‘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
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sp; 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
Hooded gyrfalcon graffiti and commuters in an underpass at London Bridge station, 2005.
An adult tiercel peregrine.
REFERENCES
INTRODUCTION
1 W. Kenneth Richmond, British Birds of Prey (London, 1959), p. ix.
2 Stephen Bodio, A Rage for Falcons (Boulder, CO, 1984), p. 9.
1 NATURAL HISTORY
1 W. Kenneth Richmond, British Birds of Prey (London, 1959), p. 50.
2 Quoted in J. G. Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting (London, 1988), p. 190.
3 Edmund Bert, An Approved Treatise of Hawkes and Hawking (London, 1619), p. 19.
2 MYTHICAL FALCONS
1 Rosalie Edge, ‘The Falcon in the Park’, American Falconer (July 1942), pp. 7–8.
2 Charles Q. Turner, ‘The Revival of Falconry’, Outing (February 1898), p. 473.
3 Fable 164 from Thomas Blage, A schole of wise Conceytes (London, 1569), pp. 180–81.
4 Juliana Berners, The Book of Haukyng hunting and fysshyng [Book of St Albans] (London, 1566) [Eiv v–r].
5 Quoted in J. G. Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting (London, 1988), p. 190.
6 Richard Meinertzhagen, Pirates and Predators: The Piratical and Predatory Habits of Birds (Edinburgh, 1959), p. 16.
7 Meinertzhagen, Pirates and Predators, p. 25.
8 Meinertzhagen, Pirates and Predators, p. 23.
9 History overview: http://www.atlantafalcons.com/history/001/051.
10 Dave Barry, ‘Sex-craving Falcons Can Teach Politicians about the Hat Trick’, Gazette Telegraph, Colorado Springs (14 July 1990), p. D3.
11 John Loft, D’Arcussia’s Falconry (Louth, 2003), p. 261.
12 Eugene Potapov, ‘The Saker Falcon’, unpublished manuscript, Chapter 1.
13 Loft, D’Arcussia’s Falconry, p. 144.
14 Three-dollar Bar Billy, speaking around 1901–2, quoted in A. L. Kroeber and E. W. Gifford, Karok Myths (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1980), p. 46.
15 Loft, D’Arcussia’s Falconry, p. 143.
16 Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk, p. 231.
17 J. G. Cummins, ‘Aqueste lance divino: San Juan’s Falconry Images’, in What’s Past is Prologue: A Collection of Essays in Honor of L. J. Woodward, ed. Salvador Bacarisse (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 28–32.
18 Alonso Dámasco and J. M. Blecula, Antologia de poesia española: Poesia de tipo traditional (Madrid, 1956).
19 Quoted in Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk, p. 228.
20 William Bayer, Peregrine (New York, 1981).
21 Bayer, Peregrine, p. 249.
22 Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (London, 1971), pp. 141–2.
23 Victor Canning, The Painted Tent (London, 1979), p. 56.
24 Canning, Painted Tent, p. 35.
25 T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone (London, 1939), p. 129.
26 White, Sword in the Stone, p. 126.
27 T. H. White, The Godstone and the Blackymor (London, 1959), p. 20.
28 J. Cleland, Institution of a Young Noble Man (Oxford, 1607), p. 223.
3 TRAINED FALCONS
1 Hans J. Epstein, ‘The Origin and Earliest History of Falconry’, Isis, XXXIV, 1943, p. 497.
2 Gilbert Blaine, Falconry (London, 1936), p. 13.
3 Blaine, Falconry, p. 11.
4 Harold Webster, North American Falconry and Hunting Hawks (Denver, CO, 1964), p. 12.
5 Webster, North American Falconry, p. 12.
6 Jim Weaver ‘The Peregrine and Contemporary Falconry’, in Tom J. Cade et al., Peregrine Falcon Populations: Their Management and Recovery (Boise, ID, 1988), p. 822.
7 William Somerville, Field-Sports. A Poem. Humbly Address’d to His Royal Highness the Prince (London, 1742), p. 7.
8 Stephen Bodio, A Rage for Falcons (Boulder, CO, 1984), p. 7.
9 John Gerard, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, trans. Philip Caraman (New York, 1952), p. 15.
10 Richard Barker, trans. and intro., Bestiary [MS Bodley 167] (London, 1992), p. 156.
11 Lord Tweedsmuir, Always a Countryman (London, 1953), p. 128.
12 Robin Oggins, ‘Falconry and Medieval Social Status’, Mediaevalia, XII (1989), p. 43.
13 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York, 2001), II, p. 72.
14 Richard Pace, De fructu qui ex doctrina percipitur (Basel, 1517), quoted in Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London, 1973), p. 34.
15 John Loft, D’Arcussia’s Falconry (Louth, 2003), p. 215.
16 Loft, D’Arcussia’s Falconry, p. 267.
17 The Art of Falconry, being the ‘Arte Venandi cum Avibus’ of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, trans. and ed. C. A. Wood and F. M. Fyfe (Stanford, CA, 1943), p. 3.
18 Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, ed. and trans. Ronald Latham (London, 1958), p. 144.
19 Sir John Chardin, Travels in Persia, 1673–1677 (New York, 1988), p. 181.
20 Christian Antoine de Chamerlat, Falconry and Art (London, 1987), p. 171.
21 W. Coffin, ‘Hawking with the Adwan Arabs’, Harper’s Weekly, 57 (15 March 1913), p. 12.
22 E. Delmé-Radcliffe, Notes on the Falconidae used in India in Falconry (Frampton-on-Se
vern, 1971), p. 11.
23 Delmé-Radcliffe, Notes on the Falconidae, p. 1.
24 Lt Col. E. H. Cobb, ‘Hawking in the Hindu Kush’, The Falconer, 11/5 (1952), p. 12.
25 Cobb, ‘Hawking in the Hindu Kush’, p. 9.
26 John Buchan, Island of Sheep (London, 1936), p. 26.
27 Webster, North American Falconry, p. 11.
28 Letter from Sig Sigwald, Collection Archives of American Falconry.
29 T. H. White, The Goshawk (London, 1951), p. 27.
30 White, The Goshawk, pp. 17–18.
31 J. Wentworth Day, Sporting Adventure (London, 1937), p. 205.
32 Bodio, A Rage for Falcons, p. 131.
33 Bodio, A Rage for Falcons, p. 130.
34 Aldo Leopold, ‘A Man’s Leisure Time’, in Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopard, ed. Luna B. Leopold (New York, 1953), p. 7.
35 Nick Fox, Understanding the Bird of Prey (Blaine, WA, 1995), p. 345.
4 THREATENED FALCONS
1 ‘Peregrine Chicks Hatch in London’, BBC News UK edition, 8 June 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3788409.stm.
2 Dr P. C. Hatch, Notes on the Birds of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN, 1892), p. 200.
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