Book Description
Here is the incredible true story of a Red-tailed Hawk that makes himself at home in the most unlikely of places--atop a high-rise apartment building in New York City. Named Pale Male by his many fans, this majestic bird not only endures in this urban environment, he thrives. But when the residents have Pale Male's nest removed from their building, a historic battle--and triumph--ensues, uniting bird lovers everywhere.
With Jeanette Winter's beloved folk art-inspired illustrations and soulful insight into the spirit of this beautiful hawk, this is a book that will delight nature enthusiasts of all ages.
Includes an author's note.
Customer Reviews:
High-flying fun.......2007-04-24
"The Tale of Pale Male" is a gussied-up true story for the Picture Book set. Remember Pale Male--a Red-tailed hawk--and his Fifth Avenue perch? (Mary Tyler Moore lives in his building.) Remember how Pale Male brought his gal pal Lola to his favorite spot and they built a nest? Remember the birdwatchers down below and the momentous birth of two "hungry chicks"?
Pale Male and Lola set off a media storm when they build their huge nest and begin circling the skies of Manhattan. People lined the street to watch the birds fly and the chicks hatch. Winter chronicles their story and their abrupt eviction from 927 Fifth Avenue when downstairs neighbors complain of the "evidence of Lola's meals" falling on "to the balcony below." (Note: Winter includes only bones, leaves, and twigs in this "evidence.") Media and public outrage follow culminating in the restoration of Pale Male's home.
Winter successfully combines two stories in "The Tale of Pale Male." On the one hand it's the story of people standing up for nature even in the heart of Manhattan. On the other hand, it's a nature story--we learn how Red-tail hawks build nests, what they eat, and how they live.
Winter's pallette of grays, purples, and teals beautifully suits Pale Male's city life, especially when contrasted with the opening pages illustrated in the greens, blues and browns of a Red-tailed hawk's life in nature. An "author's note" at the end of the book gives us the straight story.
"The Tale of Pale Male" is best suited for readers ages four to eight. School-aged children in kindergarten through second grade will especially like "The Tale of Pale Male" at story time. Its dual story line will appeal to city slickers and nature lovers alike.
Amazon.com
The literature of bird watching is full of memoirs set in out-of-the-way, rural locales, but few are set in the heart of big cities such as New York, where Wall Street Journal ornithology columnist Marie Winn hangs her hat. In this delightful account, Winn tells of birding in Central Park with an unlikely band of fellow enthusiasts (including Mary Tyler Moore and Woody Allen). Among her objects of study were a pair of increasingly uncommon wood thrushes who set up their nest in the park's Ramble, treating city dwellers to their "penetrating, flutelike, heart-stoppingly beautiful song: Ee-oh-lee, ee-oh-loo-ee-lee, ee-lay-loo," and a pair of red-tail hawks who courted, mated, and produced offspring, thus quickening the spirits of Manhattanites. Both urbanites and those inclined to country matters will enjoy Winn's gracefully written story of observation and discovery.
Book Description
Marie Winn is our guide into a secret world, a true wilderness in the heart of a city. The scene is New York's Central Park, but the rich natural history that emerges here--the loons, raccoons, woodpeckers, owls, and hundreds of visiting songbirds--will appeal to wildlife lovers everywhere. At its heart is the saga of the Fifth Avenue hawks, which begins as a love story and develops into a full-fledged mystery.
At the outset of our journey we meet the Regulars, a small band of nature lovers who devote themselves to the park and its wildlife. As they watch Pale Male, a remarkable young red-tailed hawk, woo and win his first mate, they are soon transformed into addicted hawk-watchers. From a bench at the park's model-boat pond they observe the hawks building a nest in an astonishing spot--a high ledge of a Fifth Avenue building three floors above Mary Tyler Moore's apartment and across the street from Woody Allen's.
The drama of the Fifth Avenue hawks--hunting, courting, mating, and striving against great odds to raise a family in their unprecedented nest site--is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking. Red-Tails in Love will delight and inspire readers for years to come.
Customer Reviews:
wonderful story.......2007-02-12
I live in Portland Oregon, and have large populations of birds in my back yard, so this was a fun read. Perhaps i will visit NYC someday, and i will bring my glasses! What a nice book!
Birding in central Park.......2007-01-06
Although the star of this book is Pale Male, there are also wonderful stories of encounters with other birds. Marie Winn is a good writer and this is a very entertaining book for anyone interested in Pale Male or birding in Central Park.
SHOULD BE RE-NAMED.......2006-11-10
I was hoping for a more in depth article on Pale Male. This book had a more general theme to it pertaining to all the birds/wildlife in the park. It was okay, I am glad I didn't buy it, a friend let me read hers. I absolutely love, and purchased after watching it, Pale Male, the video produced by Nature, narrated by Joane Woodward.
Repeated Enjoyment.......2005-11-10
Every year goes by and this simple tale becomes more treasured and heartwarming. I have given dozens of copies of this book to friends, birders and non interested alike. Everyone is grateful for the inspiration that this unusual piece of nature brings.
We watch eagles return to a nest along a stretch of the Llano River that falls in line with a highly traveled highway and the human reaction is just the same as the thousands of New Yorkers. Scores and scores of strangers with craned necks and binoculars in raised and ready position, standing in the back of their truck beds only to get a little closer to the marvel of the eagles on the the back side of our very own ranch and river.
From fall to spring each year my weekend exploration includes a trip to see the eagles and I am always thinking through whom else I could share Red Tails In Love with...it is not hard.
Purchased this book in protest against Pale Male's eviction.......2004-12-16
As a New Yorker, I hadn't really paid much attention to Pale Male before this unfortunate state of affairs. There was something shockingly callous and arrogant in the way the board of 927 Fifth Avenue destroyed this magnificent bird's home. I hope the hawks will eventually get their nest back.
I would like to find out more about this star's history and family. My whole family is now crazy about him and Lola.
Hail Pale Male!
Customer Reviews:
Exquisite.......2007-08-17
There is no one that does it better than Floyd. I use his books as reference because of the accuracy in descriptions and fantastic photography.
Book Description
A Falconer's Guide to Training the Passage Red-tailed Hawk. A book for apprentice falconers wanting to know the basics of becoming a falconer. Shows a step-by-step approach to training your first wild caught hawk.
Customer Reviews:
Soar With the Falcons.......2006-12-31
There are fewer things more beautiful than a falcon in flight. This beautiful, majestic bird is the epitome of grace and speed.
This book is a good beginner's guide to catching, training and working with falcons and enjoying the world through their very keen and penetrating eyes.
Book Description
120 color photos throughout 1 map, 7 x 9
Praise for Stackpole's Wild Bird Guides
"Irresistible to bird-watchers and nature lovers."-Booklist
"Anyone who is interested in going beyond compilation of life lists will appreciate the details."-Scott M. Ramsay, Ibis
The Red-tailed Hawk is one of America's most familiar and best-loved birds of prey. Its watchful presence, effortless flight, and piercing cry make it a conspicuous resident of eastern forests, southern wetlands, western deserts, and northern mountains. This latest addition to the Wild Bird Guides series describes in detail how the red-tail soars, swoops, and seizes its prey; how it communicates and defends it territory; how it nests and raises its young; and how it copes with the environmental dangers that threaten its existence-all illustrated with brilliant full-color images from the country's top wildlife photographers. Charles R. Preston served as curator of ornithology at the Denver Museum of Natural History and wrote the Red-tailed Hawk account for the Birds of North America series. He lives in Wapiti, Wyoming.
Customer Reviews:
Great book for specific species information........2000-03-12
This book is an excellent overview of the Red-tailed Hawk, giving the already experienced raptor-watcher and fledgling birdwatcher alike a very thorough description of this Hawk's lifestyle. Recommended. Some of the photographs seemed less than ideal for book publication, however.
Excellent book.......2000-02-01
Very informative and accessible. Detailed overview of the life-cycle and behavior of this magnificent bird. Lots of great pictures. Includes descriptions of places where you can see hundreds of hawks during their migratory season!
Book Description
With meticulous anatomical drawings and highly detailed illustrations in an impressive variety of poses, this guidebook reveals how artists can render re-creations of some of the most elusive aerial predators. From sharp talons and curved beaks to individual feather charts, this unique resource was compiled from photographs taken of numerous specimens of each species of bird. Additional chapters discuss the physiology and habits of the kestral, hawk, and falcon while extensive color charts with paint references guide artists in finishing their creations.
Customer Reviews:
Great Reference Book.......2007-09-09
Very concise book if you are looking for a good reference book. Drawings are well executed.
Illustrated Birds of Prey.......2007-06-17
I love this book, it has every thing you could think of for questions, that you could have!
Amazon.com
At home from Panama to the Arctic, red-tailed hawks are a common sight in the skies of North America. But because red-tails are understandably shy of humans, they are usually a distant sight, and few people get the opportunity to observe the raptors up close for more than a fleeting second.
Peri McQuay, a Canadian writer and naturalist, is one of those few. Called on to help raise a young red-tail that had been taken from the wild early and trained--but only partly--by a would-be falconer, she embarked upon what she clearly considers to be the adventure of a lifetime. Warned that Merak, the young bird, might have imprinted on humans and therefore likely could not fend for herself, McQuay spent the next several seasons encouraging Merak to find a home for herself in the world to which she belonged, probing the depths of raptor psychology in an attempt to help Merak learn to hunt, find a mate, and return to the wild state that was her birthright.
The experiment, as McQuay writes in this thoughtful memoir, had mixed results. Her portrait of Merak is sympathetic, affectionate, and full of surprises (among them the humorous revelation that a bird of prey and a cat can arrive at an accommodation, and even live in peace), if tinged with sorrow for what has become of so much of the wild. McQuay's affecting tale of "the gift of this pitiably damaged yet magnificent hawk" will inspire any student of wild birds. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
Illegally plucked from her nest when only a month old to be trained for falconry, Merak is two when finally released. She isn’t used to foraging for herself, however, and wanders into a nearby town. As Peri McQuay quickly learns, this human-imprinted hawk is not quite ready for the wild. As Merak’s caretakers, the McQuays try to coax the bird to independence. In journal form, Peri McQuay writes about her life with Merak, relating the hawk’s antics — chasing a garden hose that looks like a snake, rearing up to magnificent size to threaten a house cat — and her difficulties. McQuay becomes increasingly attached even as she hopes that Merak will become fully wild again. This unusual book about a little-known topic testifies to the powerful connections between humans and animals.
Customer Reviews:
A Future Classic of Nature Literature.......2001-10-24
The fact that Milkweed Press has wisely chosen to reprint Peri Phillips McQuay's A Wing in the Door: Adventures with a Red-Tail Hawk (originally published in Canada in 1993), bespeaks its enduring value, and I think helps ensure its survival into the future as a classic of nature literature. Like another great Canadian nature writer, Farley Mowat (Never Cry Wolf), Peri Mcquay explores the relation between human and wild with wisdom, intelligence, and spirit. McQuay adds to these qualities a remarkably poetic prose which deeply involves the reader in the inner experience of her story-- which is also the story of Merak the hawk, who becomes movingly real to us through the pages of this wonderful book. 'A Wing in the Door' is even more convincing and enriching because it includes not only the human-imprinted hawk and her caretakers who are attempting to help her live as close to the wild as possible, but much of the other wildlife surrounding them as well. The world of 'A Wing in the Door' is broad, rich, and varied, as well as exciting and deeply poetic. To quote from a moment in the book when the author is enjoying watching Merak in flight: 'To fly through the wings of a hawk is like flying through a kite, only far better." As a scholar and teacher of nature literature and editor of two books on naturalist John Burroughs, I find this book a treasure, one that I hope to use in the classroom.
Praise for A Wing in the Door.......2001-08-07
Toronto Globe and Mail, June 23, 2001: "In the style of Jane Goodall and other...animal behaviourists, there's a magnificent tenderness in these narratives--emphatically not to be confused with sentimentality....[A] rare and enlightened witness to the truth of non-human nature."
Washington Post Book World, April 22, 2001: "McQuay knows her land, knows its inhabitants, both plant and the animal, like a first language. Because of this she has written a compelling tale about wild places and wild and half-wild creatures and what it feels like to be around them that rings with authenticity."
Fine new Milkweed title........2001-08-02
This gentle, closely-observed, radiant work explores new territory in the genre of writing about animals. The red-tailed hawk, Merak, never gets more than a wing in the door, literally. She is neither reared nor rehabilitated in the McQuay house. She is brought to them Ñ on their 800 acre conservation area in Ontario Ñ by the local rehabilitator to be released back into the wild. It is only almost as the door to the cage is being opened that the McQuays find out that the hawk may be human imprinted, and thus Merak may be within the circle of their lives for the rest of her own. This book, like a crafted journal, tells the story of several years of Merak's life interwoven with the lives of the people who choose to feed her (mice and rats and muskrats) and look out after her. It is always the hawk who is the focus. Merak is neither wild nor domesticated, but lives in that space where more and more nonhuman creatures will be found, as human existence encroaches upon the natural states necessary for animals to be completely themselves. McQuay is all too aware of the losses that Merak must live with, and records them with the clarity and honesty available to someone who lives amidst such hard lessons.
Strong story compromised by some inaccuracies........2001-05-10
Take a strong premise-the observations and interactions of a human family with a partially tamed Red-tailed Hawk, evocative, often lyrical writing, add some anthropomorphism and a few factual errors, and you have A Wing in the Door. I really wanted to like this book more than I did. Like Marie Winn's Red-tails in Love, it covers a subject very near to my heart, humans and their relationship to birds of prey (I teach environmental education using non-releasable hawks, and one of the birds I use is a big female Red-tailed Hawk). The opportunity to interest a wider audience in the "personal" lives of these birds could be a valuable asset in promoting greater understanding of and appreciation for not just the subject species, but all wildlife and the environment in general. To do that effectively, anthropomorphism is a legitimate tool to make the birds seem more human and give them recognizable character traits to which the reader can relate. However, you shouldn't go too far. Too often, I thought, Ms. McQuay ascribed feelings, motivations, and premeditation to the bird's actions that I felt were a stretch. She addressed this issue in an opening note, explaining her use of anthropomorphism as a conscious, necessary antidote to the alternative worldview that we humans are somehow above other animals. I agree, in principal, up to a point, but felt that the author went too far in many cases, thus undermining the non-fiction objectivity of her narrative. In a similar vein, there were some inaccuracies, mainly having to do with aging and plumage characteristics. Early on, she discusses the bird's age when it came to her family, spring of the year following the year it hatched. The bird still has the brown and gray banded tail typical of an immature redtail, as it is coming up on its first molt. Yet, the bird is called a two year-old in the text (it is, in fact, just coming up on one year). I found this confusion about the bird's age as the years cycle throughout the narrative a bit distracting. The process of molting (shedding old feathers and growing in new ones) was often described as being uncomfortable for the bird, with allusions to ill-temper and bad behavior related to being thus indisposed. In my experience and from everything I have read, I have never seen reference to molt being a particularly discomforting process, any more than is the shedding of our hair. Out with the old, in with the new. Molt does change the bird's energetic requirements, but doesn't seem to actually cause them pain. These and similar problems with raptor biology aside, there is much to enjoy in A Wing in the Door. I welcome the effort to interest the general public in some of the fascinating details of the lives of raptorial birds. In the end, the author spins a pretty good tale about her experiences. For myself, I would have liked it better with a little more about the bird and a little less of the human.
Average customer rating:
- How to raise a young hawk
|
A Red-Tailed Hawk Named Bucket
Gaird Wallig
Manufacturer: Celestial Arts
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| Veterinary Medicine
| Medicine
| Subjects
| Books
Animal Husbandry
| Agricultural Sciences
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0890872767 |
Customer Reviews:
How to raise a young hawk.......2006-10-13
This book was written when raising raptors was still allowed in most states. Now you have to have permits to do so. But that is not the point of my comments here.
This is the story of Baku, a four-month old male Hawk who was supposedly rescued by a young boy and sold to the author who lived at that time in Oakland, CA with her husband and cockateel. She had no idea how to feed it or tend to it, but she taught herself, and even took off from work to give the bird its fullest attention.
Baku, or Bucket (for his pention for wanting to flop around in cold water in an ice bucket)also had an interesting personality and that is the driving power of this book. Wallig's writing style isn't very strong but her descriptions of this hawk's antics made this interesting reading, despite the juvenile title.
Baku was a protective, intelligent, comical and loyal bird for the four years he lived with the Walligs. But toward the last 20 pages it becomes clear his life in the city must come to an end and the story abruptly ends. (Don't worry, it's a happy ending)
Average customer rating:
|
City Hawk: The Story of Pale Male
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster/Paula Wiseman Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Nonfiction
| Birds
| Animals
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Family Life
| People & Places
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
Nonfiction
| City Life
| Where We Live
| People & Places
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
Nonfiction
| Environment
| Nature
| Science, Nature & How It Works
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Ages 4-8
| Children's Books
| Subjects
| Books
Similar Items:
-
The Tale of Pale Male: A True Story
ASIN: 141693359X |
Book Description
There's a hawk in the city!
New York City is known for its sky-scrapers, subways, and hustle and bustle -- not for its wildlife. So everyone is surprised when a red-tailed hawk is spotted flying over Fifth Avenue, and even more surprised when he decides to settle down on the ledge of one of the Big Apple's swankiest apartment buildings.
The hawk soon draws many admirers. They name him Pale Male and watch as he builds his nest, finds a mate, and teaches his little hawk babies to fly.
Based on the true story of Pale Male, City Hawk brings New York City's favorite hawk to life in a story of family, perseverance, and big-city living.
Books:
- The Taste of Innocence: A Cynster Novel (Cynster Novels)
- The Versatile Border Collie
- The Working American Bulldog
- There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
- Tom Kundig: Houses
- Vanishing Act
- Water Dog: Revolutionary Rapid Training Method
- Whale Done! : The Power of Positive Relationships
- Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales
- Winter's Gift
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose
- The Lord of the Rings Trilogy Gift Set
- Professional Development: The Dynamics of Success
- Nature and the Marketplace: Capturing The Value Of Ecosystem Services
- Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn
- The Red Badge of Courage
- The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals Including Hoofed Mammals, Carnivores, and
- STEPHEN KING - DARK TOWER SERIES -- 7 Titles By Stephen King - Unboxed Set -- DARK TOWER BOOKS
- MP Principles of Auditing w/ Internal Control/What is Sarbanes Oxley/PW
- Child of All Nations
The Police Cloud
What Elephant?
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Extreme Animals: The Toughest Creatures on Earth
Nature - Pale Male
