Amy Liptrot finds birds of prey on the Tempelhofer Feld…
In a city famous for its nightlife, I’ve been waking up early to look for birds of prey. One 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 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.
At the beginning of the winter, I moved to Berlin from Scotland, 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 am 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.
The northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) is, in most places, notoriously elusive, only glimpsed in woodland. In Britain, goshawks were extinct by the late nineteenth nineteenth century, persecuted by humans who saw them as vermin. From the 1970s, they were re-introduced by falconers and, these birds mixing having mixed with escaped falconers’ birds, 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 like crows and magpies and mammals, including rats and squirrels), and are not usually persecuted by humans. Goshawks are arboreal, which means they live in trees; and the fact that Berlin is one of Europe’s most wooded cities, with tree-lined streets (an average 80 per kilometre), and