WHY EAT THE RICH STILL SEEMS LIKE A PLAN

I sometimes wonder why the wealthy try so hard to be loathsome. For eleven years, Pale Male and his family of urbanized red-tailed hawks have nested on a ledge on the baroque facade of a Manhattan apartment building. (And for those who don’t know the geography of the Upper East Side, you have to be double-plus stinking rich to live at 927 Fifth.) They have been the delight of New Yorkers and even the subject of a fabulous and way cool PBS documentary, but now they are being evicted to an unknown fate by condo owners. The disgusting event was marked by an editorial in today’s NY Times.

"There is no historic preservation district or landmarks commission for hawks' nests. But if there were, the red-tailed hawk's nest at 927 Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park at 74th Street, would surely have qualified. Until Tuesday, the nest stood on a 12th-floor cornice with a sublime aerial view of the urban forest in our midst. Since 1993, 23 young hawks have been raised there, sired by a bird called Pale Male. Thousands and thousands of bird-watchers over the years have followed the lives of the hawks in that nest. But this is not an homage to bird-watching - it's an homage to birds. On Tuesday, workers took down the nest and, apparently, the metal anti-pigeon spikes that had helped hold it in place. So far, no one from 927 Fifth Avenue has spoken up to defend the co-op board's decision to remove the nest. Perhaps residents were annoyed that the hawks didn't do a better job of cleaning up after themselves by using a pooper-scooper or putting their pigeon bones in the trash, the way a human would. Perhaps they simply wearied of the stirring sight of a red-tailed hawk coming down out of the sky to settle on its nest."

The secret word is Oink.