A New York love story

Red Tails in Love, by Marie Winn, Bloomsbury, 307pp, £13.99 in UK

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New York's Central Park was planned as a metropolitan arcadia for the workers, a stage-set wilderness without the bears. In the ensuing century-and-a-half it has bred its own nocturnal predators, most of them human, but also a thriving and authentic wildlife community and a truly astonishing traffic in birds.

The park's first official bird census, in 1886, listed 121 species. By 1996 this had more than doubled, and the park had earned a place among America's great birdwatching locations, up there with Yosemite, Hawk Mountain and the Everglades. A green oasis on the coastal migratory flyway, it attracts a torrent of warblers in spring and autumn, and a gratifying swerve from a whole stream of flyover raptors, including goshawks, ospreys and bald and golden eagles.

The red-tailed hawks of Marie Winn's enlivening book did more than swerve, however. They actually nested on the 12th-floor ledge of an apartment house on Fifth Avenue and 74th Street, four storeys up from Mary Tyler Moore and right across the street from Woody Allen. When the watchers at the "hawk bench" in the park got bored with waiting for the chicks to hatch, they could swing their binoculars to watch Woody practising the clarinet or dallying on the terrace with SoonYi.

This weave of human and feathered affairs gives Ms Winn's book a most engaging flow. She is totally smitten with birdwatching and writes a column on the natural world for the Wall Street Journal. But she also loves New Yorkers, and is pleased to reinstate Central Park as a habitat for benign obsession. In her story, Muggers' Wood is where you look for the great horned owl.

She introduces us to the little band of Regulars, the confraternity of birdwatchers who follow nature through the seasons along the winding, wooded paths of The Ramble and note their observations in The Bird Register kept in the park cafe. Anyone can write there - not just the big guns who know it all, but the beginners who think they might just have seen a red-necked loon or a little blue heron, and sometimes actually have.

The diversity of birds in the park - a good day in May can offer more than a hundred species - is enough to make any Dublin birdwatcher despair of St Stephen's Green. Tanagers, grackles, grosbeaks, vireos, orioles, woodpeckers - the list is as exotic as a sketchbook by Audubon. Peregrines and kestrels are now regular city nesters, so the arrival of Buteo jamaicensis, the red-tailed hawk, once commonly shot by America's farmers as a chicken-killer, was perhaps a matter of time: New York's rats and pigeons are in plentiful supply.

It was the audacity of the nestsite that helped to turn the redtails' breeding adventures into such a dramatic "first" for the park and an anxiety-ridden saga for the watchers on the bench beside the model-boat pond. The stick-platform was built above an ornate window of one of those exclusive apartment blocks where nobody gets past the doorman. Each twig had been bitten off a living tree by dint of great effort: would the nest now be demolished as unsightly?

Yes, indeed, and it took a stiff letter from the US Fish and Wildlife Service to make sure the second nest survived. Such dramas, chronicled by Ms Winn in her Wall Street Journal column, guaranteed a gathering of crowds and TV cameras as the time for the first flight of the nestlings drew near. Their swoops into the park brought screams of relief from the humans, shrieks of alarm from the resident blue jays.

Red-tails in Love comes as a hardback that would just about squeeze into an anorak pocket. That fact may have more relevance in New York, but even here I would hugely recommend it to any category and competence of birdwatcher, and to anyone else who has wondered just what it is that turns us on.