Inspired by the thoughts of Donna J. Haraway, in these troubled and confusing times, we felt the need to connect with a couple of Peregrine falcons that where roosting at the top of the Roger-Gaudry tower at the Université de Montréal. Using three webcams installed near their nest, we observed and recorded them from our computer almost every day from early March to late May, and then occasionally until late October 2021. The video recordings became a point of contact with these birds saved from the threat of extinction thanks to the ban on the use of DDT (in Canada and elsewhere).

We were captivated by the life of these urban birds of prey, their unique space-time, and how they live in their temporary habitat. One of our main interests was to observe how they survive in this anthropogenic place devoid of vegetation. Their nesting area with the city as backdrop, in a place saturated with human expansion, formed a strange and reassuring image all at once. Their presence in this place emphasized the tension between different temporalities: a production-oriented human time and a rhythm specific to falcons.

This temporal interlacement made us pay particular attention to the “dead” time that took up a significant part of the Peregrine falcons’ daily life. They spent long periods of time in the same spot, in a state of observation or silent waiting, offering a striking contrast to our hyperconnected pace and collective allergy to unproductive time.

And, the Coexistence of Temporalities focuses on the interactions between human and non-human animals in order to glimpse other ways of inhabiting the world and to infuse our imaginaries with an inclusive and sensitive multispecies energy.