A BIRD lover, who will go nameless to protect the wealthy, told me of a weird encounter with his neighbor, CNN newsblonde and committed fowl-foe Paula Zahn.
“My friend was telling her, ‘You’re so lucky to live in the same building where those hawks live,’ ” the bird fancier said. Her reaction was not what he expected.
“She said, ‘Hawks? I don’t know about hawks,’ ” the man said. “I was aware there was a bird problem here.” And she walked off.
The man was perplexed. “I didn’t think that the people here would think of the hawks as a problem, rather than something to be happy about.”
But there it was yesterday in that clannish village with the massive net worth called Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
While the rest of the city mourned, residents of one spectacularly snooty co-op at 927 Fifth Ave. – where Zahn’s hubby is president of the co-op board – angrily defended their evil decision to evict a pair of undesirable tenants just before Christmas – the red-tailed hawks Pale Male and Lola.
Actually, residents of the building, toting Tiffany shopping bags and sporting well-pickled faces, scampered like rodents behind the blacked-out windows of chauffeur-driven cars – then left it to maids, drivers, nannies and assorted servants to do their talking.
From them, I learned the real reason the hawks had to go.
“It was the telescopes,” explained a meek, dark-skinned employee of the lily-white building – where a nine-room, eighth-floor apartment recently listed for $18.5 million, plus $10,460 in monthly maintenance fees.
The woman, who like all who defer to the anti-hawk forces begged me not to use her name, was talking about why her boss wanted to destroy the wild creatures’ nest. A nest that, for the last 11 years, saw the birth of 23 hawk chicks.
You see, the beloved hawks attracted the one thing the tenants dread more than off-the-rack suits: attention. These birds were superstars, and all sorts of people would gather in Central Park with long lenses, hoping for a peek.
Spokesmouths for the building claim the birds were ousted because their nest endangered the limestone façade of the structure.
That’s a lot of bird droppings.
“There were complaints” about telescopes. “They’ve been talking about [destroying the nest] for a long time,” a man who said he managed the building told me as he skedaddled out of the building.
Across the avenue and inside Central Park, bird fanciers watched Pale Male through telescopic lenses, as the homeless hawk circled his old nabe forlornly.
“I’ve been coming here from Astoria, two, three times a week just to see them,” said Nick Sabbaghi, 65. “When I hear what happened, I wanted to cry.”
Me too.
Enough. Bring the hawk nest back to 927 Fifth!
Evict the evil bird-haters.