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Washington Square Baby Hawks Start Their Possibly Short, Miserable Lives
By
Ben Yakas
Published May 6, 2011
Modified May 6, 2011
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By
Ben Yakas
Published May 6, 2011
Modified May 6, 2011
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So: sometime in late March (around March 24), some folks noticed that a red-tailed hawk had been tending three eggs, white with brown speckles, in a nest on the 12th-floor ledge outside the office of the president of NYU by Washington Square Park. So naturally, the Times went and set up a webcam of the action. Violet and her partner Bobby took turns watching over the eggs, which would take 32-36 days to hatch—suffice it to say, City Room was enthralled with the saga. On Tuesday, they wrote that it was too late for the little critters: "barring some kind of record-setting miracle, there will be no fuzzy ones in the nest this year." But they were wrong!
After that rollercoaster ride, at 8:30 a.m. this morning, one of the baby hawks was born! The NY Times got their Mother's Day Weekend miracle! According to hawk expert John Blakeman, it'll still take another 24 to 36 hours for the other two to hatch; then it will take four or five weeks before they start testing their wings. Of course, all of this is most likely moot, since there's a good chance they're going to die anyway, even if they aren't fed a piece of poison rat meat. According to Urban Hawks: "In general, 70% of all birds die in their first year of life. It's a hard fact of nature. Birds have a high mortality rate." Between the dogs, the rats, the poisons, and the NYU kids, the future doesn't seem to bode well for them.
You can watch the hawk cam here. Today the Times wrote in what must be a first for them: "Never have we been so ecstatic to be wrong." So enjoy the ecstasy hawk-lovers, because they may not be long for this world.
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city room
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red-tailed hawk
washington square park
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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