I made two visits to Fifth Avenue today. Once in the morning, where things seemed to be like they had for the last few weeks with both hawks escorting out intruders and making brief visits to the nest. But when I visited this evening, things had changed. Octavia clearly had started brooding. She was sitting tight on the nest for the first time this season!
American Woodcocks have been migrating through New York City this past week. I caught up with one on Saturday in the Ramble of Central Park. It was doing it’s best to stay hidden, which it did an excellent job of doing!
Hawk watchers at Fifth Avenue got to see many nest visits, watch Pale Male chase off a juvenile Red-tail and share food with Octavia over the last few days. We all are looking forward to the 2019 nesting season.
The hawks at 350 Central Park West seem all set of the season. The nest is in much better shape than last year and looks great. One of the hawks was on the church at 96th Street for twenty minutes. Then both hawks visited the nest and they then copulated while I was there in the early afternoon today. The building is excited to have them nesting and seems very protective of them which is great news.
I didn’t get much of a chance to watch Pale Male and Octavia that much this weekend. On Saturday, I caught both of them on the Carlyle Hotel. On Sunday, I found Pale Male in a tree by the Boathouse parking lot.
What I found strange this weekend was listening to multiple tour guides and folks claiming to be “locals” who seemed stuck in the 2004/2005 period. They gave lectures to tourists about Pale Male and Lola, talked about celebrities who haven’t lived on Fifth Avenue for years, asked if the nest was “new” because they knew the old one had been taken down, and other nonsense.
The entire time frame of the nest being taken down, including the protests, and the installation of the nest cradle lasted only a few weeks. That was over fourteen years ago. Folks, it’s time to put away your old copies of Marie Winn’s books and Frederic Lilien’s DVDs and catch up to the present! A lot has happened in fourteen years!
I visited the Washington Square Park nest in January and February, but my timing was bad each time and I only saw a few glimpses of the hawks. I had much better luck today with the female on One Fifth Avenue, with a fly-by by the male who had a rat. He shared it on the Student Center building and they both made a few visits to the nest. Then they both went east and I lost track of them over the Law School. Both they and the nest look great and I expect we’ll see eggs in a few weeks.
