Red-tails in Love A Wildlife Drama in Central Park

Marie Winn is our guide into a secret world, a true wilderness in the heart of a city. The scene is New York's Central Park, but the rich natural history that emerges here--the loons, raccoons, woodpeckers, owls, and hundreds of visiting songbirds--will appeal to wildlife lovers everywhere. At its heart is the saga of the Fifth Avenue hawks, which begins as a love story and develops into a full-fledged mystery. At the outset of our journey we meet the Regulars, a small band of nature lovers who devote themselves to the park and its wildlife. As they watch Pale Male, a remarkable young red-tailed hawk, woo and win his first mate, they are soon transformed into addicted hawk-watchers. From a bench at the park's model-boat pond they observe the hawks building a nest in an astonishing spot--a high ledge of a Fifth Avenue building three floors above Mary Tyler Moore's apartment and across the street from Woody Allen's. The drama of the Fifth Avenue hawks--hunting, courting, mating, and striving against great odds to raise a family in their unprecedented nest site--is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking. "Red-Tails in Love" will delight and inspire readers for years to come.But love among the skyscrapers is a risky proposition. As the great birds of prey - one male, known as Pale Male because of his colouring, and two successive females, First Love and Chocolate - prepared for parenthood, the loyal watchers grew apprehensive ... with good reason, it turned out. The unfolding drama, chronicled by Marie Winn in this enchanting book, was to take some unexpected twists, developing into a magical tale of disappearance and mistaken identity. In telling it, the author draws us spellbound into the adventures not only of the hawks, but also of the park's other wildlife residents - water birds, owls, raccoons, orioles, woodpeckers - and of the birdwatchers, whom we come to know as the Regulars. In a tale as bewitching as Alice's, Central Park is the wonderland; its inhabitants, both human and avian, are the compelling cast of characters in this most charming story of romance, exhilaration, despair and obsession.