I love when wildlife and urban life collide.
Relaxing on the small, grungy, outdoor 4th floor fire escape-cum-utility roof at Farallon in the Kensington Park Hotel building (we used it for restaurant break time, for smoke time, for Angry Birds time), surrounded by the vertical urban thrust of Union Square and downtown San Francisco, over the years I learned that if the cooing, courting, copulating pigeon population that also shared the area suddenly flew off all at once they'd no doubt spotted a raptor in the sky.
Took me a while to figure out the reason for the avian mad dash, but once I did I could predict it like clockwork. Boom! En feathery masse the pigeons would make like a bat outta hell, quickly escaping the dangerous confines of their dirty little ledges and nooks and crannies, their hiding places, their nests. Moments later I'd look up and sure enough, in the patch of blue between the tall buildings, a soaring, patrolling red-tailed hawk would appear.
I was out there one day, nose down in the iPhone, no doubt, when I felt a rush of air above my head, sensed the close encounter flap of wings. The pigeons had scattered a few minutes before, and I had since returned to my thoughts. Roused that second time from a game of online Scrabble, perhaps, I glanced up and caught my breath. Time briefly stopped, then I remembered the camera in my hands. To this day I'm still not sure if it was a red-tailed hawk or some other bird of prey (it seemed small, any help out there?), but it was a perfect little raptor - for an instant my little raptor - perched atop a security lamppost at the edge of the roof...alert, ruffled and primed for the kill.
Point and shoot, baby!
Peter J. Palmer
Relaxing on the small, grungy, outdoor 4th floor fire escape-cum-utility roof at Farallon in the Kensington Park Hotel building (we used it for restaurant break time, for smoke time, for Angry Birds time), surrounded by the vertical urban thrust of Union Square and downtown San Francisco, over the years I learned that if the cooing, courting, copulating pigeon population that also shared the area suddenly flew off all at once they'd no doubt spotted a raptor in the sky.
Took me a while to figure out the reason for the avian mad dash, but once I did I could predict it like clockwork. Boom! En feathery masse the pigeons would make like a bat outta hell, quickly escaping the dangerous confines of their dirty little ledges and nooks and crannies, their hiding places, their nests. Moments later I'd look up and sure enough, in the patch of blue between the tall buildings, a soaring, patrolling red-tailed hawk would appear.
I was out there one day, nose down in the iPhone, no doubt, when I felt a rush of air above my head, sensed the close encounter flap of wings. The pigeons had scattered a few minutes before, and I had since returned to my thoughts. Roused that second time from a game of online Scrabble, perhaps, I glanced up and caught my breath. Time briefly stopped, then I remembered the camera in my hands. To this day I'm still not sure if it was a red-tailed hawk or some other bird of prey (it seemed small, any help out there?), but it was a perfect little raptor - for an instant my little raptor - perched atop a security lamppost at the edge of the roof...alert, ruffled and primed for the kill.
Point and shoot, baby!
Peter J. Palmer
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