by Marie Winn (Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. 1998)
In the 1990s, or maybe in the 1980s, a distinctive-looking young male red-tailed hawk was seen by birdwatchers in New York’s Central Park. Although too young to breed, he wooed and won a female. They built a nest and tried to raise a family, but were unsuccessful. Then both hawks were injured, and as a consequence the male (nicknamed Pale Male because of his subdued coloring) was without a mate. The following year, he returned with a new mate. Breeding failed again. Finally, the third year, with a little help from the birdwatchers, Pale Male and his mate succeeded in raising three healthy chicks; then tragedy strikes when the female is killed by a car. Pale Male finds another mate. . . . or wait a minute–can it be? His First Love come back to him? Sadly, this mate too dies when she ingests a poisoned pigeon. Undaunted, Pale Male takes up with a third female, “Blue”. That’s as far as the book goes, but his serial relationships over many years are documented in this Wikipedia article.
Marie Winn is one of those Central Park birdwatchers, as well as a writer. She tells the story of the hawks, the other birds and wildlife in the Park, and the people who make it their business to observe, advocate for, feed, and protect them. It’s an enchanting story, complete with hawk romance, loss, and parenting, as well as vignettes of the brother-and-sisterhood of bird lovers that forms around the hawks. These human park visitors take care of one another and learn from one another. To read this book was like breathing fresh air after being down in a coal mine reading about Donald Trump, racism, and artificial intelligence making human beings obsolete. If those hawks could raise a family in the middle of New York City, perhaps we can take our country back from the clutches of this president and his goon squad.
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