Peregrine falcon

In City of God, the Peregrine falcon is one of the novel's most striking figures of urban wildness, a creature of prey nesting not in cliffs or crags but on the iron-front window ledge of a top-floor Manhattan building. The narrator, watching through binoculars from across the street, describes a nest of three peregrine falcon chicks, quiet balls of fur that suddenly erupt into squawking, their beaks opening like post diggers and their gullets aimed at the sky, the moment their mother begins her return from blocks away. The scene is rendered with the precise, almost documentary attention that characterizes the novel's treatment of the natural world within the city's artificial canyons, and it carries a sense of privilege: whoever lives in that apartment is sensitive to the brood and keeps the shades down, a small human accommodation to a wild neighbor.

The Falcon's Hunt and the City's Ecology

The mother falcon's hunting is described in unsparing, physical detail. She comes winging down the canyon with a city bird in her talons, a rock dove, and alights to a fluster of infant demands, holding the prey with one foot while a hail of breast feathers falls and she pecks it apart methodically, pulling off red hanks of flesh and dropping them into the chicks' gullets. This is not a sentimental vision of nature; it is a scene of predation, of flesh and feathers, set against the backdrop of an iron-front window in a dense urban neighborhood. The falcon's prey, the rock dove, is itself a city creature, and the encounter stages a kind of wild food chain operating within the built environment, where the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world, as the narrator elsewhere calls the city's teeming human life, coexists with a parallel, non-human drama of survival.

The Falcon and the City of Birds

The peregrine falcon also appears in the narrator's account of the City of Birds at Valdemingomez, an enormous garbage dump north of Madrid that he describes as a third city alongside the Earthly City and the City of God. There, a population of storks, hawks, egrets, linnets, kites, jackdaws, ravens, condors, and turkey buzzards, when aroused, can circle the dump and, with a boost from the trade winds, wing-whiff its miasma of sulfurous gases as far east as Rome. The birds of Valdemingomez do not migrate, the narrator notes, because why would they; over a hundred thirty species stay summer and winter, including accidentals from the tropics such as the albatross and the blue-footed booby. Eggs are laid in old Big Mac containers, nests are lined with cassette tape, songbirds flitter in and out of rusty cans, grackles huddle in TV cabinets, and gulls bomb old sofas with the clamshells of paella. When flocks of rock doves go cooing and pecking over fields of chicken bones, the bones clack like train tracks, clink like wind chimes, shiver and shirr like shuffled cards, bongo and bop, and chickuh-chick-chick like a hot marimba band. The narrator adds, with characteristic wit, that there are special rates for ornithologists. The peregrine falcon belongs to this global aviary as much as to the Manhattan ledge, and the two appearances together frame the novel's ecological imagination: the city is not a human-only space but a habitat shared with birds, ants, and other creatures, each with its own society and purposes.

The Falcon and the Novel's Vision of Urban Life

The falcon's presence connects to the novel's broader meditation on the city as a living system. The narrator reflects that the city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, or the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers, and that each passerby on a busy corner is a New Yorker, native to the same diaspora, part of a great sputtering experiment in a universalist society. The falcon, nesting and hunting within this human experiment, is a reminder that the city is also a place of non-human inhabitants, pursuing their own lives with their own purposes. The narrator's observation of the falcon family, with its quiet accommodation by the human resident who keeps the shades down, suggests a mutual, if unspoken, respect between species sharing the same vertical space. The falcon is thus not merely a decorative image but a figure for the wildness that persists within and alongside the urban, and for the novel's insistence that the city's true ecology includes its birds, its ants, and its other non-human residents, each contributing to the aggregate life of the place.

The Falcon and the Ants: Parallel Societies

The narrator's account of the falcon is paired, in the novel's associative structure, with his observation of a brown ant population in a patch of dirt under a tree in Central Park, where he hunkered down with the boys to watch these infinitesimal creatures, each not an eighth of an inch long, build an underground city. The ants, he notes, are brainless but purposive, disciplined, and possessed of a strong work ethic; their lives are all work, even the queen's, and they take instruction from one another, antenna to antenna, unified in their responses almost like parallel processors or the cortical structure of neurons. Each ant comprises one cell of a group brain, an invisible organ of thought beyond the capacity of any one of them to understand. The narrator explains to the kids that these are domesticated Central Park ants, the house sparrows of the ant species, unlike the big ones in jungles and rain forests that build leaf bridges, cultivate crops, float across rivers on rafts, march, make war, eat meat, and bite like hell. The falcon and the ants together illustrate the novel's ecological vision: both are non-human societies operating within the city, each with its own form of organization and purpose, and both invite the narrator's wonder and his speculative reflection on the invisible organs of aggregate thought that bind individuals into a larger whole. The falcon, with its solitary hunt and its family of chicks, and the ants, with their collective labor for an unseen queen, are two poles of the novel's meditation on the relationship between the individual and the group, the wild and the domestic, the human and the non-human, all within the frame of the city as a living organism.