The man who charmed eagles.

• Author: Guerrero, Arturo
• Position: Colombian ecologist Alvaro Torres Barreto

As the protector of endangered birds of prey, Alvaro Torres Barreto took a medieval art to new heights

Alvaro Torres Barreto had spent haft a century looking into the eyes of eagles, so it seemed only fitting that, toward the end of his life, his appearance had become aquiline - his profile, the combination of nose and mustache, and certainly his gaze. An eagle is eternally watchful: A lateral membrane cleans its eyes without impeding its riveting stare. Such was the friendly gaze of this Colombian scholar.

A veterinarian and ecologist, a specialist in horses and hawking, Torres Barreto was also a writer and painter, a newspaper columnist, and a member of the Colombian Academy of Natural, Physical, and Exact Sciences. For decades it had been his custom to acquire birds of prey kept by others in captivity. He would spend two or three years helping them to recover their proper configuration, full plumage, and flight feathers. He retaught them the art of flight, then released them among the high rocks to seek out a mate and follow the wind.

Torres Barreto, who revived this pastime of kings and nobles, died in Bogota, in December 1994, at the age of seventy-six. His life was a Renaissance enclave in the New World. "In Colombia there is not even the slightest trace of such a tradition," he wrote in 1986. He would be the only person to dedicate his life to the art of falconry employing neotropical birds of prey. He believed himself to be the only falconer in Colombia, and, with fewer than a handful of exceptions, perhaps in Latin America.

Although he was a scientist, taxonomy failed to obscure his own instinctive love for intelligent animals, for nature, and for mankind. He did not approach his eagles with the eye of the cataloger but with the vision of one who, over three quarters of a century, had explored exhaustively one passion at a time.

"Since I was a child, the flight of birds has been a source of wonder to me," Torres Barreto once recalled. "Especially birds of prey, the rulers of space, who spend hours circling at high altitudes without a single lift of their wings. I remember when I was small lying in the grass in the countryside at Subachoque, a town near Bogota, for hours at a time, absorbed in contemplating the maneuvers of some eagle surveying its broad territory from dizzying heights. Perhaps this is why, over a period of tune, through some atavistic impulse, I became a slave to hawking, dedicated to researching the behavior of...