Bird Lovers Chant For the Return Of Hawks’ Nest
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
With a mixture of anger and disappointment, bird lovers staged a second day’s vigil outside a luxury apartment house yesterday, hoping to restore a nest that was ripped from the building’s facade, evicting a pair of red-tailed hawks from their decade-old aerie 12 stories above Manhattan.
Between 50 and 70 people gathered across the street, holding lighted candles and chanting, “Shame on you, bring back the nest.”
“We hope to influence the building’s residents. We want the building to return the nest,” said E.J. McAdams, executive director of NYC Audubon, organizers of the vigil. He said his group had been flooded with protests.
Some 70 Audubon Society members and sympathizers also turned out on Wednesday to express their grievances and watch the dispossessed hawks, Pale Male and Lola, circling overhead, trying to figure out what had happened to their high-rise domicile. The birds were not seen yesterday.
Over the years, Pale Male – so named for his plumage – and a series of mates produced about two dozen chicks in the unusual urban nest, attracting thousands of fans and becoming world-famous through a book, “Red-Tails in Love,” television documentaries, and a Web site.
In a letter, NYC Audubon asked Mayor Bloomberg to “urge the return” of the nest from the company whose workers had taken it down on Tuesday. Mr. McAdams said the society also asked Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office to determine whether any state regulations had been violated.
Witnesses said construction workers had showed up unannounced, raised a scaffold, and stripped out the huge nest from the window ledge where it first appeared in 1993 and was rebuilt two years later. While redtailed hawks are protected under the federal Migratory Species Treaty, the law does not prohibit removal of an “inactive” nest – one containing no chicks, eggs, or nestlings, said a spokesmen for the Fish and Wildlife Service, Nicholas Throckmorton.
Pale Male and Lola produced three fledglings last June, and as recently as Sunday were making home improvements with new twigs, said Lincoln Karim, an engineer at Associated Press Television News who set up a Pale Male Web site and spends most of his free time recording their activities.
