Everyone who has lived in New York will have dealt with troublesome tenants at some point in their lives. But there can surely be no more peculiar subletters in town than buteo jamaicensis – known as red-tailed hawks – that have just been evicted from their perch on an Upper East Side apartment building inhabited by such celebrities as Mary Tyler Moore and the CNN anchor Paula Zahn. Our sentiments are with the owners of the apartment building and their property rights.

But what a tale of our times it is. The building’s owners insist that the nest, which was home to three families of birds and where some 25 of their young had been hatched, could have resulted in a collapse of some of the external structures: echoes here of the claim made by the Venetian authorities that the excrement of pigeons on St. Mark’s dangerously erodes the architectural heritage of that one-time great maritime republic. Here in New York the residents are up in arms, asserting that their much-loved avian neighbors are greatly missed.

What’s a landlord to do? They clearly are caught between the contemporary safety hysteria and the widespread solicitude for the welfare of animals so long as it’s rich persons’ property they are defiling. Fortunately, red-tailed hawks seem to take a wiser, more realistic approach to things than the activists claiming to be protesting on their behalf. They appear to have moved upscale to other co-ops (not coops) nearby. Let’s see whether they will be more welcoming. Meantime, who was it who said that rent control was a form of featherbedding Manhattan’s cosseted middle classes?