Over a ledge off the 26th floor of one of St. Paul's tallest buildings, a peregrine falcon swooped past her nest while her mate soared high above and called out to her.
Lori Naumann, with the Department of Natural Resources nongame wildlife program, was protected by a screen as she checked the nest for eggs and wiped a camera monitoring the pair. The falcons, the world's fastest living things, continued to hover and dive in the biting wind, ready to fight for what might be the city's finest nesting spot.
"I think if we were outside, we'd be injured by now," Naumann said.
The nest would have been almost unimaginable a few decades ago, when there were no peregrines known to be left in the Minnesota wild. But now, the program largely responsible for helping them make a comeback is at risk as fewer and fewer taxpayers donate money to help keep it running, biologists say.
The state's nongame wildlife fund, which also helped restore bald eagles and trumpeter swans from the brink of extinction in Minnesota, has been almost entirely funded through checkoff donations marked on tax returns since the 1980s. In the early years of the program, when wild swans hadn't been seen near the metro for a century and eagle sightings were so rare as to be newsworthy, about 200,000 people a year would check the box on their state returns to give at least a few dollars to the program.
By 1995, half that number donated. In 2015 — the last year the state kept records on the donations — fewer than 50,000 people contributed. And that number has probably steadily decreased in the years since, Naumann said.
"We're worried because as far as we can tell it's the same people who are donating every year and as they get older they're just not being replaced," she said.
Minnesota is hardly alone. A total of 30 states set up similar tax donation-based programs in the 1970s and '80s — known as the "chickadee checkoff." Many, including Iowa, Indiana and Ohio, have seen sharp drops in donations over the past decade.
