"Every day a cluster of hawk-watchers at a bench on the edge of the Model Boat Lake trains its telescopes and field glasses on the pediment above the 12th-story window of an apartment overlooking Central Park at 74th Street. There is no truth to the rumor, watchers say, that some of the field glasses are trained on the apartment of Woody Allen in the building next door."

"Naturalists have hung around Central Park since its creation but activity has never been so intense, as the 1997 Central Park Bird Register, a thick book of observations (including one written on the back of an income tax form), shows - a red-bellied woodpecker, female cowbird, and common loon at the Reservoir, a veery in the Conservatory Gardens, a mourning cloak near the Bridle Path, a tufted titmouse, nuthatches and the backside of a raccoon in Mugger's Woods, and so on. The hawks are referred to as the Fifth Avenue Red-tails, rather like the Carnegies or Vanderbilts."

"In a city so grittily self-obsessed, it is heartening to see a mix of cliff dwellers watching something other than their cellulite and troubled psyches and taking such reviving joy in it.

As Poet-O, whose real name is Isadore Block and who lives in a senior citizens' home, remarks in a poem in the Bird Register,

''Waking dreams ebb not from me.' "

June 1999 images (using a Canon A5 digital camera through a Nikon spotting scope) of red-tail hawk fledging sitting on nest overlooking Central Park at 74th Street - 47 days after hatching.  Shortly after this image was taken, this hawk took first flight.

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updated May 2000

all images copyright June 1999 by "Friends of Poet-O"  - all rights reserved by "Friends of Poet-O"