The Birds

One of the things that happens when your regional paper is also a newspaper of global reknown is the curious oddity that your local trifles get broadcast and amplified to the world at large. It's not as if this is on the level of a police report, although it's still pretty entertaining to read the editorial's heart-wrenching homage to hawks. I've added bold type to the good parts:

There is no historic preservation district or landmarks commission for hawks' nests. But if there were, the red-tailed hawk's nest at 927 Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park at 74th Street, would surely have qualified. Until Tuesday, the nest stood on a 12th-floor cornice with a sublime aerial view of the urban forest in our midst. Since 1993, 23 young hawks have been raised there, sired by a bird called Pale Male. Thousands and thousands of bird-watchers over the years have followed the lives of the hawks in that nest. But this is not an homage to bird-watching - it's an homage to birds.

Aside from being an entertaining read, this editorial is actually quite remarkable, for several reasons. For one, it contains a kind of overwhelming amount of detail, suggesting that someone has been closely observing the nest like on a daily basis for over 10 years. Second, the author of the editorial has, apparently without irony, penned a name on one of the birds. I mean it's either that or the bird named himself. Or the flock named him, and pasted a name-tag on him. Third - most important of all! - a hawk's nest is getting a full editorial! Don't underestimate the editorial as a mere runoff for the cesspool of overly sentimental and trivial humans... This one makes a few strong observations, we can't deny that:

Perhaps residents were annoyed that the hawks didn't do a better job of cleaning up after themselves by using a pooper-scooper or putting their pigeon bones in the trash, the way a human would. Perhaps they simply wearied of the stirring sight of a red-tailed hawk coming down out of the sky to settle on its nest.

I'm not sure what mix of irony and hoakiness is the appropriate mix for interpreting that passage. Although I'm thinking maybe the authors were being serious?

The hawks have gone out of their way to learn to live with us.

I wouldn't have given them so much credit. I would have thought, maybe I'm wrong, that the hawks didn't notice anyone at all - because they're hawks!