One of this year’s fledglings parallaxing at sunrise today. Raptors bob their heads before taking off to gauge the distance and trajectory of what they’re aiming for–but this one made me laugh.

And it made me remember.

I wrote about it at the time it happened 15 years ago and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here at least once since. It was such a powerful experience.

Today fellow knitter Clara Parkes asked on her Substack, If there were one thing in nature that you could become one with, what would it be?

There were fun answers, beautiful answers, and here was mine. Since it’s behind a paywall, I thought I’d share it here, too, where members of the falcon community can read it:

I was on the camera crew for a season monitoring the peregrine falcon nest high up on San Jose City Hall. I would love to be able to spread my wings and coast on the wind like one of those magnificent birds.

As I sit here remembering: one of the chicks at first grew big enough to explore the concrete HVAC ledge outside the nest box, its feathers for flight beginning to grow in, no longer a ball of white fluff.

And then it moved more slowly and after a day or two, quietly passed in a back corner of the nest.

The parents fed their other chicks and soon they were teaching them how to not just fly but transfer food mid-air, how to hunt, how to dive at over 200 mph, all the peregriney things.

And then the father came back to the wooden box the UCSC biologist had installed. It had a layer of gravel to mimic the rocky cliffs of nature. He stood there facing the remains of the one that had perished for some minutes while I at my computer, hand hovering over the mouse, waited to see what he might do next.

And what that was was something that had not been observed before in that species, from what I’ve been told: he bent way over towards his son’s body and then with the top of his head, the most tender, vulnerable part of his own, pushed it down, down, to give a burial to his boy where it would be left undisturbed.

It was astonishing and profoundly moving. Love. Love is the entirety of the universe. I want to forever be part of that love.