New York City’s Upper East side may seem an unlikely spot for bird watching. But, several years ago, a pair of Red Tailed hawks raised their first set of chicks from a nest twelve stories high on a Fifth Avenue apartment building. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
Well, for awhile, everything seemed to be going fine on the high rise nest. But still, hawk watchers were nervous. How were these young hawks going to learn to fly from their precarious perch? Could they make it across the street to the safety of Central Park?
“We were very terrified. These beautiful great big birds with their feathers all in and ready to fly, now how were they going to take that first flight not onto another branch, but they’d have to cross busy Fifth Avenue with all its traffic and end up in a tree in Central Park.”
Marie Winn is the author of Red Tails In Love– A Wildlife Drama in Central Park.
“We had not understood how enterprising these Fifth Avenue hawks were going to be. What they did, these fledglings, was that they used the buildings on Fifth Avenue as they were trees. They simply hopped out of the nest and up to the roof of that building. And then they sat up there and yelled and screamed and begged to be fed. And then they hopped from the roof to an antennae or to an air conditioner a little bit below. And they became building branchers.”
Soon after these hawks learned to fly, they disappeared from the neighborhood. No one’s exactly sure where they went, although residents in an apartment complex downtown later reported seeing Red Tailed hawks, soaring between their buildings.
Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.