By Leslie Albrecht
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
UPPER WEST SIDE —Millions of people tuned into the World Cup final Sunday afternoon, but for Riverside Park's hawk watchers, the real show played out in a nest tucked high in a tree just north of the 79th Street Boat Basin.
Followers of the park's resident hawk mates believe the birds have hatched a new set of young, months after losing three newborns. They're keeping eyes, binoculars and zoom lenses trained on the hawk nest in the hope of catching a glimpse of an eyass, or baby hawk.
When that moment comes, it will carry special meaning for those who follow the hawk family's ups and downs. In May, a wind storm knocked the hawks' nest to the ground, killing three hawk babies.
The deaths devastated the feathered family's followers, some of whom pause beneath the nest every day to watch the birds. Some were so upset they stopped visiting the hawk nest, said hawk watcher Billy Healey, 64, of the Upper West Side.
But Healey didn't. He told others to "be positive," and added that nature would take its course. It did.
A few days after the windstorm, Healey said he watched the hawk couple rebuild their nest. Then they got busy rebuilding their family.
Then the female, who Healey has dubbed Moreau after his granddaughter, disappeared from view, staying hunkered down in the nest for about a month. That's when many hawk watchers started to believe she was likely sitting on new eggs.
Several days ago, Healey saw another good sign. The female started standing up in the nest, off to one side. To Healey, that means her eggs have probably hatched.
But no one will know for sure until a baby hawk raises its head and peeks over the edge of the nest, which is about 30 feet off the ground. Healey thinks that will happen in the next five or six days.
He's been a hawk watcher for four years, ever since a hawk dove to snatch a rat and flew into him, scaring him so much he couldn't speak. Since then he's tracked the family's sometimes diffcult progress.
Healey said the hawks "hypnotize" him, and he finds himself unable to stop watching them. There's certainly enough to keep him engaged: the hawk hatchlings have to fight to survive in Manhattan, as one set of hawk hatchlings died after they ate rat poison and two other fledglings were killed last year when cars on the West Side Highway hit them.
"In the midst of all this human activity, there's this little drama going on," Healey said.
