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

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.