Retiring Stillwater Area High School teacher, falcon expert Andy Weaver ‘brought science to life’

Mary Divine, Pioneer Press
·12 min read

Everything in Andy Weaver’s biology classroom at Stillwater Area High School is designed to get students excited about the outdoors and wildlife science.

There’s a squawking Finnish goshawk named Nato, a tank for hatching trout, a radio-telemetry system used to track deer, an area dedicated to growing native prairie seedlings, taxidermy mounts along the back wall and a freezer chest filled with frozen rabbits. His collection of more than 500 bird skins rivals many nature centers in the area.

Weaver’s crowning achievement is a captive breeding facility for peregrine falcons — the first of its kind in an American high school. Weaver, a licensed master falconer, applied for — and got — a nearly $40,000 grant from the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources Funding in 2001 to finance the project. Weaver then organized the curriculum and designed and built three falcon-breeding chambers in a school courtyard around the corner from his classroom.

Friends who were falconers donated three pairs of breeders, and, in 2003, the high school’s first peregrine falcon chicks were hatched.

Weaver’s students have been involved in all aspects of the conservation project — from monitoring incubators to mixing mashed quail and Pedialyte together for the falcons’ food. They’ve had astounding success in increasing the numbers of the once-endangered birds: A total of 106 falcon chicks have been hatched at SAHS.

Weaver, 61, is now looking for new homes for the school’s four falcons. After 33 years of teaching in Stillwater, he retires on June 8.

“I feel very, very fortunate,” Weaver said. “Stillwater was the perfect place to land. Teaching here was a neat way to put a whole bunch of things together for me. It allowed me to talk about everything that intrigued me about the outdoors — hunting, fishing, falconry, beekeeping, maple syruping, deer-tracking, bird banding, prairies, you name it.”

‘He has helped save the peregrine falcon population’

Because Weaver holds the permits for raptor propagation, bird banding, radio telemetry of wildlife and scientific collections at the school, those programs will be decommissioned once he retires.

“Peregrine falcons were something that Andy was super-passionate about,” said Rob Bach, the school’s principal. “You hope that whoever we end up hiring has passions of their own — and if it happens to be in that area, great, because we have a great setup to continue some of that stuff, and we’d like to see that. We also know that people are probably going to have projects of their own, so what other projects can they bring to Stillwater, too, that continue to make us better? I think the big thing is leaving a good platform for them to pick up if they choose to do that.”

Weaver played a key role in the recovery of the peregrine, which was nearly extinct in the U.S. in the 1950s because of the use of DDT, Bach said. In 1999, the peregrine was removed from the endangered-species list.

“He has helped save the peregrine falcon population in the St. Croix River Valley,” Bach said. “He is taking birds from conception all the way through to adulthood and then releasing them out into the wild. That’s a pretty cool thing.”

‘He inspires kids in a way I don’t see much anymore’

Weaver has gone to extraordinary lengths to propagate the birds. When one of the school’s peregrine falcons produced infertile eggs in 2015, Weaver decided to try artificial insemination. He contacted a friend in Spencer, Iowa, who breeds falcons and had him ship a semen sample overnight. Weaver and his students then successfully injected it into one of the school’s female peregrine falcons.

“It’s a rare procedure,” Weaver said. “It’s certainly not usually done at the high-school level. I wasn’t sure what they would say when I put in a request for $500 worth of raptor semen. It’s a ridiculous thing, but a thing just the same.”

Peg Callahan, executive director of the Wildlife Science Center in Stacy, Minn., has worked with Weaver on a host of projects since the early 1990s.

“He is a believer that you are really going to instill interest in students if you can get them doing something hands-on,” Callahan said. “These kids get every experience under the sun with him. He inspires kids in a way I don’t see much anymore. It’s all hands-on, it’s experiential. He does more to recruit kids to outdoor jobs and enjoyment than anyone else I know. The kids love him; they just love him. We need more teachers like him in the classroom.”

‘This is a nice oasis’

Weaver’s students bait a live trap for deer each year in the school’s Environmental Learning Center, a 55-acre parcel behind the high school. When they catch a deer, Weaver calls Callahan, who comes to the school and sedates the animal and helps the students check vitals and temperature, take blood and hair samples, and attach a tracking collar. Then, they wake the animal so it can return to the wild.

“It’s really amazing,” Callahan said. “You’ve got kids in cheerleading outfits handling the deer — monitoring their temperatures, heart rates, everything. The collars they use are state-of-the-art and provide real-time data.”

Eighteen cameras throughout the center capture images of the deer and other animals, and the students work with Weaver to track the deer’s movements. The collars provide satellite locations eight times a day. Most of the deer stay in or around the Environmental Learning Center. Some take up residence on private properties south of the school, he said.

“They don’t go very far,” Weaver said. “This is a nice oasis, and they typically flood out into the neighborhood. What usually makes the difference is a quiet back yard with no dogs. A double bonus is to have a bird feeder they can hit all winter long.”

Each deer’s location is tracked for a year, after which the battery in the collar will expire, and the collar will release itself.

Growing up on the banks of the Mississippi

Weaver, the son of the late Rep. Charlie Weaver Sr., R-Anoka, grew up in Anoka on the banks of the Mississippi River. He kept a pet raccoon and a menagerie of birds in the family’s back yard, including wood ducks, canvasbacks and pheasants. Once, when his sister found a goose egg, Weaver hatched it in the basement using an incubator. “Word got out, and people would bring me all sorts of abandoned eggs they’d found, and I would try to hatch them,” he said.

During an art class his senior year at Anoka High School, Weaver discovered a book that would change his life: Frank Beebe and Harold Webster’s “North American Falconry & Hunting Hawks.” “It turned out to be the bible of American falconry, and it just blew my mind,” Weaver said. “I thought, ‘What an intimate way to interact with birds. What a way cooler way than just watching them — through a screen — walk around in the back yard.”

One of Weaver’s teachers found out about his interest and offered him an American Kestrel, a sparrow hawk, that the teacher had trapped to prevent it from nesting in his wood-duck house, Weaver said.

Before he could take the kestrel, Weaver had to pass a written test, find a sponsor and have his equipment inspected by the state. “Once you’ve jumped through all those hoops, then they give you a band, and it’s your job to go trap a first-year red-tailed hawk, which are super-common and easy to train. That’s how we all start, with the red-tailed, and then as your license continues, you get more and more liberties.”

Weaver continued to work his way up the falconry ranks to apprentice falconer, general falconer and master falconer over the next seven years.

One of the first things Weaver did when he arrived at the University of Minnesota-Morris in the fall of 1981 was to look for a place to keep Zero, his red-tailed hawk. He found a spot he liked next to a lilac bush in a professor’s back yard. “I just walked up to his house, knocked on the door and said, ‘Hey, Dr. Templeman, could I keep my hawk in your back yard?’” Weaver said. “I kept him there all four years. I used to fly him right out of my dorm room.”

After graduating in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in biology, Weaver took jobs teaching in Bird Island, Coon Rapids and Blaine. He then took a year off to work at Steve Martin’s “Birds of the World” show in Texas and get his master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. While at the U, he lived with a falconer friend in Stillwater.

Weaver, who sings and plays guitar, was invited to Stillwater Area High School in 1990 to perform environmental music for an Earth Day program. “I was looking around thinking these guys are thinking outside of the box,” he said. “This is really a creative spot.”

Weaver was hired to teach science that fall. “The first day, I asked my department head, ‘How do you do things out here in Stillwater? Is it systemic? Cellular? There’s a whole bunch of ways you could teach biology.’ He said, ‘You know, we hired you. You’re the expert. You do what you want.’”

‘If they see you having fun, then it’s going to go well’

Weaver, who teaches Advanced Placement biology and Advanced Placement environmental science, said he tries to make his classes fun. “If they see you having fun, then it’s going to go well,” he said. “I would always bring my personal stuff. I was a volunteer firefighter, so I would talk about firefighting. I would talk about guitar playing. They want to know what makes you tick.”

Classroom activities have included cat dissection, bird banding, prairie restoration, radio telemetry and capturing small mammals. “If I ran over a deer, I was dragging that baby in here, and we’d dissect it on the floor,” he said. “We’ve dissected a bear on this floor, too.”

Weaver’s wife, Sandra, worked as a counselor at the high school for 32 years before retiring last year; the couple’s two daughters, Rachel and Megan, are SAHS graduates. “We called it cheap date night,” Weaver said. “We’d go to the basketball games and the football games and the Battle of the Bands, just to see kids and have fun. Just show up. It’s all about the relationships, for sure.”

Weaver was one of Zach Sobiech’s favorite teachers. Sobiech, who became an internet sensation after his song “Clouds” went viral, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma when he was 14. He died in May 2013 during his senior year. “Clouds,” a movie based on Sobiech’s life, was released on Disney+ in 2020. In the movie, Weaver is portrayed by actor Lil Rel Howery.

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Weaver received more than $50,000 in grants during his career at Stillwater from the Partnership Plan, the nonprofit organization that funds extra programs in Stillwater Area Schools. One $3,500 grant was for the “artificial insemination of falcons to produce hybrid offspring that will be trained to chase birds off airport runways.”

“Andy truly understands one of the tenets of why we exist: to champion innovative learning,” said Rick Robbins, executive director. “He didn’t just teach science from a textbook, he brought science to life. My kids graduated in 2003 and 2007, and when I ask them what they most remember, Andy Weaver is at the top of their lists. I’m sure there are thousands of alumni who feel the same.”

In addition to breeding falcons, Weaver ran the school’s prairie-restoration effort, including collecting seeds and overseeing prescribed burns, and helped students hatch about 1,000 rainbow trout a year to be released in Brown’s Creek, just north of the high school.

‘Maybe their forte will be beetles’

Now, Weaver is working on a plan to clean out the falcon chambers and convert them into a storage area for waders and other gear. He also needs to clean out the lab’s freezer, which is filled with cottontail rabbits that his falcons have caught. “They’ll be parceled out and fed to the hawks,” he said. “It’s a little gruesome, but you can’t live with raptors and then feed them Twinkies.”

He’s also looking for a home for the collection of bird skins, some of which came from the now-closed Warner Nature Center in northern Washington County. Others “got peeled off the grills of kids’ cars,” Weaver said. “It’s not uncommon for me to sit down at work, and all of a sudden I’ll notice I have a present on my desk. ‘I found this dead thing. Thought you’d like it.’ I’m like, OK.”

Weaver said he hopes whoever is hired to take his place shares his passion for the outdoors and takes advantage of the school’s Environmental Learning Center.

“Someone else might have really awesome ideas,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be the same. Maybe their forte will be beetles, and they’ll grow purple loosestrife-eating beetles, or maybe their forte will be fish, and they’ll do more of this aquatic stuff in the classroom. There’s a million things that the next person could do.”

Weaver said he’s grateful that school administrators and district officials gave him the freedom to teach the way he wanted.

“I’m a firm believer in just being able to be unique and original,” he said. “Unfortunately, I think the push right now nationally and statewide is to celebrate being the same: Let’s have standardized tests, standardized curriculum, a standardized grading policy. They want everything standardized so it’s comparable.”

“I just hope everyone can still bring their A game,” he said. “I hope we can celebrate our differences and play-to-your-strengths kind of things — ’cause I’ve certainly been able to do that. It’s empowering. It makes me excited to go to school. If we were all making chocolate-chip cookies, and my job was to show up and do a recipe, I’d go crazy. I’d have no fun in it.”