Falcon by Helen Macdonald

Author:Helen Macdonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Falconry as a symbol of Arab cultural identity meets Bald Eagle as a symbol of American imperialism: a 2004 cartoon from Al Jazeera.

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Threatened Falcons

SNOW LEOPARDS. Giant pandas. Peregrine falcons. Bengal tigers. All are rare and spectacular animals, icons of environmentalism, stars of the small screen. Their faces are familiar from magazine covers and their lives are favoured subjects for nature writers. These are species bathed in an aura denied other, commoner creatures. Put bluntly, they’re celebrities. They exist in the wild, but they live in glossy magazines. And the peregrine is right up there on the ‘A-list’, along with a select few other icons of extinction. Rarity is a slippery concept. Separating its biological from its cultural meanings is a difficult task. Animals on that A-list seem made of rarity, an identity-characteristic almost impossible to ‘think round’ to get to the animal itself. Just as the decline in house sparrows in Britain in the 1990s was masked by the species’ presumed ubiquity, so upturns in the fortune of celebrity endangered animals often fail to register on popular consciousness. In 2004, for example, a BBC webpage described peregrine falcons as being ‘now rare enough to share the same protection as the Giant Panda’, even though peregrines are commoner today in Britain than ever before.1

How does one become a celebrity animal? Both pandas and peregrines got their A-list status during the 1960s and ’70s. Pandas sent as diplomatic gifts from China were Cold War icons; their sex lives in Western zoos had ramifications far beyond their conservation value. And peregrines? The threat to the peregrine in the 1950s and ’60s was real. An entire race of peregrines – the huge, dark anatum birds of the eastern US – became extinct and across a vast swathe of North America and Europe peregrine populations plummeted to frighteningly low levels. This disaster mightily increased a series of symbolic attributions previously accorded peregrines – ones relating to wilderness and primitivist glamour – and transformed the peregrine falcon into a supreme icon of environmental destruction, a symbol of how science and technological progress had betrayed its promise to build a better world.

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