12/11/04-TODAY'S FRONT PAGE ARTICLE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

No Fighting the Co-op Board, Even With Talons

December 11, 2004
By THOMAS J. LUECK and JENNIFER 8. LEE


They gathered on Oct. 19 for a ritual known to thousands of
New York co-op owners, the annual meeting. The board
president, Richard Cohen, and his wife, the newscaster
Paula Zahn, threw open their second-floor apartment
overlooking Central Park for the occasion. Quickly, the
discussion focused on a huge and untidy red-tailed hawk,
known famously as Pale Male, which had been nesting on the
building's facade for a decade.

The building, 927 Fifth Avenue, is among the city's most
sumptuous - apartments behind the neo-Italian renaissance
facade occupy entire floors, or two, and are worth well
over $10 million. The roughly 10 people at the meeting
included Robert A. Belfer, the founder of Belco Oil & Gas
and a former director of the Enron Corporation; Dr. Robert
Schwager, a plastic surgeon with offices on the ground
floor; and Dr. Robert Levine, a Manhattan cardiologist who
is married to Mary Tyler Moore.

Some shareholders had long complained about Pale Male and
his mate, Lola, whose nest of twigs and small branches had
grown to eight feet across a cornice outside the building's
12th floor.

The hawks were hardly hygienic, preying on pigeons and
rats, sometimes dropping bloody carcasses on the roof or
sidewalk. And bird watchers were constantly looking up with
their cameras and high-powered binoculars.

The nest, board members said, had to go. There would be no
vote among shareholders. Several people familiar with the
discussions said it was Mr. Cohen who had headed the
effort, even though his wife had once proclaimed her
affection for the birds on television.

The building's management company, Brown Harris Stevens
Property Management, had warned of a public backlash. "We
told Richard it would be extremely controversial," said
Noreen McKenna, a Brown Harris Stevens agent who serves as
secretary to the board.

The story of Pale Male, how he came to live at one of
Manhattan's most exclusive addresses and then was sent
away, is one of wealth and fame meeting nature and
instinct, of an obscure international treaty researched and
clarified, and of anger among those who live in an elegant
building where, Ms. Moore now says, relations have become
frosty.

Pale Male had adopted Central Park as his home and feeding
ground, had prospered for 11 years, siring 23 hawks, and no
one knows whether he will rebuild a nest and stay, or
simply fly away.

At the very least, his predicament serves as a reminder of
an immutable force, perhaps peculiar to New York City: the
power of a co-op board.

At the meeting, Dr. Levine stood up to object, but not on
his own behalf.

"Dr. Levine was vocal," recalled Dr. Schwager, who
described the Oct. 19 meeting. Neither he nor Dr. Levine is
on the board. "He said, 'I can tell you categorically that
Mary Tyler Moore is opposed to this.' "

Dr. Schwager joined in: "I said 'This will cause a major
commotion in New York if you do this.' "

Both doctors were right.

Since workers removed the nest
on Tuesday, dangling on a window-washing platform and
shoving Pale Male's carefully foraged twigs into garbage
bags, the building has been the focus of searing anger from
those around the city and nation who saw the hawk as an
emblem of raw nature and perseverance in a densely
populated urban setting. Bird lovers have camped outside,
held vigils and chanted in anger, occasionally joined by
Ms. Moore.

Both Pale Male and Lola have been observed circling their
cornice, and landing with bits of twigs and tree branches
in what appeared to experts on the ground as a futile
attempt to rebuild. Their nest-building may be stymied
because metal spikes that held their previous nest in place
have also been removed.

Mr. Cohen, a real estate developer, spoke publicly about
the matter for the first time yesterday and defended the
co-op, on the corner of East 74th Street. "Every year this
became more problematic," he said of the nest, calling the
decision the result of a consensus and flatly denying he
had railroaded it through.

He called the eviction a "last resort" and said that board
members believed the birds would thrive elsewhere, and
quickly. "It takes a week to 10 days to rebuild a nest.
Trees fall in nature. They lose nests. They are resilient
animals."

Also yesterday, Maureen Wren, a spokeswoman for the state
Department of Environmental Conservation, said the agency
was working with the New York City Audubon Society to
protect the hawks and determining whether any state laws
had been violated.

The Audubon Society said that the co-op board has agreed to
meet with it on Monday to discuss options. Possibilities
include replacement of the spikes on the ledge or the
construction of a platform elsewhere on the building's
exterior.

Last night, about 40 hawk supporters gathered in the rain
bearing photographs of the hawks and a placard that read
"Honk 4 Hawks." Ms. Moore, whose apartment is for sale for
$18.5 million, was skeptical about the prospects for an
amicable resolution. "These are not reversible type
people," she said of her fellow apartment owners. "They
just don't want the birds here."

Said Dr. Schwager, "This building is unbelievably
conservative and reserved. I think, should we all buy
lottery tickets, there is a better chance we would win."

The eviction of Pale Male was long in coming, and had been
tried once before. The hawk's longevity in his co-op nest
was due primarily to a federal environmental treaty, signed
by the United States, Canada, Russia, and other nations in
1918, that was intended to protect the habitats of several
species of migratory birds, including red-tailed hawks,
from poachers who sought birds for food or for their
feathers.

The treaty, administered by the federal Fish and Wildlife
Service, was invoked in 1993 when the board of 927 Fifth
Avenue removed Pale Male's nest for the first time. The
removal came only months after the hawk had built the nest
on his 12th-floor cornice, and his mate at the time had
tried unsuccessfully to hatch eggs.

Marie Winn, a bird watcher and author, whose 1998 book
about Pale Male and his offspring, "Red-Tails in Love,"
became the basis for a public television documentary, was
one of those who jumped to the hawks' defense in 1993.
"They put up a scaffolding and took the nest down in a
plastic bag," she said. "I got the workers to hand it over
to me. I put in my bicycle basket, and took it to a secret
place in the park."

Then, she said, she contacted officials of the Fish and
Wildlife Service, who concluded that removing the nest
violated the 1918 treaty.

The federal agency "put fear and trembling into their
hearts" at 927 Fifth Avenue, Ms. Winn said. Board members
at the co-op "promised to never remove it again, although
they have always wanted to," she said.

Their opportunity arrived in April 2003, when the federal
agency issued what it called a "clarification" to the
migratory bird treaty. Instead of a complete ban on the
removal or destruction of nests, it said the nests were
protected only when they were being used to hatch or raise
offspring.

The law "does not contain any prohibitions that applies to
the destruction of a migratory bird nest alone (without
birds or eggs)," said a memorandum spelling out the rule.

Federal officials said this week that the clarification was
intended to ensure that different species are treated
uniformly, and some of the birds, like robins, simply
abandon their nests after their chicks are raised.

On Dec. 9, 2003, Ms. McKenna submitted an application, with
photographs, to the Fish and Wildlife Service to remove
Pale Male's nest. "The nest has caused deterioration of the
building's canopy from bird droppings," she wrote. "In
addition, the hawks bring live prey to the nest where it is
killed and torn for feeding." She said the result was a
danger of contamination, Lyme disease and West Nile virus.

The application included a report by James E. McCosker, a
building engineer who inspected the building. He described
the nest as "massive," and said it posed a danger to
pedestrians because it was directly above the building's
entrance.

"This ain't a regular nest," Mr. McCosker said in an
interview. "How would you like to have a bird's nest 8 feet
long and 3 feet wide overhanging the edge of the building
by a foot?"

On April 30, Fish and Wildlife Service officials responding
in writing, saying that no permit was needed to remove the
nest.

"We had no knowledge that this was a famous pair of birds,"
said Diane Pence, the chief of the agency's division of
migratory birds for the northeastern states, in an
interview on Thursday.

"It was just an address in New York City to us," she said,
but added that the position of the agency would not have
been different if the nest was in a less prominent
location.

Then came the October meeting, and finally, on Tuesday,
workers came to take the nest down.

Lincoln Karim, a 43-year-old engineer who has been among
the most diligent bird watchers in tracking Pale Male and
his offspring (at the Web site www.palemale.com), said he
saw it happen at 2:30 p.m.

After workers hung a window-washing style rigging from the
roof of 927 Fifth Avenue, "I thought maybe they were
checking masonry." he said. "Then I saw they were taking
the nest down and putting it into garbage bags."

He added, "I thought, 'I'm going to climb up ropes. I'm
going to stop them.' But I looked up and saw the nest was
gone. It was just gone."

Other than Ms. Moore and Dr. Schwager, residents of the 11
apartments in the building have declined to be interviewed,
among them Bruce Wasserstein, the Wall Street deal maker,
and Ms. Zahn, who had referred to Pale Male in a 2001
segment of "The Edge with Paula Zahn," on Fox News Channel.
She was interviewing two naturalists, one of whom commented
on the problems associated with people feeding wild
animals, and Ms. Zahn seemed eager to offer a glimpse of
her personal life. "Well, guess what lives on my building,
you two, a red-tailed hawk," she said. "It eats rats and
pigeons on our block."

"I like the hawk," she said. "I am just not going to feed
it."

But these days Pale Male is a sore subject among the
residents of 927 Fifth Avenue. Mr. Cohen said Ms. Moore had
not even mentioned the hawk when they had a friendly
conversation at a recent party. She said she had been too
upset to talk about it. The topic is largely off-limits
when residents cross paths, she said. "We are playing the
game of the elephant in the middle of the living room."

Janon Fisher contributed reporting for this article.

Dawn Bailey
Eatonville, WA
mailto:dawnsdog at rainierconnect.com

"If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?"
- Thomas Lovell Beddoes