Prison Peregrine

I only recently discovered that Peregrine falcons nested on the high-rise Brooklyn Detention Complex on Atlantic Avenue last year. This building used to be called the Brooklyn House of Correction ~ things becomes more complex but not necessarily better ~ although it is neither a house nor particularly corrective. I’m not often near it, even though it isn’t so far away, but I kept my eye on it while walking to the Williamsburgh Savings Bank yesterday to visit the Marshall strawberry at the Brooklyn Flea. There was a game of hoops in progress in the caged roof court of the grim pokey: silhouettes in the gray day, an arching ball confined in the mesh.

On the way back, I walked down State Street, where a block of modern row houses captured my curiosity. I have been reading about bricks, I’m that sort of person, and here random dark greenish ones mixed in with the usual red in exciting ways. I passed the ugly prison, made of not-at-all-admirable bricks, my eyes on its top edges. Nothing now, and air time was over for the inmates. A block up Atlantic by Trader Joe’s snacks, I saw a Peregrine zoom over to the center of the airspace above the street and then falcon it eastward with speed. I did an about-face to watch it. The bird landed on a high corner of the prison. So I walked back. As I passed below, the bird vocalized, that high pitched, mechanical, threshing screech, and I thought, what on earth do the people behind those caged windows think when they hear that?

Update: here are some fantastic photos by Bradley Klein of a young Peregrine taking its fledgling flight from this nest in 2010 (so it’s been there longer than I knew).