Hollywood’s Favorite
BIRD BRAINS: Inside the Strange Minds of Our Fine Feathered Friends (ISBN: 978-0-7267-8755-5)
by
Budd Titlow
When it comes to ecological accuracy, Hollywood has a lot to learn. My wife and I love going to movies. Through almost forty years, our Friday “date nights” have provided us with a great deal of fun and long-lasting conversation.
But as much as I love the movies, it really grates on me when I see something in the natural setting that simply doesn’t add up. Like autumn foliage on background trees during a spring wedding. Or outdoor flowers blooming when snow is falling during a Christmastime plot. Or a flock of honking geese migrating during a midsummer picnic in the park. Or lions and tigers running around in a South American jungle scene.
My wife gets annoyed with me, saying, “Why can’t you just relax and enjoy the movie. No one else in the whole world even notices stuff like that.” Maybe so—but if people are paying attention, there’s a lot of ecological misinformation being conveyed via the big screen.
My pet peeve among all Hollywood’s visual malapropisms is how, if there’s an outdoor scene, you invariably hear the same rasping scream that starts on a high note and then descends rapidly in pitch—keeeeeeeerrr. I know this wonderfully wild sound very well. It’s a hunting red-tailed hawk, the most common hawk in North America. You see them just about anywhere there’s open terrain, soaring in lazy circles above fields, farms, highways, and even city parks.
Unleashing its classic downward-spiraling scream, a Red-Tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) goes into a power dive. (Photo Copyright: mallardg500 / Shutterstock.com)
The problem is that Hollywood directors play the scream of a red-tailed hawk no matter what bird is shown flying around. A bald eagle soaring overhead? In the background, we hear keeeeeeerrr. A blue jay lands in a tree? We hear keeeeeeerrr. A wolf goes trotting past? We hear keeeeeeerrr.
Red-tails are popular outside of Hollywood as well. In New York City back in the mid-1990s, a male red-tail dubbed Pale Male and his mate built a nest near Woody’s Allen’s penthouse patio and repeatedly left pigeon entrails on the bio-phobic (“I am two with Nature”) director’s patio. While Woody didn’t complain—he actually liked seeing the hawks—some of his high profile neighbors did and the city removed the nest. The ensuing howls of protest from the legions of New Yorkers who had been following Pale Male’s activities for years was so deafening that when the hawks rebuilt their nest the city had to leave it alone. Then, after years of courting and breeding futility, Pale Male and his mate finally successfully produced a brood of young red-tails right there in the middle of Manhattan. Marie Winn told the whole story in her book Red-Tails in Love. Maybe that will be a movie some day, with a perfectly appropriate background sound—keeeeeeerrr.
Text excerpted from book: BIRD BRAINS: Inside the Strange Minds of Our Fine Feathered Friends, written by Budd Titlow and published by Lyons Press (an imprint of Globe Pequot Press).
Author’s bio: For the past 50 years, professional ecologist and conservationist Budd Titlow has used his pen and camera to capture the awe and wonders of our natural world. His goal has always been to inspire others to both appreciate and enjoy what he sees. Now he has one main question: Can we save humankind’s place — within nature’s beauty — before it’s too late? Budd’s two latest books are dedicated to answering this perplexing dilemma. PROTECTING THE PLANET: Environmental Champions from Conservation to Climate Change, a non-fiction book, examines whether we still have the environmental heroes among us — harking back to such past heroes as Audubon, Hemenway, Muir, Douglas, Leopold, Brower, Carson, and Meadows — needed to accomplish this goal. Next, using fact-filled and entertaining story-telling, his latest book — COMING FULL CIRCLE: A Sweeping Saga of Conservation Stewardship Across America — provides the answers we all seek and need. Having published five books, more than 500 photo-essays, and 5,000 photographs, Budd Titlow lives with his music educator wife, Debby, in San Diego, California.
This Birding Life 