Find Hope In Peregrine Falcons
There are millions of people in Chicago, and I’m still single.
I can’t lie, blame society, dating apps, or my generation’s lack of social skills. I can’t be baffled by how I’m putting myself out there yet still find myself alone at night, because, in truth, I’m not trying very hard. It’s been almost three years since my ex-boyfriend broke up with me, and as embarrassing as it is to say, I’m not over him.
For a while, I convinced myself we were like two mythical birds of prey, circling each other in the deep sky for all life, that we were destined to be together by some cosmic ruling.
But now I know that he was just my first love, and I was stupid.
At this point, I don’t believe that I’ll find someone to complete me. Twin flames are for Hallmark movies and grifting matchmakers. And yes, I still yearn for a partner, even for my ex, but I also love being alone. I love the freedom of it. I can stay up as late as I please. I can be aggressive and defensive at the same time, not having to explain myself. I can want a home and to fly off into a far-off horizon. I am, in many paradoxical ways, a true raptor, and apparently raptors are difficult to date.
I moved to Chicago for a new start, but I never really started over. I had simply transported my heartbreak to a city with better coffee and Thai food.
I’ve found the skyscrapers and cement strangely determined to tame the wild creature within me. Traffic, sidewalks, planned parks. There are too many boundaries. Too many constraints. There is no controlling a raptor, only nudging one in a direction that might be better for its future. I didn’t know what that direction looked like for me.
Then, on my way to an overpriced coffee shop in my fashionably oversized pants, I noticed a small circular patch of brown in an angular cranny of one of the buildings before me. A large bird, shrunken by distance, soared over to a skyscraper, rustling its feathers as it settled into its nest.
A peregrine falcon.
Traditionally, you might spot a peregrine falcon on a wild coastal cliff, practicing flight or stalking a duck for lunch. Or maybe not. Even in their natural habitat, they can be difficult to find. But in Chicago, they are becoming increasingly hard to miss.
However, that hasn’t always been the case.
Once a vibrant species in the Midwest, in 1970, the peregrine falcon was listed as an endangered species. Habitat destruction and widespread use of insecticides like DDT had decimated their population. By the middle of the twentieth century, there were no mating pairs left in the area.
Love seemed hopeless. But it can never be forgotten.
The peregrines’ comeback began with people deciding that extinction didn’t have to be inevitable. The Chicago Peregrine Program brought together falcons from Minnesota and Illinois, bred them, raised their young with detailed falcon puppets so the birds wouldn’t become attached to humans, and eventually released them into the wild. The goal was never to make the falcons dependent on people, but to give them another chance to be falcons.
By the 1990s, the population had recovered enough that the program no longer needed to breed them. The birds knew what to do. What began with essentially no reproducing birds has grown into a thriving population across Chicago. Around twenty falcon pairs occupy multiple territories throughout the city.
If they can persist in such an environment, why can’t I?
Peregrines mate for life. They raise their young together. They build nests high above streets filled with people late to work, avoiding solicitors, complaining about the drama in their polycule. Meanwhile, I’m alone. In my stubbornness, I don’t want to change for love, but when I looked to the skies and saw the predators in all their wildness, I realized that maybe compromising authenticity and adaptation are not the same.
It’s survival.
Mary Hennen, an ornithologist at the Field Museum and a key figure in the Chicago Peregrine Program, explained to me how these raptors have learned to live alongside us. Instead of nesting on coastal cliffs, they make homes on lakefront high-rises downtown. Their nests can be awe-inspiring to the businessman who has gained an interesting distraction from work or terrifying to the smoker who just wants a few minutes with his cigarette.
Mary’s job now is largely about helping people and falcons coexist during nesting season. She told me, “The more you know and understand, the less of a problem it is.” Fear, she explained, often comes from not knowing what is going to happen.
I know something about that kind of fear.
When a relationship ends, you suddenly find yourself in a world you don’t recognize. Your footing feels off. You feel annoying and ugly and unlovable. The future you had imagined becomes unusable. You walk around your own life like a bird that has lost its ledge.
But a peregrine that loses its home doesn’t spend the rest of its life hovering over the place where the nest used to be.
It just moves on.
If a building decides it no longer wants a peregrine nest, Mary told me, the solution can be as simple as waiting until the young have been raised and then transporting the nest. The falcon finds somewhere else. A storm destroys a cliffside nesting site? It finds another ledge. Construction changes its environment? It adapts.
As Mary explained, an urban peregrine losing its nesting place isn’t fundamentally different from a peregrine on the coast losing its cliff.
The environment may look different, but the bird remains the same.
I think about my own nest, the emotional comfort of a deep relationship. It crumbled a lifetime ago, and I’ve spent too long since then acting as if losing one person meant losing the capability of being loved. I held onto the idea that my relationship was some rare ecosystem that could never be replicated. Maybe that’s why I kept looking backward. If I had already found my perfect mate, then everyone else was going to seem like an inferior species.
I think I confused familiarity with destiny.
There are still threats to peregrines. DDT has been banned in the United States since 1972, but other dangers remain: light and sound pollution, pesticides, disease, construction, and the endless ways a city can interfere with wildlife. Their recovery isn’t a fairy tale where everyone lives happily ever after. It’s ongoing work.
Mary and I chatted about how the success of conservation doesn’t require everyone to do something enormous. “Everybody doesn't have to do this huge thing,” she said. “If everybody did one small thing, find whatever your interest is, the cumulative effect can be huge.”
Plant milkweed for monarch butterflies. Build a birdhouse. Protect a nesting site. Learn what lives around you. The city is not separate from nature. It is another habitat to grow with.
I have been slow to understand since moving. My love life here has sometimes felt like an anthropological field study, full of judgment and observation of those around me. The people I meet don’t know that wood sorrel tastes great in a salad or that red-winged blackbirds will kamikaze-dive into the back of your head during mating season. Instead, cool grungy twenty-somethings with pierced eyebrows and sleeves of ironic tattoos tell me about the coolest new bands and the underground venues where I should see them.
I have yet to find a romantic counterpart with the same wilderness within them. But according to Mary, there are plenty of wild things here. She told me to think about all the parks, golf courses, the lakefront, and the other patches of habitat scattered throughout the city. Rabbits nibble sidewalk dandelions. White-tailed deer find refuge in the cemetery near my apartment. Birds build nests in buildings designed for humans.
Wildlife can persevere in this seemingly unnatural place.
The falcons agree.
I’ve spent too much time and energy dividing the world into what belongs in nature and to the city. The same goes for writing off potential friends and lovers. I write off people who I believe won’t understand my interests without really knowing. I separate them as the wild ones and the domesticated ones, the people who know about birds and the people who know about underground bands.
But the punks, finance bros, and yoga girlies are all on the same quest as I am: to find connection with a like species. Maybe I have been looking for another peregrine while dismissing every animal that didn’t look like one.
The peregrines don’t survive Chicago by becoming less wild. They survive by figuring out where their wildness fits. That may be what I need to learn, too. My love is not endangered. I am not broken. I am simply living in a new habitat and resisting some of the adaptations required to thrive here.
I don’t need to become a different person to belong in Chicago. I don’t need to find a new rendition of my old mate. And I don’t need to overthink my desires even if they’re sometimes contradictory. I just need to build another nest and keep going.
Maybe it will be in a skyscraper. Maybe it’ll be nowhere near the city, and I’ll look back at this time of my life as a silly chapter. Maybe the person I eventually love will be nothing like the person I thought I was supposed to love. But no matter where I go and who I love, the peregrines have taught me that losing a ledge is not the same as losing the ability to fly.
And, for now, that seems like enough.