Photo by Monte Costa

New York City Audubon recently led a high-profile campaign to restore a red-tailed hawk nest to a Fifth Avenue co-op building window ledge overlooking Central Park. The nest had been home to celebrity hawk couple Pale Male and Lola. The building's owners had removed the nest and the support spikes that had held it in place, provoking unprecedented public outrage from around the world.

What made the Pale Male and Lola story so important to so many? After all, redtails are relatively common in the United States and other countries. Plus it was just one nest; it wasn't as if someone had bulldozed a park or a wildlife refuge. Why did this story resonate so deeply with people everywhere?

Besides being excellent barometers of the health of our environment, birds have an amazing power to inspire people and motivate action. Early conservationists formed the first Audubon Chapters in the late 1800s to protect birds and their habitat. In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt launched the National Wildlife Refuge System, which focused on bird protection. In 1962, when Rachel Carson struggled to awaken the country to the looming threats posed by toxic pollution brought on by postwar industrialization, she chose the metaphor of the canary in a mine shaft, signaling danger. If bald eagles were about to go extinct, she asked, would people be next?

Carson's simple bird metaphor launched the modern environmental movement, which resulted in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the vast system of environmental health and safety regulations we all enjoy today. Since 1962 we continue to mark environmental progress by the recovery of a number of imperiled raptor species, including bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and ospreys.

Last year Audubon published the first annual State of the Birds report, a comprehensive study on trends in bird populations across the country. While bald eagles, peregrine falcons, and ospreys recover, some 28 percent of bird species are significantly declining. Just as in Carson's day, these declines signal problems that, in turn, set our conservation agenda.

Pale Male and Lola became a symbol of the environment for New Yorkers. They transformed the complicated issues we care about down to a human scale. More than almost any place in America, New York has been paved over, its nature pushed to the limits. Still, against all odds, Pale Male and Lola survived and prospered on this small window ledge—in public view. They were ambassadors for the wild, enriching our lives with daily lessons on raising a family in nature. Their unprovoked eviction became a rallying cry for all of us who want more nature in our lives, not less. After all, if we weren't able to protect this small space for one pair of hawks, how would we ever protect distant parks and refuges like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Klamath Basin, Long Island Sound, the Everglades, Delaware Bay, and the Mississippi River?

If you were inspired by Pale Male and Lola, and want to help Audubon protect places important to birds and other wildlife, please visit our website at audubon.org.