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As the 5th avenue co-op board nears an agreement to rebuild a home for Pale Male and his hawk family, it got some of our listeners wondering why the commoner birds don’t attract the same concern. Why are there rallies for these hawks while pigeons are given short shrift? Here are some opinions.

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I for one DO care about pigeons, and feed them, and it drives me crazy to hear people talking so badly against them. I don’t have time to list all the arguments in this email, but I would ask you to please just acknowledge that not everybody feels the way you and this person who wrote the article apparently do.
-JP

Pigeons are flying rodents. They breed in the space between my apartment building and the building next door. They crap all over the place, and that's a source of disease. Why the city doesn't go after them -- and their cousins, the crawling rodents, aka rats -- is beyond me.
-JS

I for one DO care about pigeons, and feed them, and it drives me crazy to hear people talking so badly against them. I don’t have time to list all the arguments in this email, but I would ask you to please just acknowledge that not everybody feels the way you and this person who wrote the article apparently do.
-JP

Pigeons are flying rodents. They breed in the space between my apartment building and the building next door. They crap all over the place, and that's a source of disease. Why the city doesn't go after them -- and their cousins, the crawling rodents, aka rats -- is beyond me.
Maybe what we need is an Adopt-A-Hawk program.
-JS

There are beings that for mysterious reasons are repellant and those that foster awe and fascination practically everyone I know is creeped out by roaches and waterbugs but
LOVE butterflies and ladybugs. And then there are those freaked out by snakes but find turtles "cute" and so on everyone finds pigeons annoying...but is inspired by hawks and eagles go figure
-EM

Regarding the "world famous" hawks, I have a few questions: what are the statistics about homeless families in New York City? Who speaks for the over 8,000 homeless families in NYC? What value do we as a society place on human lives? I am amazed at the hypocrisy and 'self-righteous outrage' these so-called bird-lovers are trying to prove. It reeks to high heavens.
-DE

I was at the hawk rally while Clyde Haberman was walking around asking his disingenuous question, particularly whether those gathered had been to homeless rallies. It presupposes that if you have an interest in one cause, be it environmental, political, avian, etc, you must therefore actively support all other causes. Let the homeless advocates, of which there are many, support causes for the homeless, and let naturalists and bird enthusiast support the causes that they know.
A quick search at Amazon.com shows that Haberman has contributed to a coffee-table book about Times Square. Why has he so blatangly ignored Trafalgar Square? Or Red Square? Has he ever written a book about the plight of the homeless in Times Square?
-R

Pigeons found in NYC are technically an invasive species. Red tailed hawks are indigenous.
-DW

What's always puzzled me is how Americans will loathe pigeons over here, then will travel to the large squares in various European cities and feed and take photographs of themselves with pigeons swarming all over them. Are European pigeons more cultured or what?
-JM

What annoys me about Haberman's column is that people who care about animal welfare are expected to be ideologically consistent and perfect, while those who do not care about animals -- or their fellow human beings, for that matter -- are totally off the hook.
-MM

are pigeons endangered? Isn’t it easy to help these hawks and much more complicated to help people?
-AS

It's a matter of quantity. The more you have of pigeons the less the value. There are no red hawks in Manhattan. If 2 of them land here, they're priceless.
-ES

Regarding the hawks and pigeons, reminds me of Nixon at the end of the Oliver Stone movie, looking up at the JFK painting and saying as if to Kennedy himself, I'm paraphrasing, 'they loved you because when they looked at you they saw what they wanted to be, when they looked at me they only saw who they are'. Nixon is the pigeon
-FD