Like many of the symbols in Terry Tempest William’s Refuge, the peregrine falcon appears at the very end of a chapter supposedly about something completely different: starlings. Williams talks of arriving at the dump and watching the birds as they flit among the trash, stripping it of everything they can and argumentatively enforcing their monopoly of the trash heap from other birds. She contemplates how the starlings, brought from another country on a strange whim and now dominant forces in an aggressive adaptation to a changing world, are despised for the traits they share with us. They eat anything, travel in huge flocks, are aggressive and argumentative, and they push everything that came before them out to make room for themselves.
As she admires the large cluster of birds take to the sky–what is often called a murmuration, a kind of highly coordinated group flight of up to thousands of individuals– a peregrine falcon explodes through the cluster, scattering them and leaving it clutching prey in its claws.
Like the starling, the peregrine falcon has adapted to an increasingly human-dominated landscape. Historically known as a duck-hawk for its past preference in prey, the peregrine now utilizes its incredible capacity for speed to snatch starlings from the sky. Additionally, they’re increasingly common in cities, such as Cleveland where a mated pair have chosen the heights of Terminal Tower to build their nest.
This chapter is a contemplation of change and perseverance despite it. Though the wings in the sky have changed, the peregrine has merely adapted and continued, just as the starlings can only adapt to what we humans provide. Now that they’re here in our dumps and crowding out our native birds, we can accuse the starlings of changing the world and peregrines changing to follow new prey. But these changes were first wrought by the human character we so despise to see in starlings.
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