Beacon Hill's hawk eye
Photographer spies them daily
Eyes alert, camera inside his backpack, dressed for his job as a custodian in paint-stained jeans and zip-up sweatshirt, John Beattie emerges from the Park Street subway station at 5:35 a.m. on a cool, overcast Monday and glances at the steeple atop the Park Street Church. Nothing there.
Beattie, 59, is looking for the red-tailed hawks he tries to photograph every weekday, and the steeple’s weathervane is one preferred perch. For four years, first with a film camera given to him by a building tenant and now with a digital camera, a gift from his wife, Beattie has photographed the hawks of Beacon Hill. He displays a different image daily on an easel in the lobby of Congregational House on Beacon Street, an office building where he has worked for almost three decades. He has decorated the walls of the basement janitorial office with pictures of hawks. His photographs are posted down the block in the glass-walled Fox newsroom across from the State House and at the dry cleaner in Somerville where his wife works.
“This is my pride and joy,’’ Beattie says. “All I do is work. Doing this relaxes me.’’
Since noticing a hawks’ nest on a back ledge of a nearby building at 6 Beacon St., Beattie has been fascinated by the birds. He taught himself photography taking pictures of hawks. He has captured them with wings spread and captured them nestling downy babies. He has caught them in stately profile and on a gravestone in winter and hanging from a branch. One photo Beattie put in the lobby last week showed a hawk chasing a wild turkey in Boston Common. This week he showed two hawks on the church’s weathervane, one standing and the other landing, wings and talons out.
“Oh, I love them,’’ Beattie says. “Building their nests and watching the babies grow up and fledging. Their wing span and soaring.’’
Jessica Steytler, 34, archivist at the Congregational church’s library, calls Beattie’s photographs a “cohesive force’’ in the eight-story building where she has worked for nine years. “John,’’ she says, “is the heart of the building.’’ Now she looks for hawks downtown, too. “I saw two the other day,’’ she says.
Amber Moore, 27, looks at Beattie’s latest photo while waiting for the elevator on her way to her job in the administrative offices of the Museum of African American History. “It’s remarkable,’’ she says.
Until he discovered the hawks, Beattie, a quiet man who has lived all his life in Somerville, never had a hobby. Now he is so well-known in this corner of Beacon Hill for his photographs that Frank Middleton, youth program coordinator for the National Park Service, comes to the roof one afternoon to recruit Beattie to take a staff picture.
The hawks that first caught Beattie’s eye lost their nest a year later, in 2006, either to vandals or wind, and then rebuilt on a nearby fire escape that is also visible from the roof of Beattie’s building. Beattie, a wiry man with clear blue eyes and thinning white hair, would lie over the roof’s edge and photograph hawks in their nest. He noticed the female liked to drink and wet her belly in hot weather, then snuggle her chicks against her damp breast to cool them and relieve their thirst. So Beattie placed a dish of water on his roof’s ledge, to lure her for photographs.
Two months ago Beattie saw the male dead behind the neighboring Athenaeum and called the city’s animal control office to remove the body. An autopsy conducted at the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Trailside Museum in Milton showed he died of a broken neck, perhaps from flying into a building, says museum director Norman Smith. Her partner gone, the female abandoned the nest and its three eggs, leaving Beattie to focus on a juvenile male and adult female that frequent the Boston Common. The population of red-tailed hawks in urban and suburban locations has been increasing over the past decade.
“There’s certainly an abundance of food and an ability to use manmade structures for nests,’’ says Wayne Petersen, director of Audubon’s important bird area program. “It’s a nice example of a top-of-the-line predator that’s actually making it in Massachusetts.’’
Each lunchtime, Beattie goes to the roof, takes out binoculars, and searches for hawks. If he sees one, he grabs his camera and rushes outside. Once Beattie leaned out a fourth-floor window looking for the female with her babies in the nest below and the male hawk lurking above swooped down and hit Beattie’s head with his talons.
“It felt like a brick,’’ Beattie says.
Since the male died and his widow abandoned their nest, Beattie has adjusted his daily routine. When he arrives at Park Street, he looks at the church steeple, then walks a circuitous route through Boston Common, searching for a hawk or two to photograph. He looks at the arched windows of the building at the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, at the Civil War memorial on the common, at the ball field lights, at the State House dome. Once at work, he places the day’s photo on the easel.
Beattie misses the pair that tended the nest on the fire escape. “I still wish I knew what happened to that female,’’ he says. Beattie has seen the juvenile male from Boston Common poke around the abandoned nest and hopes he and a mate or another pair eventually move there.
“I really wish there [were] babies this year.’’
Correction: Because of an editing error, a caption on a Page One story in Saturday’s paper incorrectly described the view John Beattie had as he looked for hawks. He was overlooking the Granary burial ground. 