A Falcon in the City (NYT Magazine)

[petronius]

I’m standing on cracked asphalt by a high security fence at the eastern edge of Ireland. The sky is cold pewter, the salt wind bitter. I’ve come all the way here to watch wildlife, and I have just turned my back on the only birds I can see. The miles of sand behind me have been washed by the Irish Sea into a perfect blankness, pearled with gulls and flocks of migrant waders. It’s beautiful. But my friends Hilary and Eamonn have told me to look instead at Dublin’s Poolbeg Power Station, a giant’s play set of brutal turbine halls facing the shining sands. Set amid sewerage works, derelict red-brick buildings, wharves, cranes and shipping containers, this is a bizarre spot for a wildlife pilgrimage. Two decommissioned cooling chimneys tower above us, marked with vertical washes of rust and horizontal bands of red and white. Rising from the horizon, they are your first sight of Ireland if you arrive from the east by sea and the last when you leave. Visible throughout the city, they have come to mean home for a whole generation of Dubliners — and for the peregrine falcons that have nested on them for years.

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We take the binoculars from our eyes and look at one another. We have all been reminded that a day can be cut in two by three seconds of a hunting peregrine and leave you stilled into silence and the memory of each curve of its flight. I’d swear, if I were of a more mystical persuasion, that a hunting peregrine changes the quality of the atmosphere it flies through, makes it heavier. Like thunder. Like slowed-down film in which the grain shows through. The Poolbeg site is about as far as you can get from a thriving natural ecosystem, but watching a falcon chase its prey above the scarred and broken ground beneath feels like an act of quiet resistance against despair. Matters of life and death and a sense of our place in the world are tied fast together in a shiver of moving wings across a scrap of winter sky.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/magazine/a-falcon-in-the-city.html

Short, but evocative essay. I enjoyed reading it...