six
Urban Falcons
Even in a big city, the falcon’s world is different from man’s, and the two converge only at rare moments when we humans make a special effort to meet the falcon on her own terms.1
YOU SHARE AIRSPACE with the peregrine over London in Charles Tunnicliffe’s 1923 woodcut, and its aviator’s vantage too: that sense of power over, and separation from, the city below. And you and the falcon both possess that other ferociously modern ability, that of being able to set yourself against the sweep of history. Here is Roger Tory Peterson, writing in 1948:
Man has emerged from the shadows of antiquity with a peregrine on his wrist. Its dispassionate brown eyes, more than those of any other bird, have been witness to the struggle for civilisation, from the squalid tents on the steppes of Asia thousands of years ago to the marble halls of European Kings in the seventeenth century.2
One of the less obvious roles of wild animals is to signify history. They can do so because they are perceived as immortal. Clearly, animals aren’t immortal in the physical sense, and nor is this the animal immortality espoused by academic theoreticians, among whom at least one thinks that animals are technically immortal because they possess no language.3 This form of immortality rests on a far more straightforward phenomenon: that a falcon is a falcon. The same falcon. Whenever it’s lived, wherever it is. A fourteenth-century gyrfalcon is as indistinguishable from a modern gyrfalcon as is the peregrine photographed at its eyrie in the 1920s from the peregrine photographed there today. Civilizations rise and fall, fashions change, but feathers remain the same. And so all falcons, past, present and future, are routinely represented as if they are a single bird. A symbolic type specimen. This is the ‘immortality’ that gives animals an extraordinary facility for the signification of history. Like an antique vase, the falcon gains value and meaning from the hands it has passed through. Today’s gyrfalcon is lauded because, in one sense, it’s the same bird that Henry VIII or Genghis Khan flew, the same bird that’s nested for millennia on ice-capped Arctic cliffs. And this is how Peterson’s falcon partakes of what Nietzsche described as the superhistorical spirit of the modern age.
Tunnicliffe’s peregrine has a name: but it is a family name; it too is immortal. For this is Chakcheck, Henry Williamson’s supreme icon of aristocratic romanticism, and the hero of his 1923 nature fable The Peregrine’s Saga, a tale far more disturbing than Tarka the Otter. The Chakcheck lineage is ancient, ‘older than the gods of man’, explains Williamson, establishing the falcon in a longue durée framework of essential Britishness. ‘A Chakcheck surveyed the Battle of Trafalgar,’ he continues. ‘Another slew the Frenchman’s message-pigeons before Sedan. One was in Ypres before the first bombardment.’ And on he goes:
A Chakcheck was hunting the airways of the Two Rivers’s estuary as the ships went over the bar to join Drake’s fleet; centuries before, when Phoenicians first came to trade; long, long before, when moose roamed in the forest which stood where the Pebble Ridge of Westward Ho! now lies – the trees are long since gone under the sand, drowned by the sea.4
A peregrine falcon high over London in an illustration by Charles Tunnicliffe for Henry Williamson’s The Peregrine’s Saga (1934 edition).
And this falcon is not at home in the city over which it flies. Williamson was convinced that urban life led to social, mental and moral decay, and the gulf between his falcon and the modern city is vast. The bird is invisible to London’s inconsequential denizens who move in ‘agitated streams’ below. It exists in the same symbolic register as those city landmarks upon which it chooses to rest: on the cross of St Paul’s Cathedral, or on another one-eyed British hero atop a column in Trafalgar Square, ‘landing on the admiral’s cocked hat with scratch of claws’.5
Williamson’s peregrine is not Nietzschean solely in its historical transcendence. It is an analogue of the Übermensch, the ‘superior man’ who redeems Western civilization from its moral decadence and loss of vision. Any doubts about Williamson’s political affiliations are dispelled in the virulently anti-Semitic episode in which Chakcheck is trapped by a bird-netter, an ‘unshaven and insignificant individual, who worked for a maculate Yiddish “birdfancier” in Whitechapel’.6 The netter is frightened of this warlike Übervogel, of course; Chakcheck attacks him, escapes, and flies back into the pure skies. The Peregrine’s Saga clearly foreshadows Williamson’s later propaganda for the British Union of Fascists.
Williamson’s recruitment of the falcon as a fascist icon is a particularly distressing episode in that long-standing Romantic tradition of viewing the falcon as the spirit of a lost age – either of vital, primeval nature, or of glorious myth and heraldry, both of which have often been held up as contrastive and ultimately normative mirrors to society and the social mores of contemporary America and Europe. Typically the falcon was viewed as the opposite of modern civilization, the scion of ageless mountains, not a citizen of modern streets. In 1942 American ornithologist Joseph Hickey wrote a scientific paper emphasizing how important ‘wilderness’ was to peregrines. He thought that high cliffs isolated and protected them, raising the falcons away from ‘the progress of what passes for civilization below their cliffs’.7 Like many other falcon-enthusiasts, Hickey was worried that urbanization might drive east-coast peregrines from their historic cliffs. Strange, then, that an ebullient Hickey had seen peregrines ‘all over’ New York City two years earlier. ‘I nearly got run over by Broadway traffic 2 weeks ago watching one for ten minutes working an area around 72 St,’ he wrote, thrilled, to a friend.8
‘Man has emerged from the shadows of antiquity with a peregrine on his wrist.’ The falcon as a signifier of history: David Jones’s 1948 watercolour drawing The Lord of Venedotia.
SKYSCRAPER FALCONS
Yet Hickey’s apparently inconsistent views on falcons and cities were not so strange. For falcons do live in towns. Lugger falcons haunt village streets in Pakistan. Black shaheens raise their young on temples in southern India. Hickey himself reported that peregrines had nested on Salisbury Cathedral in the nineteenth century. And he noted that American falcons sometimes nested on those modern cathedrals of commerce, skyscrapers.9 Skyscrapers dominated the city skylines over which Hickey watched his falcons. Some were overtly futuristic – New York’s Chrysler and Empire State buildings glittered in concrete and steel. Other high-rises reworked classical styles to extraordinary dimensions. The steel skeleton of the Kodak Eastman building in Rochester, New York, for example, was faced with terracotta and topped with a hundred-foot aluminium tower. Bettmann’s photograph of Iroquois workmen on the Chrysler Building atop a eagle- or falcon-headed gargoyle projecting over the city far below is both a reminder of modernism’s fascination with primitivism and a literally concretized trope of the raptor’s vision and power. Atop the skyscraper, the falcon shares the cartographic view of the town planner, looking down on grids of streets and edifices of angled sheer stone and glass. As the writer David Nye explains:
the new vista glimpsed from the upper floors of these buildings was intentional, and it quickly became an important prerequisite for executives. By the 1920s the Olympian perspective from their offices was immediately recognised as a visualisation of their power.10
From this height the view was sublime. It evoked the same feelings of awe and transcendence in the viewer as did views from the edge of the Grand Canyon or from Rocky Mountain peaks over vistas of wild America. But there was a crucial difference between the sublime view from a skyscraper and the view from a clifftop or mountain: from the former, the totality of civilization, not nature, was laid out below. This was a second nature, the cityscape doubling for wilderness. Mankind had proved he was indeed lord of his own creation.
Construction workers on New York’s Chrysler Building in the 1940s take a cigarette break on a sublime steel perch. |
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But something else was sharing those views. Real falcons. They naturalized these parallels between cliff and skyscraper, nature and city. Wintering American peregrines roosted on city high-rise ledges as if they were cliffs, tail-chased pigeons hell for leather through the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan’s financial district. They shared their mountain views with top-floor executives; both were high above the hustle and mess of the urban jungle below. And because these giant buildings were concrete symbols of corporate and personal power, falcons choosing to roost or nest on them had enormous symbolic import. For one of nature’s most spectacular icons of vision and power had chosen your headquarters over those of your competitors to call home. If falcons forsook cliffs to nest on your building, you had clearly succeeded in creating an edifice as immortal as a mountain: your own Olympus. Capitalism seemed to have been granted its final approval from the falcons that chose to inhabit its most obvious symbols and whose predatory practices naturalized the aggressive competitiveness of capitalism.
The most famous city peregrines of the 1940s lived on a quite literally mountain-sized building: the headquarters of the Sun Life Assurance Company, a mind-numbingly massive edifice of pale granite rising over Montreal’s Dominion Square. In 1936 a pair of peregrines ‘laid claim’ to the Sun Life Building, where local falcon-enthusiast George Harper Hall watched them daily. For two years, he saw the falcons nesting attempts end in disaster; the female laid eggs in drainage channels where they were soon waterlogged. And so, in 1940, Hall sought permission from the Sun Life Assurance Company to assure the future of its peregrines. He arranged for two shallow wooden boxes filled with gravel to be placed over a drainage scupper on the twentieth floor. The falcons accepted the boxes, laid eggs in one and raised two young. Hall was delighted – even more so when the falcons bred again the following spring. But the company had scheduled repairs on the building’s facade for May, and the falcons, busy raising their young on a diet of city pigeons, took umbrage and attacked the contractors. The workmen retreated and refused to work unless the birds were destroyed. Hall immediately took on the role of public relations representative for the falcons, and the furore over their fate was fanned not only by the local press but by the national media; letters and telephone calls poured in from across America offering advice on the matter. One young man keen to show the workmen that falcons were harmless retreated with a lacerated and bloody head, much to their satisfaction. Sun Life quietly delayed the building work, allowing the falcons to survive and the storm to subside. Everything had worked out for the best. The ‘Sun Life Falcons’, as they were now called, were now the most famous pair of birds in the world, their lives celebrated in articles, columns and editorials across America and overseas. Accusations flooded in that these birds were a publicity stunt: semi-domesticated birds managed by the company. ‘Can the placing of a few rough boards across a water-gutter and covering them with gravel . . . be called management?’ Hall retorted.
An American peregrine, at home in city air.
Not all peregrines were so lauded. Peregrines were still actively persecuted in this era. Some owners of New York buildings frequented by falcons actively discouraged them or destroyed their young. The rector of Riverside Church was particularly unhappy that his congregation could see peregrines killing pigeons from his church steps. In the early 1940s a pair nesting on a coping near the balcony of actress Olivia de Havilland’s suite at the St Regis Hotel was bundled into a wooden box by hotel staff armed with brooms, and destroyed. Their ‘dictatorial screaming’ and ‘preying on innocent pigeons’ had upset the hotel residents – except for De Havilland, who had a penchant for falconry and was outraged by their deaths.11 For New York falconer Vern Siefert, who exercised his trained falcons from the roof of his apartment building, the problems came from a very different quarter:
And the thing was, that the Mafia were very interested in pigeon racing. It’s a funny thing . . . just loved pigeons and loved to race them. And Vernon’s birds used to catch some of them, and they valued their pigeons . . . and they drove Vernon out of New York. No kidding. They scared him so he left New York. They drove him out of New York ‘cause he wasn’t going to give up falconry and they said, ‘O.K. Really? We’ll put a hit on you. We’ll put a number on you.’ So he came out [to Colorado].12
Although safe from trigger-happy sportsmen, the city was not a perfect nursery for young falcons, particularly if they fledged prematurely. There were no raccoons or foxes, but there were cats, dogs, trucks, trains, wide expanses of glass that reflected the sky and clouds and could break a falcon’s neck – and a population whose response to falcons was ambivalent, to say the least. Two young falcons found by Patrolman Thomas Murphy under a car and on a building marquee in West Seventy-Third Street in June 1945 ended up in the Bronx Zoo. But the career of city peregrines wasn’t ended by physical dangers like these. Their death-knell was sounded by pesticides. For despite their apparent embrace of progress, city falcons were unable to escape the chemical entailments of the consumer society. The Sun Life female ate her own eggs in 1949, and the pair disappeared from Dominion Square in 1953 after years of poor breeding performance, much to the chagrin of Sun Life, who’d commissioned Hall to write a book on their famous falcons.
However, the DDT crisis and the tireless efforts of those involved in reintroducing peregrines to the wild unexpectedly ushered in a whole new era of city falcons in the 1980s. The cultural meanings of these modern city peregrines are fascinating. Helping forge new links between corporations, governments and local communities, they have forever altered the relationship of nature and the city. And unlike their forebears, they have names.
GONE WITH THE WIND
Scarlett was the first, ushering in the era of the celebrity falcon. Though famed across the globe, the 1940s Sun Life female had no name other than that of the corporation she represented. But the 1970s ushered in a different, TV-enabled, ecologically aware decade. The era of the immortal falcon had ended in two important senses. First, the DDT crisis meant that the species as a whole could no longer be seen as immortal. And second, the eyass peregrines released by conservation organizations were no longer merely represented in terms of their species; they carried leg-bands that enabled them to be identified as individuals.
Scarlett, Baltimore’s darling, surveys her urban domain.
In spring 1979 a captive-bred peregrine that had been released two years earlier from the old gunnery tower at Maryland’s Edgewood Arsenal took up residence on the 33rd floor of the US Fish and Game headquarters in Baltimore. It was a happy coincidence. She’d chosen to live on the headquarters of the very organization charged with the federal protection of the peregrine. The Peregrine Fund hacked back two potential mates for her; both disappeared. But Scarlett, as she was now named, laid three eggs, and raised captive-bred chicks that the Peregrine Fund gave her. In the following years several more tiercels, all named after characters in Gone with the Wind, were released for Scarlett. They helped her raise fostered chicks, for all her own eggs were infertile. She became a bona fide celebrity, a tourist draw, a media darling. She even inspired a children’s book based on her life story. Finally, in 1984, Scarlett took a wild, unbanded tiercel as her mate. Beauregard, as he was called, succeeded where the others had failed: Scarlett laid fertile eggs and raised four healthy young. Tragically, as soon as her offspring were flying strongly over the Baltimore skyline, she died of a Candida infection. Emotional obituaries appeared in the local and national press. And the eyrie continued; a new female joined Beauregard after Scarlett’s death.
Hacking back captive-bred falcons from tall buildings seemed an excellent strategy to the Peregrine Fund, Canadian Wildlife Service and similar organizations. For it solved many of the problems plaguing releases on traditional cliff-sites. For one thing, there were no great horned owls in downtown Baltimore, Washington, Montreal or New York. And tall buildings isolated and protected falcons from human disturbance just as the sheer cliff-faces of the Appalachians had done decades before. But releasing falcons in cities had an unexpected side effect: an unprecedented rise in the number of urban falcons in North America. Everyone thought that falcons released in cities would leave this unnatural environment to populate natural falcon habitat, settle to breed on cliffs. But these young falcons had strongly imprinted on their ‘nests’ in city landscapes, and they gravitated towards urban and industrial sites in search of a mate or eyrie. By the late 1980s peregrines were nesting in at least 24 North American cities and towns, and were developing surprising and novel behaviours in their urban haunts; some started hunting at night, for example, pulling pigeons from ledges and rooftops in the glow of city streetlights.
A young, just-released captive-bred falcon sits beneath a CCTV camera in Washington, DC – a particularly powerful triangulation of politics, nature and the media.
The extraordinary enthusiasm of city residents for city peregrines was also surprising. In the 1980s the US Secretary of the Interior personally approved a hacksite on the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC, and the Fish and Wildlife Service set up a CCTV system in the foyer showing the public live footage of the roof. In Baltimore, as well as in Washington, CCTV feeds of hacksites attracted scores of people to the foyers of falcon buildings in their lunch breaks. They were mesmerized. What was the lure of these falcons? What had brought people there?
THE SHOCK OF THE REAL
Much has been written on the disappearance of animals in the modern world. This disappearance takes many forms, most worryingly in biodiversity loss and in the ever-increasing rates of species extinctions. But animals are also disappearing in other senses. One of the defining elements of the modern era is the continuing disappearance of wildlife from humanity’s habitat, and by ‘the reappearance of the same in humanity’s reflections of itself’.13 That is, actual animals, real live animals, have largely disappeared from everyday urban life. They’ve been replaced by images of animals shaped by the concerns of television companies, documentary filmmakers, advertisers and so on. Yet the idea of animals as tokens of a deeper and more abiding reality – ironically, one that’s often fostered by their media representations – has a deep hold on many people. The urge to connect or commune with wild animals seems to necessitate travel from everyday locations, everyday lives, everyday livelihoods. So, while the town or city is the setting for everyday life, the places where one can connect with wild animals are generally constrained and distant; one must go far to swim with dolphins, join nature tours, board boats to watch whales.
So deeply held are these assumptions about the correct place for wildlife in the modern world that when animals appear unexpectedly in the ‘wrong’ place, their impact can be immense. The office worker, for example, squinting at a computer monitor under electric light, hears a sudden thump on the window ledge a metre or so to the left of his desk. There are feathers blowing in the wind, a dead pigeon, and a falcon holding it, and he finds himself exchanging a long glance with a wild peregrine. Encounters like this have had such impact that office workers who have experienced them often speak of them in awed, religious tones, see themselves of something of an elect, singled out by the falcons for some kind of special spiritual replenishment or redemption.
Until recently, it was assumed that people were the only active participants in the urban world. Yet the presence of city peregrines on high-tech buildings and industrial spaces shows, as urban geographers have explained, that ‘there is more to city living than technology and culture, or, more tellingly, more to technology and culture than human design’.14 There is growing interest in the importance of what has been called the ‘urban green’ in cities. It is becoming a source of political investment for governments and authorities charged with environmental protection. People are beginning to understand how city wildlife helps to build people’s civic identities. Urban peregrines, for example, create communities; their very presence can ‘attach’ people to their cities and to each other in strong and abiding ways. Perhaps the most heart-rendingly affective example of this comes from New York falcon biologist Christopher Nadareski, who was helping on a ‘nightshift bucket brigade’ at Ground Zero a few days after 9/11:
My attention turned to the sky above the 40 to 50 storeys of swirling brown smoke where I spotted a sign of survival. A pair of Peregrine Falcons circled this newly created void and landed on the observation deck of the Woolworth Building . . . Somehow my depression in this ravaged gravesite was temporarily overcome by the falcons displaying their solidarity with fellow New Yorkers.15
In New York City, as in many North American and European cities, each falcon nest is ‘adopted’ by people who keep constant vigil on its adults and young. Falcon pairs are often considered – always lovingly, sometimes ironically – to share the social world of their chosen nesting locale. ‘Lois and Clarke live the fast-paced lifestyle of the Met Life building in midtown,’ explains Nadareski, ‘Red-Red and P. J. are a health-conscious couple who formerly resided at New York Presbyterian/Cornell medical centre.’16 Actual adoption certificates for falcons are offered by the Canadian Peregrine Foundation, a charity that has for a decade been at the cutting-edge of the urban falcon phenomenon. The CPF runs a high-impact educational programme and public outreach programme on urban Canadian peregrines, and through its website offers a cornucopia of falcon data, images and stories.
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‘The Shock of the Real’: a female peregrine sits with her prey, an American wigeon, on an office window-ledge in Toronto. |
The Canadian Peregrine Foundation offers you the chance to adopt a falcon.
Within these city falcon communities, the only people permitted to affect the falcons physically are biologists, but scientific experts are only one element in a vast assemblage of falcon-minded city people. A cadre of super-dedicated local falcon enthusiasts watch the falcons through binoculars or telescopes; they see themselves as guardians of ‘their’ falcons. The wider city community is involved too, as ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground. And perhaps the most extraordinary, and the most novel, community avidly following each nest is a virtual one. For many urban falcon nests now carry webcams that broadcast live on the web, and the communities such webcams foster are real and fascinating ones, as the next section shows.
FALCON ADDICTS AND BATHROBE BRIGADIERS
Corporations across America have fixed upon the falcons nesting on their headquarters as symbols of their corporate environmental concern. Software giant Oracle has donated $200,000 to the University of California’s Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group, for example, to help fund its educational programmes, falcon website and project personnel. Falcons nested on the futuristic Oracle campus in Redwood City between 2000 and 2002 and, prompted by bird-minded staff, the ‘Oracle Falcons’ were given their own webcam. ‘Oracle is dedicated to helping preserve and protect endangered species like the peregrine falcon,’ explains Rosalie Gann, the director of Oracle Giving and Oracle Volunteers.17
The breeding pair of peregrines on Kodak’s corporate offices in downtown Rochester, New York, are among the most famous city birds of all. And they were lured there. In 1994 Dennis Money, an environmental analyst for Rochester Gas and Electric, asked Kodak if it could put a nest box near the top of its building, 110 metres above street-level. They did so. Four years later a pair of peregrines discovered the box and bred. Perhaps we could fix a digital camera near the box to record the falcons’ activities, suggested one Kodak employee. The company sprang into action, and after months of discussion with the Ontario-based Canadian Peregrine Foundation, pioneers of urban falcon webcams, they installed not only a camera, but a live image feed to a website – and the world-famous Kodak Birdcam was launched.
Birdcam is a magical phenomenon. Building on the CPF’s original model, the webcam is embedded in a sophisticated website, part-educational, part-celebratory, part-product-placement – you can buy images of the falcons from the website, via Kodak’s OFOTO digital distribution service. Kodak’s advice to would-be peregrine spotters in Rochester includes the line:
Seeing these majestic birds will take your breath away, so come equipped to take lots of pictures. A telephoto lens is almost a necessity to get close pictures. The KODAK EASYSHARE DX6490 Digital Camera has a built-in 10X optical zoom lens that is ideal for taking Peregrine pictures.18
The Kodak Headquarters in Rochester, New York, home of the ‘Kodak falcons’.
And just as happened with the early Canadian webcams, a diverse community of local and international ‘falconeers’ has been created around their shared emotional ties to the Kodak falcons. And, by extension, to the corporation itself – for visitors to the website literally see the birds through Kodak’s eyes in the form of four fixed-focus video cameras and a Kodak DC4800 Zoom Digital Camera. These falcons are brand celebrities: their family tree and biographies are shown on the website. And the messages left on the Birdcam discussion board are a real delight. There are poems dedicated to the falcons. There are tales of sightings, anxious enquiries about the youngsters’ wellbeing, questions about falcon behaviour and habits, messages confessing that the poster has been reduced to tears by the impending departure of this year’s young. There is a shared and inclusive notion of what it means to have falcon expertise. These falconeers are a sophisticated bunch; they clearly understand that in addition to showing the company’s environmental commitments, Kodak’s association with the falcons through Birdcam has an important branding message – and they toy with it. In a message with the subject line Birds made me buy it, one poster describes the ‘warm feeling I now get at the very mention of Kodak . . . hate to think of what will happen when my stock broker mentions Kodak’.19
Many posts celebrate the guilty joy of sharing an addiction with others similarly afflicted. ‘I began to post every chance I got,’ wrote one regular. ‘I became a “Bathrobe Brigadier” right out of the starting block. I would sit at my computer for hours at end, letting my household chores go to seed.’ She continued:
During Peregrine season, we ate fast food, peanut butter sandwiches and frozen dinners. My kids loved it! None of Mom’s weird veggie food to have to choke down! They were always called from whatever they were doing to come & look at the Peregrines. Sometimes, they would just get back upstairs and I would have them hurry back down to take another look. Hey, It was good exercise, running up & down those stairs! They worked off that junk food!20
TELEPRESENCE AND INTERVENTION
Is watching falcons on your computer monitor really watching falcons? Are falcon-cams simply soap operas in another guise, a nature-watching activity fit for an age of reality television? Cultural theorist Paul Virilio sees the modern world as entering an era in which ‘telepresence’ replaces real presence, creating virtual lives against which everyday lives become gloomy and trivial.21 And indeed, some people criticize birdcams for promoting an impoverished experience of nature. They see it as a passive, armchair naturalism, far from the immersion in nature afforded by watching falcons at a cliff nest-site. But are these falcons virtual, unreal? Are falcon-cams just another symptom of the disappearance of animals from people’s lives and their replacement with mere images, images framed by corporate symbolic investment?
Perhaps not. First, falcon-cams broadcast unscripted natural events. And although they are mediated through surveillance technology, these webcams allow you to watch and observe animals without disturbing them, in principle functioning exactly like the hides and blinds that biologists have long used to record and understand animal behaviour. Falcon-cams mean that such privileged views of natural events are no longer the province of experts alone. In Springfield, Massachusetts, the public access television channel broadcasts a live feed of a local peregrine eyrie to around 200,000 local homes. And State Fish and Wildlife Service employee Thomas French enthuses about the increase in local environmental awareness that the feed has created. ‘A wildlife issue is becoming part of common conversation, not just a conversation of experts and specialists,’ he explains. It’s now ‘part of the fabric of the city’.22
Five young ‘Kodak’ peregrines in their technologically augmented nestbox in June 2003.
So webcams allow a detailed familiarity with the lives of wild animals that previously only dedicated scientists, naturalists and hunters could obtain – with difficulty. Or not at all. These live-feed webcams, then, democratize natural knowledge. As French explains, the Springfield live feed shows viewers ‘the kind of stuff the professional ornithologist didn’t get to see historically. People love it.’23 And just as these webcams challenge commonly held notions of the division between lay and scientific expertise, they also challenge the notion of passive consumption of images on television and computer screens. This is where they differ from reality TV programmes. For these webcams support active agency in the viewer. Watching their televisions, Springfield’s residents have actually intervened in the lives of these birds in real time. Viewers called in to say that something was wrong with one of the chicks, and French rappelled down from the skyscraper’s 23rd floor to rescue the bird, which had food stuck in its throat. So these falcon webcams are in all senses beneficial: they create new and distinctive inclusive communities that include people and birds as active agents, both affecting and renewing each other’s lives. This hybrid community is a happy one.
EVOLUTION DOES NOT HAPPEN OVERNIGHT
The world is increasingly urbanized. Natural environments are increasingly degraded by development. And birds of prey are ever more commonly inhabiting cities, using urban or industrial architecture to nest upon, hunt from, roost on. From the US to China, falcons nest on man-made structures; bridges, buildings, electricity pylons, power plants, grain silos, even the roofs of railway stations. For a long while, such phenomena seemed ‘abnormal’ because for centuries wild nature has been considered to exist in a realm utterly apart from that of human concerns and technology. But recently scientists have embraced the idea of the urban raptor, though not without criticism. While the Raptor Research Foundation was busily organizing a symposium on urban raptors – funded partly by power companies keen to promote their environmental credentials – there were worried questions over the ethics of holding a conference on such a topic. Would it send the wrong message to people ‘more interested in economic matters than the environment and our wildlife heritage’?24 The conference organizers were resolute in their response. There were good conservation reasons for focusing on urban raptors, they explained. Urban peregrines provide a gene pool or reservoir of birds capable of filling or refilling vacant territories in more natural environments. And importantly, they allow access to falcons that ‘children and other segments of society that would otherwise never have the opportunity to see . . . in wilderness situations’. But the editors’ introduction to the book of the conference ends with an important note of warning:
A pair of urban peregrines in California.
In these depressing times of skyrocketing human populations, massive changes to natural environments, and dwindling wildlife populations on a global scale, environmentalists desperately need a positive message. This book offers many examples of opportunistic raptors adapting to human landscapes. But they cannot do it alone. [We] must ensure that attractive ecological features still exist in the environment, to help instil a tolerance in raptorial birds for our activities. Evolution does not happen overnight.25
And in June 2004 city falcons returned us once again to that ancient, robust convergence of falcons and divinity. The New York Times reported that peregrines were nesting on the Mormon headquarters in Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Utah. As the young fledged, a team of orange-vested volunteers ran around in the traffic under the nest to ensure the youngsters weren’t hit by cars. ‘If a bird flies into the street, Bob will try and catch it and I’m supposed to throw myself in front of the cars,’ said June Ryburn, 75, a retired office manager. A couple from Washington visiting the temple with their seven children noticed the commotion. ‘We thought everybody was looking at the prophet,’ said McKenna Holloway, aged eighteen, referring to Gordon B. Hinkley, the president of the Church. ‘Then we realized they were looking at birds.’26
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Hooded gyrfalcon graffiti and commuters in an underpass at London Bridge station, 2005. |
