How Berlin's urban goshawks helped me learn to love the city
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Version 0 of 1. In a city famous for its nightlife, I’ve been waking up early to look for birds of prey. On a Sunday morning, while the techno clubs are still running, I am out on my bike with my binoculars. I pass people coming home from parties or from working the nightshift; getting out of taxis, off the U-Bahn. I cycle past snatches of music and voices from house parties. It has been cold overnight and, at Tempelhofer Feld, the grass is coated in frost. The rising sun glints in the windows of the vast old airport terminal building, and the sky is the same pink as the markings on the runway. Everything else is monochrome. Cold is in my nostrils and I can hear trains, traffic and crows. A birdwatcher friend told me that dusk and dawn are the best times to see hawks: “Try to break up your own outline by standing against a tree,” he advised. I’ve been in the park for just a few minutes when a large, heavy bird of prey comes screeching out of the trees, upsetting the hooded crows and changing the atmosphere. It perches on a post while I fumble with my new binoculars, bought from Mauer Park fleamarket, trying to get a closer look; then it flies back into the trees and disappears. I am a novice birdwatcher so am not sure what species it is, but when I get home I compare the call to a recording online. Yes, as I’d hoped, it was a goshawk. At the beginning of the winter I moved to Berlin from Scotland, looking for new experiences and inspiration. I heard that, amazingly, around 100 pairs of goshawks (der Habicht in German) breed and live in the city of Berlin. I am particularly interested because I’d recently read the wonderful H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, an account of the author’s lifelong passion for birds of prey and training a goshawk. A birdwatcher friend told me that dusk and dawn are the best times to see goshawks The northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) is, in most places, notoriously elusive, only glimpsed in woodland. In Britain, goshawks were extinct by the late 19th century, persecuted by humans who saw them as vermin. They were re-introduced from the 1970s and, mixing with escaped falconers’ birds, there are now around 450 pairs in the UK. Macdonald describes goshawks as a “dark grail” for birdwatchers, and how, in Britain, “you might spend a week in a forest full of gosses and not see one, just traces of their presence”. So I am excited that here in Berlin it is not so hard to spot them, even for a beginner like me. If you have an idea of what to look or listen for, you can see them from an open-air cafe or even a swimming pool. In the last 30 years, they have thrived in Berlin where there is an abundance of prey (they hunt and eat mainly pigeons but also birds such as crows and magpies, and mammals including rats and squirrels) and they are not usually persecuted by humans. Goshawks are arboreal, they live in trees, and Berlin is one of Europe’s most wooded cities, with tree-lined streets (an average 80 per kilometre), and parks and cemeteries where the trees have regrown after the second world war. Although goshawks are found in a few other cities, Berlin has the highest density of goshawk territories anywhere in the world – urban or rural. Tempelhofer Feld is a huge park in the middle of the city on the site of the old airport. The park is a wide expanse ringed by trees, train tracks, apartment blocks and the terminal building. The Feld was a site of early aviation experiments: in 1909, 150,000 Berliners turned out to watch a Zeppelin flight in front of Emperor Wilhelm II. In the 1920s the first airport was built in the area, then razed after being bombed in the war. The current building was constructed under Hitler’s regime, designed as part of the Germania project to create a new world capital. When constructed it was the largest building the world, with 400 air-raid and gas-attack shelters underground. After the war, Tempelhof was the site of the American airlift in 1948 and ’49, when West Berlin was supplied by plane. A radar tower, built by the Americans in the 1980s for communications and to listen in on the GDR, still stands and is now used by the German army. After the end of the Cold War and German reunification, Tempelhof was used as the city’s main civil airport until 2008; there were subsequent plans to develop the site, but a referendum decided there would be no construction in the park for 10 years. It is now left open to the public, and to wildlife. The planes left and the birds returned. Fast wings still descend over the runway. Enthused and encouraged by a couple of hawk sightings, I contact Berlin ornithologist Dr Norbert Kenntner, who is part of a project to observe the city’s goshawks and ring their chicks. One sunny Sunday, Norbert kindly takes me around goshawk territories, mainly cemeteries in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. He plays surf guitar in his car between sites and talks knowledgeably and enthusiastically. Goshawks tend to spend much of their time perched, he explains, rather than soaring like buzzards, so they can be difficult to find. He describes how the hawk uses its long, strong legs and talons to kill its prey; it can kill a pigeon in mid-air. He shows me how to find their plucking posts – piles of pigeon feathers on the ground – and tells me about “flagging” when, around mating season, males show their white under-tail feathers. We spot big, dark goshawk nests high in the trees, and look to see if they contain any new build (green leaves that show they’ve been worked on this year). At the top of a church steeple in Kreuzberg, we see the very male goshawk that is pictured on the Wikipedia entry for the bird. Nearby, in the cemetery, his mate is perched on their nest. I look through binoculars at her and then watch her fly, as pigeons disperse, getting a good view of her pale flecked underside. As Macdonald describes, “goshawks in flight are a complicated grey.” As I walk around my new city, on my way to job interviews or first dates, I find myself thinking about the city like a hawk: looking up at treetops, window ledges and chimneys. Goshawks live in trees but use buildings as hunting perches. I’m looking up at the crosses on top of churches and the crescent moons on mosques, at satellite dishes and cranes. Armed with knowledge from Norbert, I keep searching, setting my alarm and taking a long-cut across Tempelhofer on my way to work, or going at dusk to a square near my flat in Kreuzberg where he told me there was a nesting site. I see goshawks maybe half of the times I go to Tempelhof and kestrels every time, often accompanied by a motorcade of crows. Urban birds have learned to be unbothered by the dog walkers, runners and skateboarders. One lunchtime, crossing a busy square, I unexpectedly hear the yittering call of the goshawk directly above. I look up and see a goshawk and crow in chase, then together in combat for a noisy moment before disappearing behind the red-roofed buildings. It’s an exciting and violent spectacle; no one else browsing the market stalls or sitting outside cafes notices, but I am buzzing. I am pleased I can identify the call among the other high pitches of Kreuzberg: sirens, babies crying, screeching brakes. I’ve become tuned into another frequency vibrating alongside our urban lives. Knowing about the raptors gives another dimension to this city. Related: How Berliners refused to give Tempelhof airport over to developers Urban birds provide chances for observation impossible in rural areas. Ornithologists are still learning about the species and seeing new behaviour in cities. Goshawks have been in Berlin since the mid-70s and the population boomed in the last 15 years, but is now levelling out. The city’s territories are almost full, and urban birds are vulnerable to disease and death by flying into windows. Goshawks are protected but they face illegal persecution by humans (gamekeepers, pigeon fanciers, collectors) in rural areas, and young hawks leaving Berlin could be in danger. For this reason, they have been named “bird of the year” by the German conservation organisation NABU, to encourage reporting of their persecution. The hawks become a mascot of my first months in a new city, something to pursue when my priorities are unclear. I like knowing that the city is not completely human, and become interested in other wild creatures in Berlin too: red squirrels, foxes and even feral raccoons, descended from animals that escaped from farms bombed in the second world war. Nature is not something separate and distant: wild beasts live among us, unreliant, adaptive, among train tracks, cemeteries, industrial estates, domestic dogs and cats, and fireworks. The city is not as tame or discovered as we might think. The dangers of eco-gentrification: what’s the best way to make a city greener? |