Falcon

by Helen Macdonald

  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.

  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 h
igh-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.