Raptors of the Concrete Cloverleaf by Christopher Brown

In the winter here at the eastern edge of Austin, the woodland hawks come out to hunt closer to the roads. I saw a pair the first Friday of the new year, across from the bus depot at the base of the tollway onramp. One was perched on a dead hackberry, framed in my view by a sign advertising the services of Heart of Texas Demolition, which the week before had torn down the old garage and older home that had been there for a century or so as the neighborhood went from rural to urban around them, until they finally ended up as ruins on land that momentarily evaded capital’s attention. The hawk seemed uncharacteristically oblivious to my presence, busy moving its gaze across the debris-strewn ground for whatever mouse or lizard might emerge from the rubble.

Moments later the hawk’s mate appeared. Probably the male, as it seemed smaller. It alighted on a healthier tree further back, in the shadows of the truck repair shop next door, and hung out for a minute before it flew on to a tall street lamp on the opposite side of the road, watching the cars hurtle off the tollway faster than they should. Behind the hawk loomed the monolithic wall of the five-storey parking garage just erected in a spot where, until this time last year, a grove of tall pecans had somehow held out for decades in a feral and otherwise deserted traffic island.

I remembered the Wednesday afternoon during quarantine when I saw a pair of the same species of hawks mating on a low branch of one of those pecans, revealing how the wild life the city harbours manages to make refuge out of the most marginal of spaces, and how rapidly such interstitial habitat disappears. Then I wondered if this might have been the same mated pair. The field guides say they live 10-20 years in the wild, if this counts as that.

The contemporary common name of Buteo lineatus is the red-shouldered hawk—busardo hombrorojo to our Mexican neighbours, and there must be older indigenous names still in circulation among some folks. If you are lucky enough to spend a few minutes observing one at close range, you can see why the Anglo-American settlers sometimes called it the ‘elegant hawk.’ They wear their wings like the fur cape of some fairy tale monarch, the burly shoulders more burnt orange than red, the neck and breast a feathery ermine of bright white spotted in black. They are stout, with stubbier wings than other American hawks, being adapted to fly fast through the densely-branched riparian forest rather than the edge of the plains. When you see them by the road in the city, they are a sure sign a pocket of woods is close by. Even if all you can see other than the hawks is pavement, chain link, and decrepit industrial buildings long past their useful life.

Look up from the rush hour traffic backed up at the light and you might see other signs of life flying over. Caracara, the crested eagles of the Mexican flag, often tag along with Audubon’s carrion crows, the black vultures that cruise the thermals like avian biker gangs, on patrol for fresh roadkill. In the morning and evening the waterfowl are on the move—herons, egrets and seasonal ducks. This road follows the path of the river as it meanders its way out of town. If you watch the spectral white grace of the egrets as they head off to feed, you’ll see them fly over the treeline behind the dairy plant, down into the secret valley that hides in plain sight between the last dam below downtown and the bridge that connects the city with the highway to Houston. At night you can hear the coyotes, sometimes answering the sirens of the first responders in plaintive howls.

All cities harbour zones like this. Pockets of urban negative space where, for a moment in time, wild flora and fauna can find room in the margins of our dominion. They are not hard to find, if you try a kind of green psychogeography and see the city with the eyes of an animal. I’ve found similar spots behind a train station in Barcelona, a reclaimed industrial zone in the heart of Seoul, the post-industrial marshland between Los Angeles International Airport and Marina del Rey, and the woods behind the data centre in Des Moines where they birthed ChatGPT. Sometimes you find a spot that feels like a rare remnant of what once was there — not an implausible possibility in a place like Texas, where the erasure of native ecologies was relatively recent, and the wildflowers of the prairie still appear every spring in unmowed rights of way and empty lots. In time, you come to realise the more hopeful possibility is that they are not relics of the past, but pockets of the future arriving ahead of schedule.

This is a city that loves to chase the future — a shiny, lightspeed future dreamed by electrical engineers and Chamber of Commerce boosters. It was the fastest growing city in America for much of the past two decades, a growth fueled by the technology business. The Cybertrucks fill the streets, pumped out by the new Gigafactory they built downriver during lockdown, and the most novel seasonal migrants this winter have been a fleet of robot Jaguars — self-driving taxis that wait around the corner for the next fare with the same patient intensity as the feral cats who stalk the songbirds at dusk. But they can’t compete with the allure of the abandoned factories that line this corridor, charged with the rewilded romance of some post-apocalyptic movie set. The end of the world movie was not a warning, as we thought, but an expression of our latent yearning for some restoration of balance.

The capacity of wild nature to adapt to our most brutal alterations of habitat is remarkable, and often affirming in the resilience it exhibits. Living here over the past 15 years, at the edge of an especially large pocket of urban biodiversity, we have been lucky to witness it. Raccoons that can remove the bungee cords from trash bins. Great blue herons making their massive rookery from a tall sycamore hidden in the old dumpsite behind a muffler shop where you can also get your taxes done. Ringtail cats who make their dens from the nooks of abandoned buildings. Cardinals who build their nests from a mix of native grasses, plastic food wrappers, paper receipts, and fragments of the open-cell foam used to wrap hard objects for shipping. In Belgium, magpies have been observed to be reinforcing the exterior of their nests with anti-bird spike strips ripped from buildings. There is beauty and wonder in these things, even if it is mixed with the horror of the cyborg. It gives you an idea of how much healing could be done with just a little more effort on our part to share the world.

The idea of rewilding is sometimes coupled with fantasies of depopulation, but it needn’t be that way. We made our home in this zone, on a lot bisected by an abandoned petroleum pipeline and littered with huge chunks of demolition debris. We paid the oil company to remove its pipe, built a small house half-buried in the resulting ditch, and then planted the roof with a recreation of the native prairie that once covered the land from Dallas to San Antonio. The results were immediate and wondrous, and the benefits of integrating domestic life with that kind of biodiversity are more than ecological. Others around us have embarked on similar experiments, in what feels like the seeds of a grassroots movement. And on good days, you can see the change. Even as the summers get ever hotter, and you wonder which of the species evolved for the climate we found when we got here will be able to endure the one we made. With luck, we will find out together.

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Christopher Brown is the author of A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and Other Wild Places, now published in the UK and North America by Timber Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

Photographs courtesy of the author.