After six years in which Pale Male and his then-mate Lola produced eggs every
year, only to have to abandon them in early summer long after they
should have hatched, Pale Male suddenly switched to classic Red-tailed Hawk,
fathering behavior on Thursday. He brought captured Central Park prey
to his new mate, Ginger, at their fabled East Side penthouse on New
York's Fifth Avenue.
Ginger was seen early Thursday morning by Rik Davis, a photographer and
faithful Pale Male watcher. Davis said Ginger seemed suddenly excited,
standing on the edge of the high nest above morning rush hour traffic as
she kept poking her head down into the nest to attend to something.
Then, at about 4:40 p.m., Davis saw the signs he knew so well from the
successful Pale Male hatchings and fledgings he witnessed between the
mid-1990s and 2004: Pale Male turned up with some hapless small animal
just snatched from his rich larder, Central Park, placed it on the edge
of the nest and flew off.
Ginger immediately started tearing small pieces of flesh off it and
feeding them to something down in the nest, out of sight of Davis'
telescope down below on the edge of the model boat pond.
It could only mean one thing, said Davis. He immediately phoned this
reporter, who immediately coordinated with a camera crew in midtown
Manhattan and arrived at the happy scene in less than an hour.
This reporter looked through one of Davis' telescopes and saw this feeding behavior for himself.
Word was already spreading fast to Pale Male watchers on several
continents, including Belgian filmmaker Frederic Lilien, whose
documentary, "The Legend of Pale Male," has won a best-in-festival award
in Canada and opened to admiring reviews in New York and other American
cities.
Soon after we arrived, so did Marie Winn, whose bestselling book, "Red
Tails in Love," is still a perennial favorite. It has inspired at least
three children's books about the adaptable, innovative, young male
red-tailed hawk that turned up in New York's Central Park in 1991,
barely a yearling. The bird impressed ornithologists across the country
by becoming the first -- or at least one of the first -- red tails to
nest, not in a tree or on a cliff, but on a building.
Some building.
In December 2004, the board of the classy Fifth Avenue building, with
breathtaking -- and expensive -- views across the park, took down the
by-then-large nest of twigs and branches in which Pale Male and his
previous mates had raised many youngsters over the years.
Little did they know.
The uproar of complaint that followed immediately came by letter and
email from around the world, including from soldiers on duty in Iraq,
who expressed disbelief that the well-to-do landlords could be so cruel
to these birds who had so won the hearts and imaginations and sheer
delight of countless thousands at the bit of wilderness in their midst.
Apparently, people in the building had complained about the droppings,
including a few half-eaten animals that sometimes appeared in the bushes
near the front door. They also objected to all the people with
binoculars and telescopes at the model boat pond across the street who
looked up at their windows.
But Mary Tyler Moore, an occupant of the building, appeared among the
placard-carrying demonstrators out front. And soon, after negotiations
that, at times, seemed to rival the Paris peace talks, an agreement was
announced between the building and the local Audubon society to return
the nest and try to welcome back Pale Male and Lola.