Falcon (23 page)

letters and telephone calls poured in from across America offer- ing 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 cover- ing them with gravel . . . be called management?’ Hall retorted. Not all peregrines were so lauded. Peregrines were still actively persecuted in this era. Some owners of New York build- ings frequented by falcons actively discouraged them or destroyed their young. The rector of Riverside Church was

An American peregrine, at home in city air.

particularly unhappy that his congregation could see pere- grines 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.
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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].
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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 pesti- cides. 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 cul- tural meanings of these modern city peregrines are fascinating. Helping forge new links between corporations, governments and local communities, they have forever altered the relation- ship 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 car- ried leg-bands that enabled them to be identified as individuals. 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

A keeper at New York’s Central Park Zoo displays a peregrine fledg- ling caught on West 73rd Street in June 1945.

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 fer- tile 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 build- ings 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 unexpect- ed 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

Scarlett, Baltimore’s darling, surveys her urban domain.

A young, just- released captive- bred falcon sits beneath a cctv camera in Washington, dc – a particularly powerful triangu- lation of politics, nature and the media.

these young falcons had strongly imprinted on their ‘nests’ in city landscapes, and they gravitated towards urban and indus- trial 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.

The extraordinary enthusiasm of city residents for city pere- grines 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 ’.
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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, every- day livelihoods. So, while the town or city is the setting for everyday life, the places where one can connect with wild ani- mals are generally constrained and distant; one must go far to

‘The Shock of the Real’: a female peregrine sits with her prey,

an American Wigeon, on an office window- ledge in Toronto.

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 com- puter 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 hold- ing 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.