UPPER EAST SIDE — A red-tailed hawk that was rescued after crashing through a window on East 69th Street flew into a second window hours after it was released from the first, according to its rescuers.
Police first rescued the 2-year-old male hawk after it crashed and got stuck in a window of a residential building at 145 E. 69th St. about 12:30 p.m. on Monday, according to authorities.
The NYPD and the Animal Care Center managed to free the bird after 20 minutes, deemed it uninjured and released the hawk from the sidewalk outside of the building, police said.
But then, just a few hours later at about 4:30 p.m., the same hawk crashed into another window at 215 E. 68th St., this time falling to the ground outside, according to Bobby Horvath of Wildlife in Need of Rescue and Rehabilitation in Massapequa.
A resident of the building living on the 16th floor saw the bird fall down along the façade and land in a small garden area in front of the property and immediately called the rescue group, Horvath said.
Horvath, who was stuck in traffic at the time, called city park ranger Rob Mastrianni, who was off-duty that afternoon and was likely to arrive on scene sooner, he said.
The bird looked dazed from the impact and remained in the garden until Mastrianni arrived, he added.
"[The hawk] seemed a little shaken up, exhausted and had a small cut on the shoulder of its wing from going though that first window," Mastrianni said.
The park ranger placed the hawk in a box and handed him off to Horvath, who examined him once he arrived.
The bird had a small amount of blood on its left wing and some signs of head trauma, likely from when it crashed into the glass during the first incident, Horvath said.
"He probably wasn't 100 percent recovered from the original crash," he said. "There were no fractures, but he needed some time to recoup, rest and get some pain medication and food."
Horvath took the bird back to Massapequa for rehab, where he's resting and getting exercise in a large flight cage, according to Horvath.
The hawk still needs to "get his edge back" before he's released again, Horvath said, adding that he planned to return the bird back to the Upper East Side, somewhere in Central Park or near the East River.
Rehabbed hawks are usually released in the area they came from, Horvath said, because hawks tend to have a staked-out territory and want to stay there.
This red-tailed hawk had a bad day, but it's not uncommon for birds to fly into windows, according to Horvath.
The red-tailed hawk population is booming in the city and there are birds that live here permanently and those that migrate, according to Mastrianni. There are roughly 16 known pairs of these hawks living in Manhattan alone, he said.
Over the course of his 10 years as a park ranger and raptor specialist, Mastrianni has rescued numerous hawks, including one that flew into a New York University computer room two years ago and a fledgling that tried to fly into a Two Boots pizza in the East Village a year ago.
"Birds don’t perceive or comprehend glass and when the sun hits it, it looks like a mirror and may have looked like a tree or branch," Horvath said. "It's a miracle he survived."
