Pale Male: Tributes pour in for celebrity red-tailed hawk

Pale Male on his perch overlooking Central Park

Tributes have poured in this week as New Yorkers say goodbye to Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk with a claim to being the city's original celebrity bird.

The Central Park luminary was pronounced dead on Tuesday night, more than 30 years after he first settled in Manhattan's ritzy Fifth Avenue.

The New York City Audubon non-profit said he had "brought joy to so many".

He "taught New Yorkers that you didn't need to go to a national park to watch nature", one wildlife chronicler wrote.

Pale Male has been the subject of an award-winning documentary, a television special, at least three books and hundreds of newspaper articles.

First arriving in Central Park in the early 1990s, the bird became well-known when he nested above a 12th floor window of the apartment building at 927 Fifth Avenue in 1993.

Birding enthusiasts with binoculars would flock regularly to New York's most well-known thoroughfare to gawk at Pale Male, named by the Wall Street Journal columnist Marie Winn for his whitish plume.

The carnivore shot to VIP status in 2004 when the apartment's co-op board tried to evict him and his mate because their droppings were ruining the building's canopy and raining down on the entranceway.

A furious outcry ensued, with protesters standing vigil for days and sitcom star Mary Tyler Moore, a long-term tenant, slamming the move on national television as "pointless and heartless". The nest was rebuilt.

Pale Male's eviction in 2004 drew days of protest

Much has been written since then about the iconic hawk, as well as the procession of partners he outlived, and offspring so numerous one naturalist described it to the New York Times as "Shakespearean levels of progeny".

"He lived at least 30 years in a challenging environment that NYC poses and there will never be another hawk as well known and loved as he was," wildlife rehabilitation expert Bobby Horvath wrote on Facebook.

Mr Horvath, who revealed the bird had died in his care, said blood results revealed "severe renal failure" that was "beyond treating or reversing".

"Hopefully it was simply age related issues and it was just his time after an amazing unmatchable lifespan," he said.

Bruce Yolton, an urban hawk photographer, wrote that Pale Male's "biggest legacy is that he taught New Yorkers, that despite man's efforts to control the landscape of the city, nature still thrives here and needs to be respected and nurtured".

"Pale Male inspired hundreds of New Yorker's to become conservationists, and to work to protect wildlife not only in rural areas, but in their own zip codes," he added.

But questions have been raised over whether the bird Mr Horvath cared for was in fact Pale Male, though his nest remains at 927 Fifth Avenue.

Red-tailed hawks have an average life span of about 20 years. Pale Male never wore an identification tag and, if the dead bird was really him, he was more than 32 years old.

In 2015, a blogger on 1000birds.com told fellow admirers to "acknowledge the inevitable: Pale Male is dead".

And Gabriel Willow, a naturalist who leads bird walks in Central Park, told the Times it "seems unlikely to me that the most famous red-tailed hawk of all time would also be the longest lived".

But, Mr Willow added, the bird had so firmly entrenched itself in the public imagination that "it doesn't matter if it was Pale Male or not at the end of the day".

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