Pale Mary -- or how not to be a journalist

Lola over Central Park - 11/13/06 --Photo by Lincoln Karim

A week ago Monday, 11/6/06, I received a call from a New York Times reporter. "Have you heard anything about Lola's accident?" he asked me . I was alarmed. After all, it was the New York Times calling. I asked him to tell me the details. He e-mailed me the following press release he had just received:

F O R I M M E D I A T E R E L E A S E
Contact Gary Kaskel,
United Action for Animals

PALE MARY IN THE HOSPITAL
Pale Mary, the falcon mate of Pale Male, is at the Animal Medical Center after collapsing in a Queens park on Monday.

The famous falcon couple living on Fifth Avenue got worldwide attention a couple years ago when the building tried to evict them. Residents of the tony coop included Mary Tyler Moore and newscaster Paula Zahn. The threatened eviction caused an onslaught of outrage and was eventually cancelled.

The birds now fly over Manhattan and Queens in a daily ritual observed by many admirers.

Animal rescuer Joe Mora was watching the birds from the Queens side of the park under the 59th Street bridge when he saw Pale Mary dive and eat a crow. Moments later the falcon became wobbly and lost flight, landing near the East River. Mora, knowing the identity of the famous falcon, rescued her from the ground and took the bird to Animal Medical Center in Manhattan where it is recuperating.

The bird's prognosis is unknown at this time.

-end-

Well, I felt a lot better after reading the release. The "falcon mate of Pale Male"? Only someone completely unknowledgable would call a red-tailed hawk a falcon. But that was the least of it. Everything else was wrong, What would Lola be doing in Queens? That's not part of the Fifth Ave.Hawks' territory.

And how in the world did any of the people who saw this accident identify the bird as Lola? Maybe Lincoln Karim, who watches Pale Male and Lola like a hawk, can always identify Lola, even ouside her territory, but I certainly can't. I easily identify her in context. If I see a dark-headed redtail in Central Park between, say 65th St. and 90th St. I assume it's Lola.

This is peak red-tailed hawk migration season. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of redtails are passing over the city, heading south. It is pretty ridiculous to assume that any single red-tailed hawk found in the area is a relative of Pale Male's. Pale Mary indeed!

The New York Times reporter was glad to hear that the story was unreliable and dropped it. I spoke to someone at NYC Audubon, who passed the info along to a reporter at the NY Post. But did they drop it? Not on your life. Though they could no longer claim it was Lola, somehow or other they forgot that there have been no offspring in the Fifth Avenue nest for the last two years, and they transmuted the fallen Queens bird into...Pale Male's Daughter.

Donna Browne [Palemaleirregulars.blogspot.com] posted the New York Post.article on her blog today. Read 'em and weep.

PALE MALE KIN IN ACCIDENT
By HEIDI SINGER

November 2, 2006 -- A year-old red-tailed hawk who is believed to be a daughter of Pale Male, the city's reigning raptor, is recovering from a flying accident.
The bird plummeted to the ground on Monday while flying near the 59th Street Bridge.
Joe Mora, an animal rescuer who was under the bridge watching a pair of red-tailed hawks, said that for some reason, the bird became wobbly when she dived to eat a crow and fell to the ground.
Mora took the hawk to the Animal Medical Center, where she was treated and released to the city's Animal Care and Control agency yesterday.