S5E3 - Pale Male

Virginia Thomas tells us about a red-tailed hawk named Pale Male who sparked controversy and admiration when he built his nest on a luxury Fifth Avenue apartment building in New York City. Pale Male is a celebrity whose story illuminates questions about animal habitat rights in urban environments.

Recorded: 12 October 2023 

 Featured: 

• Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat by Hal Herzog.
• S6E3: Moral Imagination and Habitat Rights with Steve Cooke on The Animal Turn.
• The Legend of Pale Male, a documentary.
• Pale Male: Citizen Hawk of New York City by Janet Schulman.
• The Tale of Male by Jeanette Winter.
• Recognizing Pale Male by Virginia Thomas.

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects, Legend of Pale Male Trailer
• Learn more about the team here. 

Support the podcast via: 

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Animals and Politics

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

This is another iRaw podcast. We podcast to make the world a better place for animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 0:16

Welcome back to season five of the Animal Highlights, where we're focused on animals and politics. All the content from this season has been extracted from season six of the Animal Turn podcast, which is a season of the same name Animals and Politics. This season, my co-host will be Virginia Thomas, who's an environmental social scientist. She was previously also a research fellow with the Wellcome Trust-funded project from Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals. In this episode, we speak about Pale Male, a specific hawk in New York City who became famous after controversy erupted around his setting up a nest. Hi, Virginia, welcome back to the Animal Highlight. Hi, good to be back here. Thank you. I know that you've got a really interesting animal for us to speak about today, so I'm looking forward to jumping into it.

Virginia Thomas: 1:08

I really enjoyed writing this one, or thinking about this one. It's a red-tailed hawk called Pale Male, and I found out about it actually from reading Hal Herzog's book Some we Love, some we Hate. I've probably got those in the wrong order, but that's what we're talking about, so I shall get started. In this episode of the Animal Turn, steve Cook was saying that people should recognise animals as individuals worthy of concern for their own sake. This is important to upholding their rights rather than simply thinking of them as members of groups or species worthy of concern. When we recognise animals as individual beings who matter for their own sake, we recognise that they can and indeed should have rights, including habitat rights. Your conversation with Steve got me thinking about a Red Tails walk in New York City known as Pale Male. Pale Male has an interesting story. He was recognised in the city as an individual worthy of concern and who had acclaimed his urban space.

Virginia Thomas: 2:12

Before telling you about pale male, let me tell you a little bit about red-tailed hawks. Red-tailed hawks are one of the largest and commonest birds of prey in north america. They're somewhere between the size of a crow and a goose, weighing between one and one and a half kilograms and with a wingspan of over a metre. They have a really distinctive, long, rasping cork, and films often mistakenly use this when they're showing bald eagles. Red-tailed hawks are generalists and opportunists and this makes them capable of adapting to almost any habitat, which is why these egg-peck predators can thrive in urban settings. Pail Mail did exactly that in New York City.

Virginia Thomas: 2:54

Pail Mail, so named for his light colouring, was first seen as a young hawk in Central Park in 1991, and he went about setting up a nest on the ledge of a fancy apartment building that bordered the park.

Virginia Thomas: 3:07

His distinctive colouring and his choice of nest site made him easily recognisable to the human inhabitants of the city. Interest in pale males started with the bird enthusiasts who watched him, the other red-tailed hawks and the other birds in and near Central Park. But because of the unusual location of his nest, interest in pale males spread beyond dedicated bird watchers and other people in the city started to pay attention to him, taking interest in him as an individual, as pale male, not as a red-tailed hawk. We don't often practice this kind of individualisation with wild or liminal animals. People might have thought of pale male as just another one of the red-tailed hawks and other birds who live in Central Park, or they might just have thought of him as a red-tailed hawk more generally, but they didn't. They thought of him as pale male. And pale male became something of a celebrity. He was the subject of hundreds of newspaper articles, three books and an award-winning documentary called the Legend of Pale Mail.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 4:09

Pale Mail. He has become the most famous hawk in the world.

Virginia Thomas: 4:13

A lot of this interest was because of where Pale Mail had built his nest. It wasn't just that he'd built his nest on an apartment building rather than in a tree in Central Park. The apartment building he'd chosen was on the Upper East Side some of New York's most expensive real estate and the building, like many others, was covered in anti-bird spikes, which were intended to stop birds roosting and nesting on them. As Pailnail proved, this kind of hostile architecture doesn't necessarily work. In fact, other birds have even started building their nests from anti-bird spikes. At first, people left Pale Male's nest alone, but in 2004, it and the anti-bird spikes which had accommodated rather than deterred it, were removed.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 4:59

Pale Male, the Fifth Avenue hawk, lost his home today when the clawboard of his building destroyed his nest.

Virginia Thomas: 5:07

The Haas workers. People had recognised pale male as an individual. They were intensely concerned for his welfare. Residents of the building and Newgau Hill kids generally rallied in protest at the removal, calling it heartless and demanding that the nest be reinstated.

Speaker 1: 5:22

I can't imagine what went through their minds. Certainly nothing went through their hearts.

Virginia Thomas: 5:33

We should look after him. He's American and this brings us really well to what Steve was saying in your conversation. Steve suggests that both humans and animals need to have their interests respected to live a good life, and if animals need habitats to live a good life, then they should have rights to those habitats. Pale male needed his nest to live a good life, to fulfil his potential to hatch and rear chicks. Red-tailed hawks like pale male use the same nest with the same partner for many years. Red-tailed hawks like pale male use the same nest with the same partner for many years. Red-tailed hawks have impressive courtship rituals, which involves the male flying high and then plummeting down to the female. Sometimes the pair of birds will lock talons in midair and spiral towards the ground before pulling up and then perching to preen each other. So when his nest was removed, pale male's ability or his right to raise chicks was violated and because we can think of his nest as his property, we could also say that his property rights had been violated. He had habitat rights and property rights, even if his habitat was somewhere different from what we might expect and even if his property was somewhat different from what we might expect.

Virginia Thomas: 6:45

In response to the protests and, rather ironically, the anti-bird spikes that him and Nit had enabled Perelmel to build his nest in the first place were reinstalled. He and his mate, lola quickly rebuilt their nets. Unfortunately, though, the pair were unsuccessful in hatching eggs. One theory is that the way the new nest was built around and among the new anti-bird spikes might have prevented the hawks from being able to turn their eggs during the incubation period, meaning that the chicks didn't grow to hatch. It's not certain that this was the case, but that's the theory, and some of the spikes were removed. Sadly, despite this, elmel and Lola never succeeded in hatching any eggs together after their original nest was removed. After Lola's death in 2010, however, pale Male found new mates and did successfully hatch chicks in the Rugal nest, fathering over 30 chicks during his lifetime.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 7:39

Pale male for Father's Day. Two babies have been sold in the nest.

Virginia Thomas: 7:45

When he died in 2023, pale male was thought to be 33. This is very old for a red-tailed hawk. The average lifespan of wild red-tailed hawks is six or seven, although others have been recorded as living into their late 20s. Over the course of his long life, Pale Mill captured the imagination of New Yorkers and made them think seriously about how humans can live alongside other species in cities. Most recent data suggests that there are about 15 pairs of red-tailed hawks nesting in Manhattan, and the population continues to grow.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 8:21

What do you think? Do you think pale male did live to be 33?

Virginia Thomas: 8:24

I know that this is a bone of some contention than one hawk who had the same distinctive colouring, who kept using also more than one hawk, were using the same nest and people just assumed it was the same hawk all along. I mean, I like to think it was one bird and I think that's what people like to think. We like to believe in this one bird coming to the same nest and living a really long time, and in this one bird coming to the same nest and living a really long time and forming a relationship with people, or people forming a relationship with it or him, rather.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 9:13

Yeah, but it is still, I think, important to. I mean, yeah, there's a tendency, I think, when we think about animals as these monolithic groups or as collectives, we kind of neglect the fact that there are individuals who experience very specific things. But yeah's interesting though, because I think somehow we're able to privilege the individual's experience while at the same time disavowing the collective. Do you know what I mean? So everyone's concerned with pale male, but what about all the other red-tailed hawks? Do you know if this kind of interest in pale male led to other kind of conservation efforts or anything in Manhattan? Was there any kind of direct link between his story and kind of more appreciation for birds of prey?

Virginia Thomas: 9:56

in the city With that. I'm not sure about Just pure speculation. It wouldn't surprise me because that is something that can happen when you raise awareness as an individual. It can lead to concern for the species as a whole. That's why, in conservation ambassador, animals are so important. There's the kākāpō in Aotearoa, new Zealand. It's a really endangered nocturnal flightless parrot and there's a bird called Sirocco who is at absolute dead loss with the conservation breeding program but he's such a cool bird that he's a really important ambassador for the species and people care so much. I mean, they care about the kākāpō generally, but Sirocco is such a cool bird that he really helps people care about the kakapo.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 10:49

Yeah, it's definitely interesting to think about. Anyway, that was really interesting. I didn't know about Pale Male before you started speaking about him, and I just know that New York has some of the highest. I think it's also peregrine falcons, one of the highest populations of peregrine falcons. Don't quote me on that and I say this far too often on the podcast, but I'm pretty certain. I saw a peregrine falcon up in Kingston actually while studying. I was sitting at my desk and all of a sudden I realized out of the corner of my eye something was there. And I look up and there's think peregrine falcons do exceedingly well in cities. A lot of birds of prey are finding a way right.

Virginia Thomas: 11:29

They do. This is the interesting thing. Our urban areas are actually providing really good niches for some raptors Like peregrines nest on cliffs often, so things like cathedrals and churches are basically man-made cliffs and full of pigeons who are also using them as as homes, so it's just really easy for the peregrine falcons to move in, have somewhere really good to live and a really good source of prey in the pigeons coral pigeons that's fascinating, all right.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 12:03

well, thank you so much, virginia for for joining me again on the Animal Highlight. Thank you, nice to see you. Thank you so much to Virginia Thomas for being an incredible co-host and to Rebecca Shen for her work on the logo and all the artwork done with the Animal Highlight. The show was edited and produced by myself. The show was edited and produced by myself.

Speaker 1: 12:44

This is the Animal Highlight with me, Claudia Hüttenfelder. For more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom. That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.