Meg Millure remembers distinctly the moment they became obsessed with falcons.
They were visiting their sister in Pittsburgh and sitting on the University of Pittsburgh campus when objects fell from above.
“We were just sitting there and these bloodied pigeon feathers started raining from the sky,” said Millure, annual giving and stewardship officer in the School of Information. “It was one of the most spectacular things I’d ever seen, and I looked up and there was a falcon eating a pigeon.”
Millure considers their interest in falcons to be dark but deep and gratifying and believes their life likely would be completely different if not for that encounter at Pittsburgh.
It helped prompt Millure to transfer to the University of Pittsburgh from the University of North Carolina at Asheville to double major in gender studies and English writing non-fiction.
For more than 20 years, Pitt’s towering Cathedral of Learning has been home to a nesting site where peregrine falcons visit to lay eggs, feed on prey and raise fledglings. A web cam installed at the nesting site allows viewers to monitor their progress, and Millure was intrigued by this access.
Millure’s favorite place on campus to study was at the Hillman Library across from the Cathedral of Learning and they had a perfect view of the area where the falcons nested. Millure became so smitten with the falcon couple during their time in Pittsburgh, nearly all of their writing projects focused on the raptors.
“The fact that I could know which individual I was looking at in the sky and connect them to what was happening on the web cam was really cool to me,” Millure said. “And it was genuinely hard to leave that in Pittsburgh. I was really attached to those two birds and watching their stories.”
Millure left Pittsburgh for Ann Arbor, eventually applying for a temporary position at UMSI. Among their writing samples was a piece about peregrine falcons, and Glenda Bullock, who was associate director of communications at UMSI, told Millure upon reviewing the sample, “Oh, we have those. There’s a couple of peregrine falcons on North Quad.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” Millure said. “A city without a skyline I didn’t necessarily expect to have a nesting pair. And of course, I was like, ‘It’s a sign.’”
Their first day, they received an offer for a full-time copywriting position outside the university and turned it down. After a year and a half at UMSI, they accepted a development position at Michigan Medicine about three months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Two years later, Millure returned to UMSI on the development side and said on their first day in the office, they spotted the peregrine falcon nesting site.
Millure said their supervisor allowed them to move their desk for a better view of the nest.
“You learn a lot just by watching their comings and goings. You can watch a falcon for an hour really intensely, but there’s really nothing like seeing the passive comings and goings while you’re doing something else,” Millure said. “As soon as I saw it, I was like, ‘I’m exactly where I need to be.’”
Even though they live in an apartment with no backyard, Millure said they are a backyard birder and do not travel extensively to view falcons or other species. Instead, Millure is content visiting their neighborhood parks to absorb nature and watch the skies with their binoculars.
And it need not be peregrine falcons that bring them joy, although that is a blessing. Millure also takes pleasure in everyday birds people see all the time.
“There are some who would say, ‘I’m traveling to Ohio for warbler week to see this specific warbler,’ and I’m someone who’s going to walk five minutes to Wurster Park and I’m going to watch some American robin, the most common bird ever,” Millure said. “I’m very passionate about facilitating your own ability to still be excited by common birds.”
But the falcons have Millure’s heart, especially the ones they left behind in Pittsburgh. That included one that received plenty of online ire due to her peculiar and violent actions, which Millure defended voraciously.
A new female replaced a longtime falcon who fledged 43 chicks over 14 years. The new female displayed aggression toward her chicks during the four years she nested there, prompting even the web cam to offer warnings of potential graphic content.
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“All of my feelings about falcons, once you get below the surface, it seems very whimsical but then it’s very gruesome under that. It was interesting that the public that had been granted this visibility into her life turned on her,” Millure said.
“That was something that was inherently interesting about falcons to me that there was this thing that was happening in Pittsburgh that we were all projecting all of our human moralities and emotions onto, including myself because I felt protective of her even though she can’t read anyone’s Facebook comments about her. That experience, watching that, is why falcons for me.”
When Millure does travel to enjoy nature, they combine their two hobbies of birds and roller skates. They learned to roller skate in 2019 — “Being an adult in a parking lot by yourself learning how to roller skate is the most humbling thing you can do,” they said.
Millure even went through roller derby boot camp that fall with a derby name of Babe of Prey, as in bird of prey. Millure’s first roller derby scrimmage was scheduled for March 15, 2020, and was canceled.
While they have not returned to participate in the sport, they do get on their roller skates to take in nature.
“I’ll go to Kensington Metropark, and I do feel a little silly because I’m roller skating while wearing my little binoculars, and I feel like, ‘Pick one whimsical hobby at a time,’” they said with a laugh. “I’ll have a goal that day. I want to see a swan while I’m wearing roller skates today and I’ll go out and do it.”
