Blogoland

Why am I having flashbacks to that Simpsons episode in which Kent Brockman intones: "The Lincoln Squirrel has been assassinated! We'll stay with this story all night if we have to!"

As everyone in the New York metropolitan area knows by now, Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk immortalized in a 2002 movie of the same name, was evicted from a Fifth Avenue apartment perch. The Times ran not one, but two articles on the urgent matter, Boldface Names weighed in the only way it knows how (drunken inchoherence), and there was even a Rush-Limbaugh-special-wack-job editorial in today's paper, which included this nugget:

It's always tempting to think that a city like New York has utterly effaced the natural ground on which it was built. Most of the creatures that lived on Manhattan Island several centuries ago would stand no chance of doing so now - not in these new canyons of steel and glass. But the presence of a nesting pair of red-tailed hawks, sequestered on the edge of an apartment building, feels like a memory from a past this city has long since forgotten.

The hawks have gone out of their way to learn to live with us. The least the wealthy residents of 927 Fifth Avenue could have done was learn to live with the hawks.

Where's a good tree to hug when you need it?