encounters with nature

Man Saves Baby Falcon From Being Bullied, Squashed

Yesterday at around 7 a.m., Morgan Pitts, a 36-year-old propmaster who works out of Silvercup Studios in Queens, had an Encounter With Nature. While on a routine coffee run near his Greenpoint home, he heroically and rather nonchalantly saved a baby falcon from a dangerous urban environment, and quite probably stopped him from turning to terrorism. Here is his story, as told to Daily Intel.

I got up in the morning, and I had no milk for my coffee. I went to the deli — normally, I would just get in my car and drive away. Anyway, I saw him across the street. He was just standing on the corner with a bunch of pigeons, and I noticed they were kind of like pushing him around. I was still kind of waking up, so I went to the deli, and I sort of thought about it. I knew he was a falcon, or a hawk, he’s pretty distinctive looking, and there’s a church near me, Saint Stanislavs, it’s possible there are hawks living up in the steeple. But he was all alone, usually the parents are around. I wondered if he had fallen out of the steeple. On the way back, I checked for him, and he was under a car. He was looking really nervous, like he knew he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. Then he ran across the street in front of me, and he nearly got hit by a car.”

At that point I was like, ‘Uh-oh, I’d better do something.’ My car was parked right there. I work on 30 Rock, we have a lot of animals on the show. There’s a great animal-rescue mission that brings us our movie animals, and so I thought I’d bring him to them. I had a box in the car, and he practically jumped in the box, that’s how freaked out he was. So I drove him to work, and we called the people we usually work with, but they were unavailable. Luckily an electrician I work with, his wife is the head of an animal-rescue center, so we called them and they came to pick him up. He was there for about an hour, and he was looking pretty scared. Now they’re looking at different wildlife rehabilitators who might take him in.”

Man Saves Baby Falcon From Being Bullied, Squashed