There is a ritual that takes place in certain parts of Queens and Brooklyn most mornings. It is the primal dance of the urban traveller. It starts with the distant rumblings of an on-coming G-train and ends in a sweaty dash of a desperate commuter when they realise the train is only half as long as the platform.

I have danced this dance often. And while there is humiliation in the final lunge - wheezing in the face of a closed carriage door - there is strength in it too. For the G-line not only connects me to Queens and beyond; its idiosyncracies also connect me to other G-line travelers.

People identify with their subway lines in New York to a degree I have not seen in any other major city. You can buy T-shirts, mugs and shot glasses from the Mass Transit Authority that proudly display the letter or number of your favourite line. I have heard people pledge their love for the F, have at least one friend whose experience on the Q - which gives a stunning view of the skyline as it rumbles over the Manhattan bridge - has moved her to prose. And the A-train has a whole song dedicated to it.

"People do feel a particular sense of ownership over that line as opposed to others," says Randy Kennedy, who writes about the subway for the New York Times. "And different lines definitely have different characters."

So the F-train, which has a passive-agressive quality, is the one people love to hate; the N and the R, local trains which go through SoHo, are more quaint; and the L, where every carriage seems to have at least one person holding a guitar, should be renamed the S-express, it is so groovy.

As the only line that does not go through Manhattan, most New Yorkers don't even know the G-line exists. We like to think of ourselves as a mixture of bohemian, black, Polish and poor (although not necessarily all at the same time). But recently there has been something else to bind us together - our hatred of the V-line. When it opened a few years ago Kennedy described the V as standing for "very nice train that no one wants to ride." Its arrival meant something had to go, and that something was the G-line, which had its route almost cut in half. "There was no need for the V," says Mark Borino of the Save the G campaign (a coalition that unites everyone from Polish National Home to the North Brooklyn Green party), "but the G is the lifeline for entire communities."

After protests, the MTA resumed the line's full route on weekends and nights. This needed more trains and since there weren't any they made the existing trains shorter and ran them more frequently. Hence the dash, the wheeze and the lunge that unites G-travellers, the personal indignity that is the price for my common, commuter identity.

Up on 5th Avenue, carving amorous circles over Central Park, a love story is taking place that has New York captivated. Since 1991 a red-tailed hawk has made his home on the ornate window ledge of apartment block 927 on the corner of 74th Street, with spectacular views and a ready supply of food from the park to help him raise more than 20 chicks.

Pale Male, as he has become known, and his brood have become a constant feature of Uptown Manhattan's skyline. A tourist attraction and childhood distraction, the hawks are a local landmark. Doormen and hotdog sellers will guide you to them, birders will train their binoculars on them, and children will point at them noisily.

"When he brings food into the nest like a squirrel or a mouse he looks all around to make sure there are no enemies near and his family is safe," says Takamitsu Muroi, who is making a film about the park that will feature the hawks. "Seeing the whole process he goes through to protect them is so exciting."

First the star of a book, Red Tails in Love by Marie Winn, and with a film on the way, Pale Male is about the only media star in New York not raking in royalties.