Hawks over Berlin by Amy Liptrot

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Hawks over Berlin AMy lIPTrOT gOeS lOOKIng FOr gOSHAWKS In TeMPelHOFer FelD…AnD BeyOnD PHOTOgrAPHy By SAM HOBSOn

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In a city famous for its nightlife, I’ve been waking up early to look for birds of prey. One wintry Sunday morning, while heading to Tempelhofer Feld on my bike, all the people I pass on the streets seem to be either coming home from clubs or their nightshifts. As I ride past the city’s tenements, binoculars in hand, I hear snatches of music and voices from the ongoing parties within.

It has been cold overnight and the grass at Tempelhofer Feld is coated in frost.

The rising sun glints in the windows of the vast airport terminal building and

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On my way to job inter views or first dates I remained vigilant, always looking up to inspect treetops, window ledges, chimneys. the sky is the same pink as the markings on the runway; everything else is monochrome. I listen to the gentle soundtrack of trains, traffic and crows as I take my gloves off to use my phone camera. My fingers grow quickly numb with the cold as I scan the messages; most are from a dating site, from men who have not been to sleep; but they are not what I’m looking for now.

I’m looking for hawks. A friend back in England had told me that dusk and dawn are the best times to see them.

“Try to break up your own outline by

standing against a tree,” he advised.

I’ve only been in the park a few minutes when a large 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 binoculars trying to get a closer look, then flies back into the trees and disappears. I am a novice birdwatcher so I am not sure what species it is but when I get home I compare the call to a recording online. It was what I had hoped: a goshawk.

A neW S TArT Photo by Amy Liptrot

I moved to Berlin from Scotland in the winter of 2014, looking for new experiences, inspiration, perhaps love. I came for people, not birds, but I heard that around 100 pairs of goshawks (der Habicht or der Hühnerhabicht in German) breed and live here. I was particularly interested in these birds because of a wonderful book I recently read called H is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald, an account of the author’s lifelong passion for birds of prey and training a goshawk.

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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. In the 1970s, they were reintroduced by falconers and there are now around 450 pairs in the UK. In the last 30 years, they have thrived in Berlin wherever there is an abundance of prey (they hunt and eat mainly pigeons, but also other birds such as crows and magpies, and mammals,

Photo by James Fancaurt

including rats and squirrels), and are not usually persecuted by humans.

Goshawks are arboreal; and the fact that Berlin is one of Europe’s most wooded cities, with tree-lined streets (an average of 80 per kilometre), and parks and cemeteries where the trees have regrown after World War Two, perhaps explains why the city has the highest density of goshawk territories anywhere in the world — urban or rural.

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Macdonald describes goshawks in her book as a “dark grail” for birdwatchers.

She says 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 even see them from open-air cafés or swimming pools.

My raptor-mad friend in England told me that goshawks tend to spend much of their time perched, rather than soaring like buzzards, so they can be difficult to find. One useful indicator that a goshawk is perched somewhere nearby, he said, is if crows and gulls are obviously mobbing something in a tree.

He told me to look for a very large bird with broad wings and long tail, and described their distinctive heavy chest and how, when pursuing prey, they tend to fly fast and low. With this encouragement, I began to start looking for the hawks in November.

On THe gOSHAWK TrAIl I visited Tempelhofer Feld again one sunrise during the winter solstice with my new friend Eve. We smoked rollups with cold fingers at the top of one

of the elaborate viewing platforms – spiral staircases to nowhere – and talked about our prospects in work and love. We scanned the trees as we chatted and Eve, who has sharp eyes, spotted a goshawk on a branch. I got a view of it in my binoculars, and suddenly there were two, fast and chunky and exactly as Macdonald describes them in flight: “a complicated grey”.

Encouraged by these sightings, I contacted local ornithologist Dr Norbert Kenntner who, for the last 10 years has been climbing trees to ring goshawk chicks. One sunny Sunday, Norbert kindly took me around goshawk territories, mainly cemeteries in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. As we drove from site to site, he talked knowledgeably and enthusiastically about the birds, telling me how the hawks use their long, strong legs and talons to kill their prey: “They can kill a pigeon in mid air”. He showed me how to find their plucking posts – piles of pigeon feathers on the ground – and told me about ‘flagging’, when, around mating season, males show their white under-tail feathers.

We spotted big dark goshawk nests high in trees and checked to see if they contained any new build; green leaves that show they’ve been worked on this year. On the very top of a steeple in Kreuzberg we saw a male and, nearby in the cemetery, his mate, perched on the nest. I peered through the binoculars at her then watched her fly, getting a good view of her pale, flecked underside.

Armed with fresh knowledge from Norbert, I continued searching, setting my alarm and heading out on my bike. Dressed in layers and wellies as if I were back home in Scotland, I took a long-cut across the park towards my

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warehouse job where I folded boxes and weighed tea. With my binoculars I skimmed the treeline, the train-lines, the vapour trails of the planes and saw goshawks during maybe half of these trips, 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 even in the busiest areas of the park.

On my way to job interviews or first dates I remained vigilant, always

Photo by James Fancaurt 200

None of the people browsing the market stalls or sitting outside cafés noticed this exciting and violent spectacle. A few minutes later, the hawk returned to the square alone and perched on the church tower. I was buzzing, pleased I could identify the call among the other high pitches of Kreuzberg – sirens, crying babies, screeching brakes – and realising how I’d become tuned in to a parallel frequency vibrating alongside our urban lives. Knowing about the raptors lends another dimension to the city.

I was buzzing, pleased I could identify the call among the other high pitches of Kreuzberg – sirens, cr ying babies, screeching brakes… looking up to inspect treetops, window ledges, chimneys. Since I now knew that goshawks also use buildings as hunting perches, I also checked the crosses on top of churches, the crescent moons on top of mosques, even satellite dishes. One day, while walking back home from the night before in the late February sun, I unexpectedly heard a familiar yittering call directly above me: a goshawk and a crow were in chase, in combat for a noisy moment before disappearing behind the nearby buildings.

PArAllel lIveS The seconds when I see the hawks these days are brief but, writing in my diary at night, I realise that these sightings are often the highlight of my day. A time when job search, money worries and loneliness falls away. The hawks have become a mascot of my first months in a new city when I sometimes find it hard to know what to hang on to and my priorities are unclear. Their silhouettes burn into my memory, and I like knowing that nature is not something separate and distant.

It’s somehow comforting to know that wild beasts live among us, independent, adaptive, among the train tracks and cemeteries and industrial estates, among the domestic dogs and cats, feral pigeons and fireworks. The city is not as tame or discovered as we might think.

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