Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll find out about a newborn in a closely watched nest of peregrine falcons in Lower Manhattan. We’ll also get details on a lawsuit accusing Coinbase and Gemini Titan of running illegal gambling operations with their online prediction platforms.
As birth announcements go, this one is short on details.
Is the newborn a boy or a girl? (Unclear.)
When, exactly, did it enter the world? (Don’t know that, either.)
Have the parents chosen a name? (Or that.)
But birders who have been watching a video feed from a certain nest in Lower Manhattan do know that the newborn is the first peregrine falcon to hatch there in several years.
“It was so unexpected,” said David Barrett, a birder who runs the Manhattan Bird Alert account on X. He posted about the birth on April 18, when he noticed the little bird on the Falcon Cam feed from the office building where the nest occupies a setback 14 stories up.
The little bird has already taken its first steps, or tried to, said Matthew Wills, an amateur birder from Brooklyn who said he had been alerted to the birth by a friend “who spends much more time watching” Falcon Cam than he does. The hatchling is still so young that it “totters and falls,” he said.
Barrett said he had seen at least one other egg when the mother stood up and stretched. And Scott Bridgwood, the vice president of operations for the company that owns the building, said he hoped that “we have more than one.”
He said this as he all but apologized for the somewhat fuzzy look of the video feed. “It’s unfortunate that the lens got dirty and we can’t get out there to clean it,” he said. “We don’t want to interfere with the birds.”
The cleaning of the camera — and the banding of the eyas (that’s what a baby falcon is called) — will be left to Christopher Nadareski, a research scientist with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. He said he would visit the nest in a couple of weeks, wearing protective gloves, a helmet and a jacket that “usually protects me from the talons going through, so my back doesn’t get all bloodied up.”
Peregrine falcons are listed as an endangered species in New York State after being all but wiped out by pesticide residue in the prey they captured and ate. But they have made a comeback: There are at least 35 pairs in the city, according to Nadareski. Peregrine falcons now nest on the George Washington Bridge and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, as well as the Municipal Building in Lower Manhattan, the MetLife Building in Midtown and Riverside Church in Morningside Heights.
“They are not a nest-building species — you’re not going to have them picking up sticks to build a nest,” he said. Nadareski has worked with building owners and managers to set up nests in many of the places they now call home, including 55 Water Street, the building with Falcon Cam.
Other peregrine falcons have occupied that nest over the years. A pair known as Jack and Jjaie debuted in 1999, when the first camera was installed. By 2008 Jack and Jjaie were gone, and the nest was taken over by a pair named Jasper and Jubilee. By 2019, a different pair known as Frank and Adele lived there.
But about the bird that hatched last week: Will it have a sibling?
“I’m guessing the other eggs will not hatch,” Barrett said. “If they did, it would have to be soon, and the odds seem to be against it.”
In 2024 and again last year, birders saw eggs in the nest but no hatchlings. Last year the female falcon stayed on the eggs for “well over two months,” Barrett said.
“It was almost too depressing to talk about,” Barrett said. “I gave up looking. It was just so sad that the mother falcon felt an instinctual need to stay on the eggs when they had gone past the date when the species gives up.” He said he had assumed that the falcon parents at 55 Water Street were “still healthy enough to hunt” but probably too old to produce offspring.
Wills said he did not know who these parents were — a new mate with a bird that had nested there before, perhaps, or possibly a new pair.
If the other eggs hatch, “that would be really exciting,” he said.
Then comes life in the big city. “For raptors, the number you usually hear is 1 out of 3 makes it to their first birthday,” he said. “It is tough, but New York is a great place for peregrines because there’s a lot of food — specifically, pigeons.”
Weather
Expect sunny skies and temperatures near 70. At night, temperatures will drop near 51.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“A.I. gives us places to go we haven’t gone.” — Brian Moynihan, the chief executive of Bank America, on opportunities presented by artificial intelligence, which has eliminated 1,000 jobs and boosted the bank’s profit.
The latest New York news
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“The Devil Wears Prada 2” premiere: At the starry premiere at Lincoln Center, fashion industry figures reflected on how much the 2006 film got right. “It might have been exaggerated a little bit, sensationalized a little bit, as to how cold and curt it could be,” Recho Omondi, the host of the fashion podcast “The Cutting Room Floor,” said. “But, also, maybe not that much.”
Coinbase and Gemini accused of running illegal gambling operations
“Gambling by another name is still gambling,” the New York attorney general, Letitia James, said as she accused two cryptocurrency giants of illegally running unlicensed gambling operations by expanding into online prediction markets.
Prediction markets “are just illegal gambling operations,” she said, because they allow users to bet on events as varied as sports, entertainment and politics. But she said that neither company — Coinbase or Gemini Titan — was licensed by the New York State Gaming Commission.
The lawsuits, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, also say that the two companies allow people as young as 18 to open accounts, even though the legal gambling age in New York is 21.
My colleague Hurubie Meko writes that James’s lawsuits against Coinbase and Gemini Titan touched on two prime issues for states: the rise of online gambling and the world of cryptocurrency.
For years, crypto has been promoted as a way to free money from government regulation and restraints. At the same time, many states have legalized online sports gambling and casino games in a race to collect billions of dollars in tax revenue.
James’s lawsuit accused the two companies of attempting “to avoid the legal and financial consequences” of New York’s gambling regulations. The lawsuit said that licensed casinos and mobile sports betting operations are taxed at a rate of approximately 51 percent of gross revenues.
Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer at Coinbase, said on X that “prediction markets are federally regulated national exchanges.” He added that “Coinbase will continue to fight for the federal oversight of these markets that Congress intended.” He said that the matter was proceeding in New York federal court. Gemini did not respond to requests for comment.
METROPOLITAN diary
Nice coat
Dear Diary:
It was freezing out, and I needed groceries. I grabbed the warmest thing in the closet, my boyfriend’s camel-hair coat.
I rode the elevator down in the Lower East Side building with another woman.
“I like your coat,” she said.
I thanked her and said that it belonged to my boyfriend.
“If you don’t keep the boyfriend,” she replied, “keep the coat.”
— Colleen Flynn
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Hannah Fidelman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post A Newborn Falcon Makes a Debut in a Nest 14 Stories High appeared first on New York Times.
