Remembering Steve Earle (1951-2019)

It’s always hard to bid farewell to good friends, and the past year and a half has been especially difficult with the death of so many people who were important to me—Peregrine Fund founder Tom Cade; Bird Watcher’s Digest editor Bill Thompson; and legendary falconers Bob Winslow, Bob Martin, and Mike Connolly, who I had admired since I was a young falconer growing up in California. But the death of Steve Earle, one of my oldest friends, has hit me particularly hard. He passed away of natural causes in the early morning hours on Christmas Eve.

Steve and I first met when we were just thirteen or fourteen years old, and we cut our falconry teeth together, hunting a variety of game with Kestrels, Red-tailed Hawks, Cooper’s Hawks—and later Prairie Falcons and Peregrines—at a time when the Southern California coast still had lots of wide-open spaces to fly raptors.

Thirteen-year-old Steve with a Red-tailed Hawk

Steve in his teens training a Cooper's Hawk in his Seal Beach backyard.

In addition to raptors, the ocean was always an important part of Steve’s life, as a surfer, fisherman, and beachcomber. He grew up in Seal Beach in the Sixties, the son of a schoolteacher and a commercial fisherman—a career Steve and his two brothers also took up. I worked with him for a time in the 1970s on a swordfish boat called the Volare, an Italian verb meaning “to fly”—a perfect name for a boat captained by Steve. He had recruited me because of my skills as a birder, hoping I could sit in the crow’s nest, peering at the horizon through 10x binoculars for hours at a time, searching for the telltale shape of swordfish fins on the horizon. It was a challenge, but thanks to Steve’s tutelage, I could soon distinguish between the fins of distant swordfish, striped marlin, blue sharks, hammerhead sharks, and many other species.

 

The Volare tied up at Fish Harbor with its swordfish plank raised.

It was a good life. We’d anchor each night off one of the Channel Islands—Santa Cruz, San Clemente, or Santa Catalina—and often catch lobster, abalone, or fish to eat in the evening. By day, we’d scour the seas, endlessly searching for swordfish basking in the sun after their morning meals. If we spotted one, we’d lower the long metal plank on the bow of the boat and one of us would walk to the end of it while the other carefully moved the boat forward, trying to get close enough to throw a harpoon at the fish. 

A finning swordfish.

                              Steve stands at the end of the plank, about to harpoon a swordfish.

It was exciting and interesting. Steve worked hard and eventually bought the Volare from the man who employed us, and he lived on the boat for many years—right up until the hull was destroyed by wood rot a few years ago. 

Steve Earle looking like the Ancient Mariner after several decades at sea in pursuit of swordfish.

Looking back on Steve's life, what I think impressed me most about him was the way he dealt with adversity—and he faced a lot of it in his later life. About a decade ago he was diagnosed with bladder cancer and went through a harrowing, hours-long surgery, which nearly killed him, and left him barely able to walk for months. I was living in Upstate New York, but I came to California and visited him not long after his surgery. He was living alone on the Volare, which was tied to the wharf in Fish Harbor, near San Pedro. It was awful, and he obviously was in a lot of pain, but he never complained. He had the most amazingly upbeat attitude, and it really got him through it. Most people would have given up, but he lived another ten years. And it wasn't a bad life. He did the things that interested him most. And he always helped his friends, talking for hours on the phone whenever one of us was in crisis. I'll always be grateful for the emotional support he gave me after the death of one of my children, when I was overcome with despair and didn't see how I could go on. 

Shortly after his surgery, Steve holds up a picture of him at age 19 with his tiercel Prairie Falcon.

Steve didn’t fly falcons in his later years. But he never stopped loving them and spent countless hours watching nesting Peregrine Falcons on the sea cliffs and bridges and buildings of California and later on the Oregon coast, where he spent the final years of his life. 

The last time I saw Steve was just a couple of months ago in the Florida Keys, where he and I and our mutual friend, Hollis Roberts, had gone to watch the fall migration of Peregrine Falcons en route from their Arctic breeding grounds to their wintering areas in Latin America. It was Steve who originally introduced me to Hollis, when we were in our mid-teens, and the three of us always flew hawks together growing up. It was a great reunion. We saw more peregrines than any of us had ever seen in a single day. The hawk watch at Curry Hammock recorded more than five hundred peregrines one of the days we were there. We got to see many peregrines there as well as at Key West and another place where the falcons were flying right over our heads. One day when it was raining we went driving around to see if we could locate any perched peregrines, and we wildly exceeded our expectations, finding seventeen peregrines sitting on a single radio tower. We had the best time, laughing, joking, talking endlessly—and watching peregrines. We were like kids again. What could be better? 

So fair winds and following seas, my old friend, wherever you may travel. 

Migrating Peregrines in the Florida Keys.

With Steve (left) and Hollis (right) at the Florida Keys HawkWatch.