& Environs: Peregrine Falcons, Ecological Recovery & Place in the Midwest Metropolis
how do you connect with place?
I think I most often connect with a place over the course of time, in a process that is not quite perceptible to me as it is happening. Picking up small sense memories and experiences build my sense of place, until it can be felt in a larger way and maybe symbolized in a concrete image or sign.
what are you noticing as of late?
I've been noticing that people are trying to get together and combat the disorganization that has seemed to dominate the last years. I don't enumerate how many years, because it could be a disorganization lasting a long time.
what is calling you?
As ever, the desire to take long walks and bike rides and go to the beach. I feel drawn to take these journeys to connect with something larger or just to encounter and observe.
Tim Hogan
Place
Place in general is performed.
Tim Cresswell, Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place
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I am writing in a studio in a large brick building located at 41° 51' 3.654'' N 87° 39' 28.7352'' W, and 597 altitude. The building is on a parcel at the intersection of Throop Street and Cermak Road in Chicago. It is occupied mainly by Mana Contemporary Chicago, a large grouping of artist studios and galleries, a companion development to other spaces of the same company in Jersey City, New Jersey and Miami, Florida. There are many other studios in the building complex, and other businesses as well. Many others are performing their labors, doing their work.
It's a large building complex on a site that stretches from Cermak on the North to the South branch of the Chicago River, and it may be the tallest industrial building in Chicago. Next to it is the now-closed Fisk Generating Station and its looming 450-foot-high smokestack. The buildings were originally planned together as one mega site for Commonwealth Edison, designed by Chicago architect George Nimmons and built in 1926.
In the 1960s, the building was acquired by auto parts firm Warshawsky and Company, which had boomed with the soaring demand for auto parts during World War II. In 1996, the company abandoned the complex for a new facility in LaSalle, Illinois. Supposedly, none of the 500 employees were given an offer to relocate. In 2013, Mana Contemporary opened in this same spot.
This is an essay about this site and its environs, embedded as they are in yet larger places, and the animals that live and work here: humans and peregrine falcons.
It is true that this essay’s contents take place in Chicago and Illinois, but it is also true that the actors in it—-humans, birds, and others—press on the borders of the state, oftentimes disregarding them entirely. Whether by air or by land, living things don’t stay put. Places aren’t fixed, and boundaries aren’t stable. As is known, the area from where I write was probably named Shikaakwa by the Algonquian. It is Algonquian land.
Tim Hogan
Mana Contemporary, Home to Artists and Falcons
On a day in April, I was walking through the Mana Contemporary lobby as usual, on my way to the studio, when I saw something peculiar on the wall across from the freight elevator. Both of the tv screens used for exhibiting video art were filled with images of big, hawk-like birds, and there was no attendant wall text attributing the work to any artist. At the end of the long bench laid out for extended viewing, there was a modest plastic case holding up a stack of papers, which explained that the videos were not works of conceptual art, but recently captured footage of peregrine falcons, from a nest somewhere in the building. I was elated.
Even though these were compelling images of beautiful birds, rare sights to me, I am still surprised at the effect that video imagery on a tv screen could have on me. It must have had something to do with my surprise at seeing something that was not “art” in a space I had been conditioned to believe was expressly for works of video art. Here was a piece of direct, documentary footage of a peregrine falcon sitting in a nest, and it held me standing there in the lobby for many long moments before I finally turned towards my studio, where I had originally come to go.
It turns out the building has been a nesting site for peregrine falcons since at least 2000, before Mana Contemporary was there, and the site is a part of a larger peregrine monitoring program that covers all of Illinois. Each spring, a mating pair returns to a nesting box on the site and the female, unbanded in this case, lays 3 or 4 eggs. The female then guards her eggs until they hatch, and the pair and the hatchlings will stay at the nest site until the young birds can fly and hunt on their own, a process called “fledging.” The young usually fledge by July and go to find their own territory.
A few weeks after the new peregrin's hatch, Mary Hennen, the director of the Illinois Peregrine Program, will come to Mana to band the hatchlings and take blood samples, which aids in tracking the peregrines’ health and the spread of the whole population across the Midwest and beyond. In order to nab the hatchlings for banding, Hennen or an assistant often have to wave a broom to distract the adult falcons while the other person performs some well-intentioned pilfering. This year, four chicks were born at the Mana site, and three were healthy enough to be banded, with a fourth taken to Willowbrook Wildlife Center to be monitored for issues with its feathers.
Soon after my encounter with the falcons on the lobby screen, I spent a good long while on a zoom call with S.Y. Lim, Director of Programming at Mana Contemporary, and Shawn Lucas, Director of Operations, talking about their experiences with the falcons.
Lim came across the falcons on her welcome tour when she first started at Mana last year. Lucas was showing her around the building, and he took her to see the falcon nest, and to give her background on the birds and their relationship to the building. As Lim describes it, she immediately wanted to know more about the birds and to find a way to involve them more in the programming for the arts community at Mana. She remembers thinking, “We have to highlight the birds. We need to give them the proper credit.” And so she and Lucas set to work, getting footage of the peregrine nest and putting it on the screens. Studio tenants like me have been watching everything from the adult female sitting on her eggs to the hatchlings being banded.
Noting that the birds have been at the building since before Mana Contemporary, Lucas says he has a strong attachment to them. “They're a really big part of our community here,” says Lucas. “We feel very responsible for their continued longevity, in their nest, at the site.”
When Lucas first started at Mana in 2017 he felt that the peregrines’ existence was “sort of secret.” “I think initially, they didn't want people to know what the nests were, because they just wanted the falcons to be left alone,” he says, “But of course, the staff had to know about it, in case there was something around the nest—-we were aware of it, and knew the protocol.”
The protocol Lucas speaks of, is one that anyone who goes out on the roof of the building needs to follow, in order to keep the birds (and the humans) safe. Humans have to wear hard hats and keep a broom with them, allowing the birds to swoop at an object that won’t hurt them, and is also removed from the human carrying it. The peregrine’s talons can move through the flexible bristles without damage.
Lucas says the nest at Mana has been a good, safe hub for the falcons, and that Mana is committed to keeping the birds “undisturbed.” “It's always been a very sensitive thing,” says Lucas. “But you know, it's been really great working with S.Y., because she and I both have the same kind of feelings about the birds.” Through the video of the falcons’ nest, Lucas and Lim believe they can protect the birds while letting the broader community of the building connect with them. “We have this really beautiful conservation effort that exists,” says Lucas.
Lim says of the peregrines, “They're probably one of the most interesting and most beautiful things happening in the building.
Tim Hogan
Peregrine Falcons, Recovery From Extirpation
There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota or dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
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The naturalist and ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote the above after seeing a monument to the extinct passenger pigeon in Wisconsin. The peregrines’ fate has not followed that of those famously extinct birds’ in North America, because the environmental movement forced the United States government to ban the use of DDT. That pesticide was ruining the reproductive capacities of falcons and other predatory birds wherever it was used, bringing these birds close to extinction.
The peregrine falcon was extirpated in Illinois and large parts of the United States, removed from this land by human intervention and blundering. It must be said too, that it was not generic humans, but particular ones: the ones with money and power and certificates of ownership. The ones who held the land captive. The ones who made the chemical DDT in massive quantities, and used it to kill off insects that interfered with postwar industrial methods of agriculture. This chemical would wind up not just killing the insects its purveyors targeted, but also polluting the lifecycles of scores of other species, including many predatory birds like the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon. After 1951, no peregrine falcon was known to be born in Illinois.
In 1972, DDT was banned by the US Government, and since then the peregrine has slowly come back to Illinois and the greater Midwest. In 1973, the peregrine falcon was listed as an endangered species under the Illinois Endangered Species Protection Act. It was delisted in 2015, after decades of human recovery efforts and the bird's own adaptation. A group of scientists, wildlife rehabilitators, and volunteers have helped the peregrine falcon return to habitats like Illinois, where Mary Hennen, Assistant Collections Manager for Birds at the Field Museum, leads a monitoring program.
The program is known as either the Chicago or Illinois Peregrine Program. It was originally called “Chicago,” but then the program grew to encompass the whole state. It oversees the population of peregrine falcons throughout Illinois, monitoring the birds’ nest sites, conducting scientific research, and engaging in public education. Hennen says the program works to understand the peregrine falcons better, and help them thrive throughout Illinois and the greater Midwest.
Hennen, who has been involved with the peregrine program for over 30 years, says the population is as strong as she has seen it. "We have around 30 territories within Illinois, from Evanston all the way down near St. Louis."
Tim Hogan
Rock River, Midwest Metropolis
People hear about the stories of extinction. Passenger Pigeons, Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (probably), Carolina Parakeets, and Bachman’s Warblers are all North American birds that are now extinct because of humans, and there are others. But while we need to learn everything we can from such losses, we also can learn from our successes. [...] An important twist on this story is that Peregrines have, with help from humans, taken to a novel habitat; they now nest in the urban canyons of our Midwestern Cities.
John Bates, Curator of Birds, the Field Museum;The Peregrine Returns
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Peregrines have been taken off the endangered species list in Illinois, partly because of their adaptation to nesting on the large buildings of cities. The bird’s native nesting habitats are high cliffs near open water, and as Hennen says, what are the centers of modern cities like Chicago but artificial cliffs? At 198 feet, the Mana Contemporary building fits this kind of habitat description, as do other peregrine nest sites in Illinois.
In Rockford, a pair of peregrines have nested in the former Rockford Register Star building, an architectural icon of the city's downtown on the Rock River. Hennen and her assistant went there to band three hatchlings on May 31st, at an event the local Sinnissippi Audobon Society publicized. The Society has been very involved with caring for the peregrines there: a banded female named “Louise,” and her current mate, “Brian,” who arrived in February 2021. The society even has a live nestcam that you can watch 24/7, an initiative that S.Y. Lim wants to implement at the Mana site.
The Chicago River at Bubbly Creek
It seems to me that I saw things before I actually saw them; they were always there, the way I believe that the words are always there, coursing through us.
Edna O’Brien, Country Girl
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In the years before I shared a studio at Mana Contemporary, I had a lot of experience with the building and its environs. I’ve lived for many years in the neighborhoods surrounding the site—Pilsen, McKinley Park, and Bridgeport—-and have often biked between them using the Ashland, Loomis, or Halsted bridges that span the south branch of the Chicago River.
Here is a passage from a journal entry of mine after one such ride: We biked to Eleanor Street Boat House by way of Bubbly Creek and Lock Street and took in the different building types and street types and subdevelopments of Bridgeport. We paid attention to homes and warehouses, alleys, trees, parks, power lines, the infrastructure, and riverways. The built and “natural” environment. From the boat launch, we took in the expanse of this “working” river, its manmade inlets, its boats ferrying human and unhuman cargo, the geese and ducks and gulls. You can see the shores of Pilsen on the other side, and the humanmade and natural lines of transmission and transport pointed towards downtown Chicago and lake beyond, even though famously, the river’s flow moves in the opposite direction, away from the Third Coast and down towards a succession of ever greater rivers, bearing our byproducts down to the Gulf of Mexico.
My first memory of seeing the site is from a car driving north across the Loomis Bridge. I was in a carpool of teenagers on our way to high school in Little Italy (of the Taylor Street variety, not the one in and around Oakley and 24th Street, which I call “Lil Lil Italy,” so as to differentiate the two). I came from the far South Side of the city, and on those morning commutes, the stretch of Loomis between the Stevenson and 18th Street always felt like the last leg of a long ride.
I remember feeling a small sense of awe at the grandeur of its tower, particularly as it read to me: an old factory, warehouse, or some such industrial structure. The neogothic masonry of the tower, along with the rest of the hulking red brick mass, seemed born out of a different society than the faceless boxes of aluminum and plastic I would see from the parking lots and highways of my own time.
Though I wouldn’t have thought much of seeing a seagull or pigeon along those carpool rides, I never would have considered that such a rare and striking bird as a peregrine would have been haunting the same vicinities that we drove along, with the trucks and power lines, and the rest of what seemed to me a non-natural environment: the wilds bounded out by concrete, rust, and the remnants of something dirty, like “industry.”
It would have only added to my wonder at the place, knowing about the peregrines there, even without knowing the specifics of the sordid history of humans and these birds: of DDT and overdevelopment and sprawl, habitat destruction and human-driven global warming.
Later on, in the journal entry, I asked myself a series of questions: We wound up biking back through the North end of Bridgeport in a snaking route passing through Palmisano Park, where the city partially “rewilded” an old quarry into a landscaped expanse of prairie grasses, wetlands, and a pond at the bottom of the quarrycut cliffs. What are the connections between the personal experience of a neighborhood, and the local ecology of a walk or a bike ride? What does psychogeography mean? Species? Ecology? Escape and the connection to the social world?
Slow-Walkin It
On a Saturday in July, I took a bike around the site that could just as well have been a walk. It might take about 20 to 30 minutes on foot if you were merely marking the route, but you also could linger at spots along the way, as I did, and take hours.
There is a mulberry tree at the end of Throop where old rail lines are bent up, broken at the river’s edge, perhaps the mark of a rail bridge that used to span across to the industrial yards on the South Side. From the site, you can see truck yards and concrete mixing plants, parking lots for bus lines, and the site of a brand new Amazon warehouse, with that obnoxious and dull blue stripe around its boring boxtop.
I walk my bike back to the entrance to my studio on the other side of the parcel. Last summer, in an expanse just next to me, they showed drive-in movies. A remnant sign along a shed still reads Day of the Dead. Under the power lines, you can hear the crackle of the electric current. From the water’s edge, you can hear the trucks on Cermak, and the traffic of yonder Stevenson Expressway (I-55). You can find pigeon parts in the parking lot: remnants of the peregrines’ kills. My studiomate has mentioned being greeted by a leg or wing on her walk into the building. It takes me a while to get back to the lobby, where I sit down to watch the video of the young peregrines being banded.
I hear screeching: the frightened screeches of a young peregrine falcon being carried to a table laid out with a white blanket and a smaller kitchen towel. Mary Hennen holds the bird down, wearing padded yellow gloves as the bird’s complaints mellow only slightly, into bursts that might be called “squawks,” although I’m sure there are more official terms for these expressions that an expert might use. I, however, am not an expert.
Watching life unfold on screen is tantalizing, but it often brings more questions than answers. What is the young peregrine feeling? What are they trying to say? What is the conservation ecologist thinking about the bird's cries? Though the scientists deem the banding necessary to aid human conservation of the peregrine species, are there any qualms about the act?
I know the process is over quickly. The video ends with the birds packed safely in a cardboard box, waiting to get back to their nest where they will continue the work of learning how to fly.
Thanks to S.Y. Lim and Shawn Lucas of Mana Contemporary who were very generous with their time. They both answered any question I had for them about the peregrines at the Mana Contemporary building and invited me to see the birds from a closer vantage.
Thanks also to Mary Hennen who gave me the benefit of her expertise and many resources about the Illinois Peregrine Program she runs out of the Field Museum. Mary’s book collaboration with the artist Peggy McNamara, The Peregrine Returns: The Art and Architecture of an Urban Raptor Recovery, is a beautiful work of science writing and art. If you are interested in learning more about peregrines or love nature drawing, pick up a copy.
