Last night we watched The Legend of Pale Male, a full-length film about my favorite New York celebrity. It's a very elegiac film by Belgian Frederic Lilien, both a lament for lost friends and a celebration of how a one-year old red-tailed hawk, a bird that hadn't been seen in Manhattan for ages, showed up in Manhattan in 1991 and sired a dynasty of red-tails in the city.
The first half of the film, which took sixteen years or so to assemble, seemed much like the earlier PBS Nature documentary I have, and it turns out that Lilien was heavily involved with that. HE chanced upon Pale Male in Central Park and began filming him and the bird watchers assembled in Central Park to keep an eye on the building at 74th Street and Fifth Avenue where Pale Male and his mate First Love had built a nest twelve storeys above the street. We see the children age, we meet Dr Fisher, who lives in the building next door and whose terrace provides Lilien a closer look at the birds. We see a clip of David Letterman's show in which Mary Tyler Moore talks about the hawks nesting outside her building. Then 9/11 occurs and the second half becomes darker: Dr Fisher dies at age 99, another photographer friend dies, children watching the hawks grow older, and in 2004, the building's co-op board destroys the nest, and the film studies the campaign to get the hawks back.
The tragedy is, they succeed and a beautiful platform to hold a nest is securely added to the building where the old one resided, and the hawks return to build a new nest, but Pale Male and his fourth mate Lola - First Love died from eating a poisoned pigeon, the next mate was hit by a car, the third vanished - mate and lay eggs but no more chicks hatch.
I do not know if Pale Male and Loloa ever succeeded in having a successful family since the film was released in 2009 and Pale Male lived fourteen more years, but hte film ends with red-tailed hawks, all believed to be Pale Male's children, nesting around the city and the boroughs.
