Sticks at the Beresford

Pale Male and Lola at the Beresford -Jan. 17, 2007
Photo http://www.palemale.com

Reader Nan Brodsky saw a photo on Lincoln's website and asked this question:

In photos of PM & Lola at the Beresford, there are branches showing. Do you think this was a former nest for someone or possibly a private stash for them to take to their 5th Avenue location?

I sent the question to John Blakeman. Here's his reply:

Marie,

About the small pile of sticks at the Beresford building perch. I'm certain that this was never intended by the pair to become a new nest site. As everyone has seen, Pale Male and Lola continue to favor the 927 nest site. It will be used once again this year (and we hope, successfully).

The Beresford sticks are merely incidental to the tendency of experienced red-tails to carry around sticks in the late fall and winter. As with so many other red-tail behaviors, this stick-carrying is ritualistic, not cerebral or decisive in any higher mammalian way. The birds were just going through the motions. They've already got a nest in place, and they may perceive that all is essentially well with it.

But because the pair is a fully functioning, experienced breeding pair, with no momentary concerns, they have a continuing, low-level, background impulse to attend to nesting matters. And no nesting activity is more elemental or basic than snapping off a twig or two and carrying it somewhere in the territory and parking it.

Actually, I've never seen any of this with my wild nesting red-tails in Ohio (but that might be because I simply don't spend any significant amount of time out in the cold winter landscape looking for my distant red-tail pairs---too little to be seen). I think the Beresford stick pile is just another manifestation of the ample and available prey in Central Park. Pale Male and Lola have food in abundance, even when it gets cold and snowy. Consequently, they've got a lot of free time on their hands, as might be discerned from Lincoln's photo of the pair sitting up there shoulder to shoulder. Do they look like they're worried about anything?

That's not real lubby-dubby love in any human sense. Red-tails don't have the brain parts to accomplish any of that. But this physical closeness happens only when the birds have no worries or concerns, when they can concentrate on both their nest and the incidental things happening out in the landscape. The stick pile, like the shoulder-rubbing mutual perching, indicate that things couldn't be better for our pair.

--John A. Blakeman