She was a sitcom sweetheart, a role model for an emerging generation of single career women, a fashion icon in white go-go boots and a pleated miniskirt. She turned the world on with her smile.

But in 2004, Mary Tyler Moore, who died on Wednesday, lent her star power to a cause close to home: the red-tailed hawks that nested on her luxury apartment building on Fifth Avenue.

The hawks, Pale Male and his mate Lola, were celebrities in their own right, drawing regular crowds of gawkers with binoculars.

Ms. Moore, then in her late 60s, would crane her neck to look up from her eighth-floor window at the sprawling aerie the hawks had constructed on a rounded neoclassical pediment adorned with cherubim — until the building’s co-op board had the nest removed because of the mess the hawks were creating down below.