Updated: April
6th, 2019, 07:45 IST
Alpha
soars between the Kremlin’s golden domes, sowing panic among crows perched in
nearby trees. The goshawk is one of a dozen birds of prey protecting President
Vladimir Putin’s seat of power in Moscow.
Crows
congregate in the Tainitsky Garden inside the red-brick Kremlin walls, croaking
as they perch on trees and wheel in the sky.
But just
the sight of Alpha, a 20-year-old female goshawk with silver-gray feathers, and
her colleague Filya, an imposing eagle-owl, makes them scarper in a few
minutes.
“The aim
isn’t to get rid of all the crows but to scare them and get them to go away, so
that they don’t set up home here and build nests,” said 28-year-old Alexei
Vlasov, one of the camouflage-clad falconers of the Kremlin ornithological
service.
This
special unit, set up in 1984, has around a dozen birds, including goshawks and
a peregrine falcon. It is part of the Federal Guard Service.
The
raptor’s job is to protect the Kremlin, one of the oldest medieval fortresses
in Europe that has served as the seat of tsars, Soviet leaders and now Russian
presidents and is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Crows can
“transmit a whole number of illnesses that are potentially dangerous to human
health and damage the gold domes by scratching them and leaving droppings on
them,” said Vlasov as he held golden-eyed Alpha with a gauntleted hand.
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