Hawk’s fire escape nest made New Yorker a bird aficionado
Michael Palma Mir’s first encounter with the hawk was not auspicious. Around the first of March, he noticed it outside his West Harlem apartment.
In his 57 years living there, Palma Mir had never seen anything like this beautiful bird, a killer. He grabbed his camera and stuck his head out the window for a better shot.
The next thing he knew, it was right there. “It was 3 feet away from me and coming in real fast,” he said. “All I saw were the talons coming right at my head.” He yanked his head back inside and slammed the window, never expecting to see the bird again.
He was wrong.
The hawk returned, again and again, turning Palma Mir’s fire escape — six stories above a nonbucolic corner of upper Broadway — into a nest and a soap opera for social media.
So became the saga of Billy and Lilly, two redtailed hawks that Palma Mir named after his parents.
New Yorkers, who pay a premium to live untouched by nature, have a soft spot for predatory birds. In 2004, when a schmancy Fifth Avenue co-op planned to remove a nest belonging to the redtailed hawks Pale Male and Lola, the birds became citywide
celebrities, outshining even their defenders, who included Mary Tyler Moore.
Bird mania has only increased during the pandemic, said Sunny Corrao, an unofficial urban wildlife expert at the city Parks Department. The department counted 35 red-tailed hawk nests last year, although there may have been more.
Palma Mir was not a bird person. But the appearance of a wild raptor, in the middle of the pandemic, was proof of life in a neighborhood that had had some of the city’s highest rates of infection and death.
A few days after his first sighting, he heard tapping outside the window and figured it was a contractor working on the building. But when he drew the curtains, he noticed parts
of the screen torn away and scattered on the fire escape. Sticks were piled in a heap. One time he looked out and saw the hawk returning to the nest with a stick.
Palma Mir did what any enterprising New Yorker would: He posted pictures on Instagram and Facebook, and he named the bird Billy. He also called the Parks Department for information, reaching Corrao.
She had some deflating news for him. A male redtailed hawk might build several nests, from which his mate chooses one.
But Billy kept working on the nest, shaping the mesh and twigs and newsprint into a bowl, and soon a second, bigger hawk joined him. Palma Mir named her for his mother, Lilly, who died three years ago.