Falcon (24 page)

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’.
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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 pere- grines, 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 exam- ple 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 sur- vival. 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.
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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.’
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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 pro- gramme and public outreach programme on urban Canadian peregrines, and through its website offers a cornucopia of fal- con data, images and stories.

Within these city falcon communities, the only people per- mitted 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 fal- con enthusiasts watch the falcons through binoculars or telescopes; they see themselves as guardians of ‘their’ falcons. And the wider city community is involved too, as ‘eyes and ears’ on the ground. And perhaps the most extraordinary, and the

The Canadian Peregrine Foundation offers you the chance to adopt a falcon.

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.
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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, sug- gested one Kodak employee. The company sprang into action, and after months of discussion with the Ontario-based Canadian Peregrine Foundation, pioneers of urban falcon web-cams, 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

The Kodak Headquarters in Rochester, New York, home of the ‘Kodak falcons’.

website, part-educational, part-celebratory, part-product-place- ment – 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 opti- cal zoom lens that is ideal for taking Peregrine pictures.
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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 visi- tors 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’ well- being, 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 under- stand 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’.
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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!
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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.
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And indeed, some people criticize birdcams for pro- moting 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 fal- cons 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 nat- ural events. And although they are mediated through surveillance technology, these webcams allow you to watch and observe animals without disturbing them, in principle func- tioning 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 becom- ing part of common conversation, not just a conversation of experts and specialists’, he explains. It’s now ‘part of the fabric of the city’.
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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 his- torically. People love it’.
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And just as these webcams challenge commonly held notions of the division between lay and scien- tific expertise, they also challenge the notion of passive consumption of images on television and computer screens. And 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 inter- vened 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 res- cue the bird, which had food stuck in its throat. So these falcon webcams are in all senses beneficial: they create new and dis- tinctive 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.