Olena Vakarenko lives in Poznyaky, a densely-populated residential district of Kyiv made up of high-rise apartment blocks.
Before that, Olena lived in the Teremky district, and got used to having Holosiivskyi Forest nearby – a full-fledged national park with centuries-old oaks right in the middle of the big city.
There’s a city park near her new home too, but it looks like an overgrown alleyway by comparison.
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Perhaps because of this lack of wildlife, a year earlier, she set up a vegetable garden – a box outside her window – to grow all sorts of greens.
What she did not expect to see in her garden one day was a pair of small falcons, who had made a little nest and laid three eggs in it.
“Only glass separates us from them,” Olena’s husband, Oleh Malchenko, wrote on Facebook in the spring of 2022. – “We have turned into voyeurists, because now, with our eyes wide open, we watch these beautiful birds: how they hatch, protect, feed, communicate with us and with each other; how she swears at her husband, and he, with a grin, is silent, and then grumbles something and goes off to catch a delicious mouse; how she gets wet in the rain and makes a funny sound and falls asleep in the sun.
It is not easy to see a falcon in Kyiv. You need to be familiar with birds’ habitats and, of course, have good eyesight. But if you learn the call of these birds, you may one day realise that they are soaring over your district. Perched upon the “man-made cliffs” that are the city’s buildings, they make their nests. But to hunt for mice, lizards and large insects, they fly away to nearby natural areas that have not yet been swallowed up by the city.
One of a pair of falcons that settled just outside the window of a 19th-floor apartment
PHOTO: OLEG MALCHENKO
Not far from Poznyaky, such natural areas still exist – in recent years, the area has been unofficially dubbed the Osokorky Ecopark, by activists seeking to have it granted official recognition as a protected area.
The story of the Osokorky Ecopark is a multifaceted one, of continual disputes between several different parties with differing interests. There are endless lawsuits over land ownership. Buyers who purchased land with promises of being able to build their own homes don’t want to be cheated out of that privilege at the last minute. And urban planners debate whether keeping the land undeveloped or not would be most beneficial…
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