The Shark and the Albatross Page 7

  This pair of peregrines have chosen to nest behind a grating in a ventilation shaft in the detention complex’s wall. To reach their chicks the adults have to break into the prison by squeezing between the bars. With a little more height we would be able to see into their nest, so Paul has cleared the way for us to film from the roof of a building nearby. On the way up the stairs we ask the owner whether he is hoping to be paid and if he thinks anyone will mind us filming the jail. He says, ‘I don’t much care for money. Don’t much care for rules neither.’ He points out the liquor store down the street and leaves us to it.

  A peregrine’s shadow, sharp-edged and curve-winged, slides across the prison’s walls. Prisoners are playing basketball inside a wire cage on the roof. They stop and stare at us, miming, ‘What are you filming?’ Fredi points at the falcon, perched on a light fitting nearby, and waves his arms like wings.

  ‘Birds?’ their blank faces signal back. ‘Really?’

  She is plucking something in a blizzard of feathers. Some float across the road and Fredi catches one: another jay. With the extra height afforded by the roof, we can see her chicks inside the shaft. They are real jailbirds, pushing their heads through the bars and testing the metal with their claws. Matt can sex them by their size: the females are larger. They line up to watch the sky and all three pan their heads around as if they were one, to track passing pigeons. The pigeons fly low and fast, aware of the risk from the peregrines but getting on with their lives like pragmatic New Yorkers. The young falcons are no threat yet. Their down is slowly giving way to brown feathers and it will be some weeks before they can fly. They take turns to exercise their wings, blasting dust through the grille. We leave the roof when it starts to rain.

  Thunder echoes through the canyons of New York and the spray from tyres, lit by the headlights behind, makes the cars look rocket-propelled. The tops of the buildings have vanished into cloud, which makes them seem to go on up for ever. The uppermost windows of the Chrysler Building glow yellow through the mist, as if a spacecraft was hovering there. An ambulance passes, hooting like a gibbon, and in the distance a fire engine seems to answer with a primeval wail, forlorn and fading, calling for company and finding none.

  Hunting does not come much harder than catching a bird in flight, yet peregrines do almost nothing else. In the wild the parent birds will feed their young until they have learned how to intercept their prey at blistering speeds, but when the Peregrine Fund freed its captive-bred youngsters, they had to manage on their own. In all, 6,000 were released in places where they had lived before DDT took its toll. Chris Nadareski joined the army of helpers who kept the birds alive by providing them with food while they taught themselves to hunt (a process called ‘hacking back’). The peregrines’ recovery was slow at first because the young birds were vulnerable without their parents’ protection. Many were killed by golden eagles and great horned owls. The eagles avoid urban America and the owls are less of a problem there too, so the Peregrine Fund tried something bold. They released some of their birds in New York City.

  From fifty storeys up, on top of a skyscraper, I look around midtown Manhattan. The surrounding buildings have plenty of ledges for falcons to nest on but they can be dangerous too. Distorted reflections of taxis and people slide along walls made of glass and metal. Some almost perfectly reflect the sky, so puffy clouds disguise their hard surfaces, and at night many windows will be brightly lit. It is a complex and confusing home for the fastest animal on Earth and it was by no means certain that the peregrines would be able to adapt, yet they did. The first two pairs nested in New York City in 1983, on the Verrazano-Narrows and Throgs Neck bridges. Chris Nadareski had been inspired by the work of Tom Cade and others to study the falcons as they recovered. He says with pride that the city has the highest density of urban peregrines in the world. There are seventeen pairs in the five boroughs, soaring and nesting among New York’s tallest buildings, on its bridges, its offices and the penthouse mansions of millionaires. Some have even learned to use the city’s lights to hunt birds migrating above it at night, and their street-wise youngsters are helping to repopulate the countryside.

  The falcons were there too when the Twin Towers fell. Chris talks quietly about joining the bucket brigades: the human chains that moved rubble away from Ground Zero by hand. Among the chaos of that dreadful day he looked up to see a pair of peregrines passing overhead. It was a reminder, he says, that good can follow disaster and that lives can be repaired.

  Between stints spent on the roofs we drop down to the city’s parks, to film one of the reasons that the falcons are doing so well here: New York has a thriving population of feral pigeons. These birds are the descendants of wild rock doves, coastal European pigeons, which were carried around the world by human colonists and kept for their eggs and meat. They adapted easily to the man-made cliffs and caves of city buildings and they have become so ubiquitous that we barely notice them. On the wild coasts of the Old World these birds were the peregrines’ main prey, so it was a boon for the falcons to find them already established in New York and many other cities. Pigeons are far from easy to catch – they have spent millennia under the falcons’ unwavering gaze and they have evolved their own ways to escape. With a special slow-motion camera we film pigeons turning completely upside down as they take off, then righting themselves within a body length. This ability to jink in flight can save their lives.

  For experienced peregrines flying is easy: gravity powers their stoops and sunshine warms the air, which raises them again without a flap, but finding suitable targets is much harder because the pigeons do not fly far and they stay low over the streets. The falcons’ technique is as simple as it is effective: they go very high and use their exceptional eyesight to search, like the NYPD helicopters sharing their airspace.

  We watch one pair scanning the surrounding space from the silver pinnacle of the Chrysler Building, in unconscious mimicry of its art deco eagles. Their other favourite hunting perch is the navigation light on the tip of the Bank of America tower, almost a quarter of a mile above the ground. When the tiercel stoops from there he folds his wings into a teardrop shape and hurtles through the lesser buildings, past mirrored glass, past steel and concrete, past video screens flickering green and red: falling like a meteor. He could almost have left a flaming trail or bubbles fizzing in his wake. When the pigeon sees him coming it dives for its life among the water tanks and rooftops. This time the tiercel rises with empty talons to graze the reflection of his wingtips in a sheer glass wall, entirely at home.

  On other days we film the peregrines chasing a pigeon out over the Hudson River, where there is nowhere to hide. The pair work together, taking turns to stoop until the tiercel binds on, then circles with their prize in his talons, calling to his mate. She flies up to receive the bird as he lets it fall and carries it back, to pluck and feed it to their chicks.

  While we are in New York a rare alignment of the sunset and the city’s cross-streets means the sun will touch the horizon exactly at the end of 42nd Street. This is close to where we have been filming, beside the beautiful Chrysler Building. When astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson noticed this coincidence, which happens on a few days every year, he pointed out that future anthropologists might argue that the city’s grid of streets had been aligned with the sun for just this purpose, like Stonehenge at the summer solstice.

  Of course there is no significance to the alignment of New York’s streets, except that their regularity makes it easier to navigate, but the sight is said to be spectacular, so we join the group of photographers looking down 42nd Street. Many have been waiting for hours in the hope that the showers will pass and the horizon will clear at the right moment. Everyone yearns for the perfect image of the sun, framed and reflected by the city’s gleaming walls, while the tail lights of taxis stretch into the distance like a thousand suns in miniature. As the time approaches it is easy to grow excited with the crowd. DeGrasse Tyson encapsulated the feeling that the natural wor
ld has aligned with our own by naming this event ‘Manhattanhenge’.

  At the last moment the clouds break and the sunlit street becomes beautiful. People worship the moment with their cameras then rush to be the first to post their pictures online, to tweet their versions of ‘I am here. Now’.

  No doubt we will always look for patterns in the world around us, for significance, even where there is none. For real significance I look up to the Chrysler Building, where a soaring peregrine catches the light of the setting sun and burns there like a star.

  AN UPDATE ON NEW YORK CITY’S PEREGRINES

  Taking your first flight is dangerous in the wild but flying from a building carries extra risks – the fledglings could easily end up among the traffic. That is exactly what happened to two of the birds we had filmed at the Brooklyn Detention Complex. Fortunately for them, Barbara Saunders, a biologist who works for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, was on standby when their time came to leave.

  ‘I’d get a call, sometimes from building personnel at the nest site, or from someone who’d spotted a youngster on the street. I’d pick it up and drive it out to New Jersey to have it checked for injuries at the Raptor Trust. If all was well, back the youngster would go to the nest site for “take two”. One week I was out there every day. I called myself the Peregrine Limo Service.’

  When the first of the Brooklyn females squeezed between the jail’s bars and launched herself out over the street, her maiden flight did not go too well: she fluttered down and was hit by a bus. A local person saw the collision, put the young bird in a box and took her to a veterinary surgeon, just half a block away – there are some advantages to being a city falcon. The vet called Barbara and the Peregrine Limo Service rolled into action.

  Another of the Brooklyn youngsters crash-landed and was rescued by local people. It ended up in an even stranger situation than its sister.

  ‘These neighbourhood guys were incredible. They managed to catch the falcon and put it under a lampshade. It kept trying to pop out so they added a second lampshade but when that didn’t help much they replaced it with an upside-down laundry basket, topped with a brick … New Yorkers are a very resourceful bunch!’

  Off went the young peregrine to the Raptor Trust. She was not injured and after a rest and some food she was banded and released.

  As well as enjoying the fun and games, Barbara is delighted to see so many people involving themselves with their city’s peregrine falcons.

  – FOUR –

  HUNTING FOR TIGERS

  Get set for a better tomorrow, ’til then inconvenience is regretted. The sign in New Delhi’s airport reads like something dreamed up by Douglas Adams. It seems to sum up India’s rush to change. Well over a billion people live here, but hanging on, in a few green places, so do the last of India’s tigers. It’s April 2008 and we are flying to the heart of the subcontinent, which most foreigners avoid at this time of year because it’s so hot. We’ve come here now as this is the best time to film tigers. In the whole of India there are just a few thousand left. There are more than that, in captivity, in Texas. Having such large predators as neighbours is a very different matter from the peregrines in New York City, or even Yellowstone’s wolves.

  It’s ten to five and I’m sitting in the dark, sipping tea. Around me I can hear the jungle waking up: the sounds of my first dawn at Bandhavgarh. I can recognise some of the birds from their calls, like the greater coucals booming to each other, but as the chorus builds most of the birds making it are still a mystery to me. One stands out, with its call growing in pitch and intensity: ‘Brain fe-ver,’ it says, faster and faster; ‘Brain fe-ver, brain fe-ver,’ putting me on edge. As a cameraman I rely mostly on my eyes but, while we are searching for tigers in Bandhavgarh’s tangled forests, I can tell that my ears are going to be working hard too. We have come here to film tigers hunting and what their prey do to avoid being caught. It seems almost impossible and I am worried that we will fail.

  As soon as I have finished my tea it’s time to go. Before I have fitted the tripod head to its mounting in the back of the jeep the sky has brightened enough to see trees silhouetted ahead of us. Our guide, Digpal, starts the engine. He is a genial Rajasthani, with a jewelled earring, sideburns and a drooping moustache. He wears a leather hat with his sunglasses perched on the brim. Laughter creases his face. The brainfever bird is an Indian hawk cuckoo, he says, and lets in the clutch. In a cloud of pale dust we head for the gates to join our park guide, Ramjas. His embroidered shoes are as colourful as garden flowers, with camouflaged trousers providing the foliage. There is another sign here, a painted tiger with a speech bubble. It could have been written with us in mind:

  Dear friends. My sighting in wild is a matter of chance. Singleminded objective for me during park visit, may disappoint you in a great way.

  The gates open and as Digpal drives through we pass a man who is beating what seems to be a huge domed rock with a cloth. He is dusting an elephant. It is kneeling as a devotee would in a church, with the wrinkled soles of its feet facing upwards. The man finishes one side and addresses the elephant sternly, asking it to turn around, which it does, rising ponderously and settling again, facing the other way, so the man can dust behind its ears. Digpal waves as we pass and, driving on through the warm air of a ravine among the trees, he chuckles about another of Bandhavgarh’s mahouts: a man who was as fond of a drink as he was of his elephant. The elephant’s name was Gautam, which in Hindi means ‘wise’. The mahout used to ride him to village bars and get drunk. When he collapsed one night some men came forward, intending to harm him, but Gautam picked up his mahout, laid him across his tusks and carried him home. The man has since died but every year his widow travels from southern India to visit the elephant Gautam and bring him a present.

  We pass a temple beside the road. It is just four pillars painted green and red, supporting a corrugated roof, with a lingam stone in the centre and a small bell. Without stopping, Digpal takes both hands from the steering wheel and, in a strangely gentle movement, places his thumbs below his nose, his fingertips against its bridge, then shuts his eyes to pray to Shiva, the Hindu God of Destruction. Ramjas does the same: their hands making synchronised, practised moves, down and up and down again. We are still driving at twenty miles an hour so I’m relieved when Digpal opens his eyes and explains that people who have not seen a tiger sometimes come here to make offerings to Lord Shiva: ‘You might not believe it but it always works.’

  The sun rises: an orange circle above a meadow filled with deer. Moments later it is too bright to look at. The stags strut and bellow around the females, who graze on, untroubled, in the tall grass, lit by the sunrise to the colour of flames. They are spotted deer or chital, doe-eyed and slender, russet with white spots on their flanks like our fallow deer, or white-tailed deer in America, when they are young. Among them walk troupes of elegant monkeys, Hanuman langurs, their long tails held high like thin question marks. Above the grassland and its fringe of forest looms an escarpment, with cliffs whitewashed by generations of nesting vultures, and crowned by a 2,000-year-old fort and a temple.

  Digpal and Ramjas are watching the track closely. A snake has left its slither mark in the dust like a mocking echo of flowing water. It has not rained here for many months and the monsoon is still eight weeks away. We pass a flame-of-the-forest tree where macaques have fed, scattering red flowers. Digpal slows to point out some narrow footprints with claws: ‘A sloth bear, Baloo.’ On the trunk of a gum tree there are long incisions where the bear has climbed to a bees’ nest, looking for honey. At the gate this morning, Digpal had pointed out a man wearing a scarf high across his mouth and nose to hide his ruined lower face. This Baloo is not a friendly Jungle Book character. Like sloth bears, tigers are nocturnal, so dawn is a good time to glimpse them, as the night shift gets ready for bed.

  Digpal stops the car abruptly, pointing down. There are pugmarks pressed into the dust: tigers’ footprints. Ramjas puts
both his hands together, side by side.

  ‘Female,’ he says. ‘Male is this size.’

  ‘Males have pointed toes,’ says Digpal. ‘Tigresses’ toes are round.’

  There are smaller marks too, the shape of a domestic cat’s. They show that two cubs walked here with their mother. I wish, out loud, that the prints had times marked on them and Digpal says they do.

  ‘These are on top of the jeep tracks from yesterday, so she has made them since the cars left last night, and they don’t have any leaves on top of them yet. She was here this morning.’

  The deer pay no attention to the tiger’s marks. For them, movement, scent and sound are all that matter: signs of imminent danger. False alarms are dangerous too. If you are unsure where a tiger is it is better to stay put, rather than running blindly through the grass, especially in Bandhavgarh which has the highest density of tigers in the world. There are about forty-five of them in its 1,000km2 (250,000 acres) of forest. The chital outnumber them three hundred to one but the tigers must kill every few days, so the deer cannot drop their guard. In this they have some unlikely allies. The langurs feed among them in distinct groups: mothers and babies in one troupe, with a watchful dominant male, and a separate crowd of rowdy young males causing trouble on the fringes. The monkeys’ fur is the colour of safari suits and they have neat black feet, hands and faces. Their eyebrows are bushy enough to rival my dad’s and they are champion frowners. While the chital have sensitive noses and ears which are never still, even when they lower their heads to feed, the monkeys have the sharpest eyes. Their lookouts stay in the treetops, ready to bark an alarm. Against this combination even a tiger would be hard put to creep within pouncing distance. The largest predators have a surprisingly hard time, for all their power.