TikTok’s Falco tinnunculus: Getting to Know Urban Wildlife through Social Media

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Wildlife adapting to urban environments has increased encounters between people and wild animals. The rise of social media, especially short video platforms, has provided more possibilities for people to experience human–wildlife encounters in virtual forms. In this case study, by sharing the co-habitation of humans and kestrels, the video producer performs a harmonious human–wildlife relationship on social media and fosters an intimate “companionship” for audiences. We argue that the knowledge production of wildlife from social media is a dynamic process co-created by multiple actors’ mutual connection and action. We also articulate the relationship between humans and wildlife in urban contexts; knowledge production and perception of these animals in social media demonstrate the unequal and unbalanced power relation held by different species. ABSTRACT: Wildlife residing in cities has made encounters between humans and wild animals a common phenomenon. The perspective of the conflict-laden animal–human relationship has been over-emphasized by traditional media, which neglects the peaceful and harmonious daily encounters between residents and urban wildlife. This paper addresses the lacuna in extant literature by examining the virtual encounters between urban residents and wildlife on TikTok by sharing the living habits of Falco tinnunculus. Participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and text analysis were adopted to explore the knowledge production process of urban wildlife as well as the emotional response of audiences. We found that displaying urban wildlife in short videos is a dynamic process involving the mutual participation of wildlife and humans. Meanwhile, audiences’ anthropocentric gaze of wildlife via TikTok attends to their desires for intimacy with nature and demonstrates the unequal and unbalanced power between wild animals and humans. These findings suggest that more efforts should be made to guide the public to pay attention to native urban wildlife species and to reflect upon the ethics and rationality of such unequal power relations between wild animals and humans.