wybranie@dtrc.dt.navy.mil (Wybraniec) (03/15/91)
This is copied from the New York Times editorial page, Sunday, March 10. (No permissions or copyrights or anything like that.) "A Touch of the Wild Nature often behaves as if New York were just another wild place. This winter, for example, three red-tailed hawks have made a habitat along the Henry Hudson Parkway. They sit, hunched up, in trees between the road and the river, watching traffic. From time to time, they hunt river rats, which are easy pickings there because the rats always follow the same pathways along the banks. The red tails, though they range from the bridge to the boat basin, avoid the vacinity of Riverside Church, where a pair of peregrine falcons has settled in the tower. After a couple of skirmishes, the red tails prudently stay away from peregrine territory. It has been a good winter for city hawks. A few other red tails frequent Central Park, soaring on broad wings over the Arsenal, looking for mice and rats, and they scout to northern parts of the park for an occasional rabbit. Nine pairs of peregrines live around the city - on several bridges, the Pan Am Building, the Cornell Medical Center - in addition to the Riverside pair, known among some naturalists as the ecumenical peregrines. Some specimens of a smaller falcon, the kestrel, which lives in cavities, have found suitable homes in tall buildings. One couple has a home somewhere around Trump Tower. What sustains the hawks in the city is the abundance of food - rodents, pigeons, sparrows, starlings, all urban nuisances that multiply prodigiously. In preying on them, the hawks provide a measure of population control. Their balance-of-nature act is small scale in nature's grander schemes but, in fighting territorial wars for a piece of parkway and chasing doomed pigeons over cement sidewalks, the hawks bring a sense of something primal to the city's life."