Co-op President and Audubon Hold Meeting on Hawks
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The two red-tailed hawks who flew the coop after a Fifth Avenue co-op removed their nest last week may find a home there once again.
The president of the co-op board of the building at 927 Fifth Ave. and executives from the Audubon Society met yesterday to seek a compromise that would both address the safety concerns of building residents and allow Pale Male and Lola to rebuild their nest atop a window cornice on the building’s 12th floor.
“Everybody is focused on solving the problem,” said the executive director at New York City Audubon, E.J. McAdams.
The details of such a solution, however, have not yet been worked out.
People who attended the meeting said the building’s management company, Brown Harris Stevens, would come up with possible solutions, though no timetable was given.
“The ball is in the court of the building’s management company to come up with some recommendation that is going to work,” said the president of the National Audubon Society, John Flicker.
Mr. McAdams said the recommendation would then be subject to approval by the co-op’s five-member board.
The environmental group speaking for the birds and the legion of admirers who have come out to protest the nest’s removal rejected an earlier proposal to build a platform on the roof.
It seemed likely that Pale Male, who has roosted atop the ledge for more than a decade and sired as many as 26 chicks with his various mates, would also reject such a proposal. Red-tailed hawks generally build their nests on cliff ledges, rather than on plateaus. In recent days, Pale Male and his mate Lola were seen bringing twigs, poignantly, to the former site of their nest.
It was the co-op board that decided to remove the nest, despite protestations from some shareholders, including the actress Mary Tyler Moore and her husband, Robert Levine, who said removing the nest would cause an uproar. Dr. Levine expressed pleasure at yesterday’s developments.
“I feel very good about the fact that the wrong will be corrected and the board recognizes they have to help Pale Male thrive in this environment while answering their legitimate health and safety concerns,” he said.
The management company had directed the removal of the metal tines that kept pigeons from roosting on the cornice. The tines also gave the hawks a warp through which they could weave their nest.
The building’s co-op board decided to remove the metal tines, and the nest, citing concerns that the 8-foot-wide nest would fall. Residents had also grown tired of the occasional pigeon and rat bones that would appear on their sidewalk.
But other shareholders, such as Robert Schwager, a plastic surgeon who has his office on the building’s ground floor, preferred the carnivores to an overabundance of omnivore pigeons, many of which had begun to reclaim their perch on the building’s green canopy yesterday. He expressed a holistic view of the city’s peculiar ecosystem.
“In the overall picture, there is an abundance of pigeons and a deficiency of hawks,” Dr. Schwager said. Then he pointed to the frenzy of pigeons alighting on the building’s canopy and said: “Now it’s a free-for-all.”