It started with a peregrine falcon. For Robert Vallieres, a veteran of the Gulf War, this was the bird that changed his life once he returned from combat.

“They needed people to watch their natural habitats. It’s called nest-watching,” Vallieres said. “For birds of prey, they asked me to watch stuff in the White Mountains, so I took a tour with New Hampshire Audubon when I got back in the ’90s.”

Birds ended up being his reentry point into the world. Vallieres, who joined the military in his second year out of high school, served with the 20th Engineer Brigade during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He sustained a traumatic brain injury in the Persian Gulf and was taken out of the desert via medevac.

“I’m not supposed to be here today. Twelve soldiers in my unit perished in the desert. I just happened to be lucky that I got medevaced,” he said. “For me, getting involved with raptors brought me back to community. If you will, it was my welcome home gift.”

Standing on the sanctuary platform at Carter Hill, Vallieres set up his camera and focused it on a hawk soaring through the distance. He can identify birds and their actions after years of observation and interactions with different species.

“There’s a group at the vet center, and there’s the VA, and there’s Northeast Passage. There are all these accesses to these groups. Particularly with COVID, it’s really given us more points of connection. Bird-watching is a good healthy thing to do together,” said Vallieres, a Concord resident.

Northeast Passage is an organization based around therapeutic recreation and adaptive sports. Vallieres’s involvement with its veterans’ programs, which brought him outdoors and in contact with others who’d served, helped him regain the confidence he needed to reengage with the world.

“I was afraid. I’d had two aneurysms, and they saved my life. I was scared ... to do anything. I died, basically,” Vallieres said.

He has done bird presentations for other veterans at the New Hampshire Veterans Home and Manchester VA Medical Center. Vallieres also helped start the hawk watch at Carter Hill Sanctuary and is a frequent visitor to the bird-watching platform that overlooks Mount Kearsarge. On a clear day, you can see as far as Mount Washington, Vallieres explained, pointing an arm in the distance. He appreciates the vastness of the view and finds its familiarity comforting.

“Hawk watching gives an idea of how well the species is doing. It gives us an idea of what is and what isn’t,” he said. “They gave me this experience. And isn’t that what we all want for our children or even your neighbors, to have an experience that will keep on giving back?”

In addition to having helped rehabilitate raptors through the New Hampshire Audubon Society and participating in efforts to tag them and track species, Vallieres seeks to facilitate other people’s connection with birds and nature. He’s brought friends and other veterans up to the hawk-watching platform at Carter Hill. The bird-watching group from the Manchester Veterans Association came to watch hawks, with Vallieres guiding them through the experience. He’s also gone into local classrooms and shared his love of birding with children.

“This is kind of spiritual,” said Vallieres, who finds a connection to his father, a World War II veteran, through birding. “It’s just the beauty of the bird, and I hope to share with the spirits, with everybody.”

He co-wrote the memoir “Wounded Warriors: A Soldier’s Story of Healing Through Birds,” published in 2014. For him, it’s all about staying connected and staying grounded.

“For a veteran who gets tied to a wheelchair – or not even a veteran, maybe a person’s grandmother, or somebody who’s not having the well-being we’re having right here – if you can tie somebody into something that’s magical, or just express some kind of spirit, it’s some vitamin D that we all need outside,” he said.

He takes every day as it comes and stops to relish in the small moments – the breeze around him, the smell of the trees, the sight of a bird.

To Vallieres, being a veteran represents a link to those he served with, in addition to those who served before him. For Veterans Day, he hopes people will take time to recognize the sacrifices made in service of country.

“The ones we really need to think about are the ones that are in the ground. Those are 12 soldiers in my 20th Engineer Brigade, Fort Bragg, Airborne. You realize how family we are, how tied we are,” he said.

Rachel Wachman can be reached at rwachman@cmonitor.com.