When Miranda Grant first visited Wayne State University for an Open House, a yard sign for the university's resident Peregrine Falcons caught her eye. It told her to look up.

When she did, something clicked.

"Of course, that wasn't the deciding factor for me choosing Wayne State," she said, "but it definitely helped."

That moment turned out to be fitting for someone who has spent most of her life looking up. Now an urban studies and planning student with minors in environmental science and urban sustainability, Grant is the first-ever research and communications intern for the WSU Peregrine Falcon Project.

Growing up with a licensed falconer father, birds of prey were just part of everyday life for Grant. Some of her earliest memories are riding along back roads with him, scanning for juvenile Red-tailed hawks. "I've basically been conditioned to spot birds of prey in passing since I was 7," she said.

Grant's parents volunteered with the Michigan Hawking Club, which meant annual trips to Hawkfest at Lake Erie Metropark. By high school, she had moved from hanging around the booth to working alongside professionals in the trapping and banding blind, helping to bring migratory raptors before the public to talk about them.

"This brought out a passion for sharing all the amazing things about raptors that I grew up learning with others," she said.

That passion now has a platform. As the WSU Falcons' first intern, a position funded by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Grant is already helping to develop a new Peregrine Falcon exhibit at WSU's Von Berg Museum of Natural History. Using footage from Wayne State's two falcon cams, she also produces a weekly Instagram Reel series called Falcon Fact Fridays.

"I would have never seen myself making a weekly Instagram Reel series, doing the voiceover and editing myself," she said. "I am still learning, but I'm becoming more comfortable with it."
Science communication, she said, is the conduit connecting her background to her aspirations and life after Wayne State.

Peregrine Falcons are a natural subject for that mission. The birds, once nearly wiped out by the pesticide DDT, have staged a remarkable comeback in urban environments, trading cliff faces for building ledges and thriving in cities like Detroit.

"Instead of being pushed out by humans and urbanization, they adapted to nesting on man-made buildings," she said. "Maybe one of the biggest animal power plays in the history of urbanization."
After graduation, Grant plans to pursue a career designing and programming public green spaces in urban environments - work she sees as a natural extension of her internship.

"I think it is important to keep the natural world in mind when building spaces for humans," she said. "This type of observation and research can be very useful when further designing urban spaces to be safer for urban wildlife."

Her work, she hopes, will get people to see what is already above them.

"We have one of the coolest birds on the planet right here on campus, and a lot of people don't know about them," she said. "The first and most important step is just getting people to look up."