shown at left) released from the plant in 2005 has mated and taken over an existing nest site on an office building in a St. Louis suburb.

"Even though our released birds have yet to return home for a permanent nesting, we consider our project successful, especially now that we know Bessie has propagated the numbers of her once-endangered species," said David Childers, a leader of the falcon program at New Madrid Power Plant. "After all, restoration of the species is what the project is all about."

Power-plant peregrines now account for more than one-third of the population in the Midwest, and utilities have played a key role in helping the bird recover from near extinction.

AECI has a long record of environmental stewardship. In 1995, employees at Thomas Hill Energy Center worked with the Missouri Department of Conservation to restore osprey in Missouri. Today, it's a common site to see them snatching fish from Thomas Hill Lake. Nearby, a pair of bald eagles hatched two birds in spring 2007.

Falcons, osprey, kestrels and eagles are just a few of the many species benefiting from AECI's careful environmental stewardship. The cooperative has restored hundreds of acres of once-mined land to productive pasture, woodlands and wetlands for wildlife. Nominated by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, AECI received a national award in 2007 for its reclamation efforts.

AECI also has improved air quality.The cooperative's sulfur dioxide emissions rate has been reduced 90 percent systemwide since 1994, and AECI has decreased its nitrogen oxides emissions rate about 80 percent during the ozone season. Construction is under way on additional environmental controls at Thomas Hill Energy Center. Once complete by Jan. 1, 2009, the new controls will enable AECI to achieve a systemwide NOx emissions rate reduction of nearly 90 percent.

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