Rediscovering Where I'm From

New York is an enjoyable city to walk in if you have comfortable shoes, keep an eye out for wheeled and human traffic and don't mind the babble around you of many different languages from people talking into their phones.

I was born in New York, specifically the borough of Brooklyn. To us, Manhattan was "the city." It is where you went to work. It is where you went to leave home and become independent. It is where you went to see a Broadway show or visit a museum or other attraction. Lately, it has become a place to occasionally find unusual birds.

House sparrow pair, Central Park (Margo D. Beller)

After many years working from home in New Jersey, I now work in Manhattan. Last time I was on the west side of midtown. Now I am on the east side, which has a completely different vibe.

I am rediscovering this city. As when I was a child taking the subway in from Brooklyn with my mother, I find myself looking up at the top of the very tall buildings to see the decorated parts you can't otherwise see from ground level.

One such day I was heading east toward the area of the United Nations. Before crossing the street I looked north along Lexington Ave. and up at a colorful skyscraper that was not a glass box or a so-called pencil building. A dark figure sat atop the tower. At first I thought it was a redtailed hawk, maybe the famous Pale Male or one of his many progeny. But later it occurred to me it could've just as easily been a peregrine falcon, a raptor I've seen atop many a skyscraper or bridge, using these man-made structures as its more usual cliff top.

Unfortunately, I had no binoculars with me to know for sure what I was seeing. However, any raptor would have an easy time picking off pigeons, squirrels or rats in some of the city's park areas, including that oasis of green in the midst of concrete, Central Park.

Past Central Park pond visitor - male wood duck (at top)
with mallards (Margo D. Beller)

One day I walked north on Fifth Ave. in midtown, relieved the holiday tourists finally went home. I had no particular place to go, just a desire to stretch my legs and get some air after being in the office in the morning. At noon, church bells rang from St. Patrick's and, up the block, St. Thomas. They were generally ignored but I stepped to the side and listened as the lunch-hour workers and visitors rushed past me, the high-end retailers and those trying to get a handout.

What does this have to do with birds, you might wonder.

I had not planned on visiting Central Park but it was such a nice day and I was so eager to rediscover this city of my birth that I continued up Fifth Ave. until the retailers gave way to expensive hotels and apartments and there was the park. The mood changed and the pace slowed. I looked in the trees and saw pigeons and starlings, two of the three most common birds seen in Manhattan along with house sparrows. I knew I was near the Pond at the park's southern end, so I walked over to see if anything unusual was around.

Pigeons, Central Park (Margo D. Beller)

In winters past one of my favorite ducks, the colorful wood duck, has been there, hanging with the usual mallards and Canada geese. One notable year, a Mandarin duck was at the Pond and became such a sensation people created a Twitter feed and a website about it. Mandarins are colorful and New Yorkers have always gone ga-ga over colorful celebrities in their midst.

However, during my visit there were no colorful creatures. There was a great blue heron watching for lunch from a branch low over the water at the edge of the Hallett Sanctuary, an area of the park kept locked except for small, restricted tours. In the water were a couple of American coots, black and white birds that might look like ducks but are actually related to more chicken-like birds such as rails, according to the Cornell Ornithology Lab. Although they will hang out in ponds with ducks, their feet are not webbed. Instead, according to Cornell, "each one of the coot’s long toes has broad lobes of skin that help it kick through the water. The broad lobes fold back each time the bird lifts its foot, so it doesn’t impede walking on dry land, though it supports the bird’s weight on mucky ground."

Central Park carriages, where a cardinal flew across. (Margo D. Beller)

It stunned me to find the coots, but I should not have been surprised. Central Park is known for the unusual birds that pass through on their way north or south, depending on the time of year. It would've been easy for me to just keep walking and looking for more interesting birds while ignoring the many people visiting the park and its attractions including the nearby zoo, or walk farther up Fifth Avenue and see if Pale Male is still around. 

Unfortunately, my lunch time away from work is limited so on that day I restricted myself, noting the mourning dove with the pigeons, the white-throated sparrows with the house sparrows and the calling male cardinal that flew over the line of horse-drawn carriages waiting for fares. 

The park isn't going anywhere and, for now, neither am I. I'll be back.

Feast or Famine, Owls in Central Park

I am writing on the fifth day of the fifth month in the fifth year of this decade and the fifteenth year of the new century. May is not known for heat but today it is expected to be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's summer weather.

It was a very cold winter, 2014-2015, and when winter finally eased its grip in April, with temperatures nearly seasonable or slightly above, it felt great. Then it would get cold again and I'd look at my bare garden beds and brown grass and wonder if spring would ever come, and with it the migrating birds.

Well, I worry no more.

First daffodil bouquet, 2015 (RE Berg-Andersson)

First, it got into the upper 60s and low 70s. My crocus, daffodils and grape hyacinths never looked so good. Every day I would come outside and find new signs that winter didn't kill off everything.

Then, for the last few days, it has felt like July, with warm and dry air. This was wonderful - winds from the south provide a tailwind for migrating birds heading north - until it got into the 80s. I am not a summer person. I do not rush for the shorts and flip-flops at the first sweat.

What I do is get my binoculars and start looking for birds. However, I am not finding them in the large numbers I usually would in early May.

I don't know why that is, exactly, but I have some guesses.

The same global warming-inspired atmospheric conditions that brought us much colder than normal temperatures for much of the winter delayed budding and bugs. Without plants and insects, birds won't stop to feed or breed. When the weather finally did warm, plants started to pop and insects started to swarm but the birds were miles away.

They made it north with great effort, flying at night when it is cooler and there are fewer predators, but in some cases strong southerly winds or a desire to make up for lost time caused these birds to overshoot my part of New Jersey. One day birds are reported in bulk in one area, the next they are gone or numbers are greatly reduced.

Black-throated green warbler (Margo D. Beller)

My backyard was a microcosm of that. I had at least one junco coming to my seed feeder. Juncos are winter birds and in my areas all the ones I see are males. They have to head north to claim territory for the female juncos, who winter farther south. I am still finding other winter birds on my morning walks, mainly white-throated sparrows and pine siskins. But I have yet to find warblers in great numbers - a northern parula here, a black-throated green there, a brief call of an ovenbird.

In short, feast or famine. We've had no rain since a massive storm that cut our rain deficit in half. So we have nothing, then a near-flood. The eastern U.S. gets too much rain, the west is in a continued drought. The temperature is either 20 degrees below the average or 20 degrees above. I can count on two hands the number of "normal" spring days we've had.

So I will blame climate change for this one and hope that somewhere along the line there is a cosmic re-balancing that will make spring feel like spring, summer take place in summer and winter cold that doesn't seem like forever.

Encounter With a Killer

In my search for this year's migrants birds I went to Central Park on May 2. Central Park is a huge urban park in the center of Manhattan island. It is impressive enough at ground level but for a tired and hungry bird heading north in spring it is an oasis in a desert.

The vast majority of people in Central Park could care less about birds. Central Park has been called "New York's backyard" and that is very true. Residents and tourists come to walk, jog, bike, sun themselves on the Sheep Meadow, use the ballfields or playgrounds. It is the reason most birders come to the park early in the morning, so they can hear the birds call above the din of humanity.

Harris' hawk (RE Berg-Andersson)

However, the day I was at the park I discovered  the annual "On a Wing" festival at Belvedere Castle hosted, in part, by the New York City chapter of the National Audubon Society and the Central Park Conservancy. Plenty of  bird tours and informational literature to be had as well as programs about plants and bats.

But what seemed to draw the biggest crowd was the exhibit called "Talons!" Master Falconer Lorrie Schumacher wowed the crowd when she opened a box and took out a female great horned owl.

There is something about owls. Perhaps it is because hunt from dusk to dawn and they aren't easily seen. The GHO's "whooooo" is distinctive and eerie. We speak of "Night Owls" and the GHO is one of the largest in this part of the world.

So when Schumacher pulled out "Big Mamma," the crowd went nuts, taking pictures as you would see at any celebrity sighting.

Great horned owl (RE Berg-Andersson)

Schumacher also pulled out a Saker falcon, which is found in Europe and Asia and is particularly popular with falconers, and a Harris' hawk, a buteo found in the desert southwest. But the owl, who swiveled her head almost completely around to look at everyone and at one point hunched into a defense posture and fluffed herself up when she spotted a leashed dog in the crowd, stole the show.

GHOs are beautiful killers, as this crowd of city residents and tourists learned up close and personal.

A bird in the bush 3/24/11

Back on May 27, 2012, I rather stupidly deleted the links of many of my older posts -- not understanding why the headlines of the posts were hyperlinked. I've learned a lot since then, such as linking and spacing and captions. 

But when I was trying to find an older post for a newer one, I realized it was time to start republishing the lost posts, and restore the links.  I will be doing this over the next few days, but I am starting with some of the oldest ones.

When Marie Winn wrote about the redtailed hawk nicknamed Pale Male in "Red-Tails In Love" she showcased birding in Central Park, a place that was coming through bad times along with the City of New York.

Central Park couldn't have had better press agents than Marie Winn and Pale Male.


When I got her book from the library I discovered almanac data in the back - what birds have been reported at particular times of year, for instance - and maps of the park. Maps were the key to getting me, and particularly my husband (MH, for short), into the park. I bought the book in paperback and one day MH and I came in from NJ to bird Central Park.

It is a big park, stretching from 59th Street north to 110th Street and from Fifth Ave. on the east to Eighth Ave. on the west. You can walk in anywhere and immediately get lost unless you can keep the tops of the old apartment towers in sight (and sometimes you get lost anyway).
Despite its natural beauty, every single thing in the park - the trees, the rocks, the flowers - were trucked in and placed as per the design of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux.

About the only things not placed there by man are the birds passing through, drawn by an island of green in the middle of the concrete city after a long flight. Most of those flights are by night, but some birds fly by day. One time MH and I were walking south on 6th Ave. as night was coming on and a black-crowned night-heron was flying north on 6th Ave., obviously headed for some body of water within the park.

We've also found oddities, such as this male wood duck I photographed swimming with the mallards at the Pond in the southern end of the park. Two males spent this past winter here, even when much of the water was iced over.

Marie's book also identified the places where warblers could be found within the wooded area known as the Ramble.

Warblers are a post unto themselves. In spring they flit in the highest parts of the leafing trees or skulk under bushes. Many are brightly colored, having yellow somewhere, and the males look distinctly different from females (not the case in the fall, which presents its own identification challenges).

Warblers bring out the birders in droves, particularly in Central Park. When an unusual warbler shows up in the park, that number goes up exponentially.
A few years ago one of those vistors was a bright yellow bird with a big dark eye and solid gray wings, a prothonotary warbler. When we were in Florida we saw them in the swamps as often as we see white-breasted nuthatches in the backyard. In Central Park it was a big deal.

I don't fly across the country when a rarity is seen but if I am in the area anyway, I'll check it out. A warm spring weekend day was my excuse for the prothonotary.
This one had been seen along the western shore of a body of water known as the Lake, which one passes on the way to one of the entrances to the Ramble. The prothonotary was seen. It was sorta seen. It had just been missed, according to the birding lists. A little golden needle in a big green haystack.

So we weren't expecting much, being new birders. We walked along the water's edge and down to one of the rustic benches. We looked to the north and suddenly the bird flew out of the bushes on the shoreline and onto a rock jutting into the water, almost daring us to take a picture. Of course we had no cameras with us (or even a cellphone with a camera).

Wow, that was easy, MH said. Are they all that easy?

As we now know, no way. But I admit to some pleasure that day when another birder rushed up while we were birding in the Ramble and asked if we'd seen the prothonotary, rushing away when we said we had, and where. He'd sought it for hours. We saw it in minutes.

Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.

I have a little list 3/20/11

Back on May 27, 2012, I rather stupidly deleted the links of many of my older posts -- not understanding why the headlines of the posts were hyperlinked. I've learned a lot since then, such as linking and spacing and captions. 

But when I was trying to find an older post for a newer one, I realized it was time to start republishing the lost posts, and restore the links.  I will be doing this over the next few days, but I am starting with some of the oldest ones.

When I was growing up in Brooklyn and then living in Queens with my husband, New York's Central Park did not have a good reputation - muggers behind every tree, bicyclists and wallets stolen at gunpoint, homeless men and women sleeping (and doing lord knows what else) on park benches.

That was particularly bad in the 1980s when the city had devastating fiscal problems and police couldn't keep up with simple crime like graffiti on subway cars, much less murder.

Things changed as the economy improved and, for better or worse, Rudy Giuliani became mayor in the early 1990s on a platform of, among other things, fighting crime and encouraging tourism. More police were hired and hit the streets as well as Central Park and, slowly, more people started to feel safe going in there.

In the late 1990s, a Wall Street Journal reporter named Marie Winn collected her writings about a particularly light redtailed hawk who'd improbably made a nest on an upper 5th Avenue building facade facing Central Park. The book was "Red-Tails In Love." It not only put the focus on the redtail nicknamed Pale Male (inspiring two movies and at least one song, by Steve Earle) but on Central Park in general and the birders who'd never stopped going there even during the bad times in particular.

I have never met Marie Winn but she is a wonderful email correspondent. Thanks to her website, http://mariewin.server304.com/index.htm, you can find Central Park nature notes and information about Pale Male's story and her other books.

But what I found most valuable about her site when I first went to it was her publicizing the New York City Bird Report. Unfortunately, the site no longer posts active sightings and is now a historical database. But between 2003 and 2007 it told you what visiting birds were in different New York City parks every day. 

A correspondent to this list was Tom Fiore, also featured in Marie's book, whose detailed reports were a major reason I (and no doubt others) started birding Central Park more often.

When nycbirdreport.com ended active reporting, Marie mentioned other interesting sites including ebirdsnyc (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebirdsnyc/) and the NY Birding List, part of www.birdingonthe.net, a service that provides lists of bird sightings by state and by rarity.

One recent mention on the New Jersey list, for instance, sent hundreds of birders from across the state and beyond to a small private lake in Washington Township (Bergen County), NJ, for a sight of a rare pinkfooted goose. Based on subsequent list comments, township residents didn't know what hit them when the birders flew into town. Such is the power of the list.

I enjoy reading the lists, and those who wish to subscribe can post their own sightings and comments. These list services are great when you want to bird beyond your backyard, so check them out.

Life Happens

There comes a point when one realizes he or she is never going to do it all. That the grand plan is nothing but a grand illusion, that the mind may be willing but the body is weak.

When MH and I moved from the City of New York to the New Jersey suburbs, we didn't realize what a radical move we were making, especially as we've aged.

We knew we wanted more space. We knew we wanted less noise. We knew we needed a place where we could park a car for when we went on vacation - we didn't need a car in NYC thanks to its public transportation system so when we traveled we had to rent one, or depend on the train. 

Even tho' we picked a suburban town with a real downtown, sidewalks and a train that ran regularly into NYC, we still needed a car.

When we got that car, and then moved from a two-family house apartment at one end of town to a Dutch colonial at the other, everything changed.

While I continued to walk - to the train, on my lunch hour - on weekdays, on weekends I was not walking everywhere as I did in the city. The weight started to go up. This coincided with getting older, when the metabolism slows and it takes more energy to burn more calories.

The suburbs brought us to cheap Jersey diners where the portions were big and the food likely laced with all sorts of the wrong fat. Even eating half and saving the rest for the next day meant TWO meals of fatty food. Until we went on the South Beach Diet, Wendy's was our go-to place of choice.

With suburban parking malls I lost my city-honed ability to parallel park the car. I can still do it, but after 20 or so years of head-in parking, being able to park close enough, back up at the right angle and jockey for position is WORK.

The other day I discovered one other change created by suburban living. 

In the suburbs, MH and I get in the car and go birding far afield. We throw into the trunk our boots, our walking sticks, our cameras, binoculars, several books to help us identify birds and plants as well as a backup pair of shoes and socks in case of bad weather. In the backseat is a water canteen, maps, tissues and a book for me to read in case MH wants to go to bookstore later.

After we hike for hours and hours we limp back to our chariot and drive off to the closest diner where we rest, repair and then return home.

Once a spring, we go to Central Park in New York City. It is a large, green rectangle - completely man-made - that goes from 59th St. to the south up to 110th St. in the north, from Fifth Ave. in the east to what would've been 8th Ave. if the numbered streets continued past 59th Street. (Instead, it is Central Park West.)

We go with practically nothing. No water. No boots. No books. I wore a backpack to carry my big binoculars while MH took a smaller pair than his usual so he could put them in his pocket.

Then, we started walking.

There are many areas where one can find birds, but since we live in New Jersey there is no way we could get to these or any other part of Manhattan at dawn or even early morning, when the birds would be feeding and active. By the time we started walking, any interesting migrants were either resting or off elsewhere. We walked and we walked and we walked and craned our necks looking for birds we didn't find. Oh, we found some good birds eventually, but not before fatigue set in. 

At one point we left the park for a restaurant - decidedly not a diner - at Columbus Ave. It was a nice rest, a good (and costly, as usual for Manhattan) meal. But when we started back to the park, my legs felt like lead. We continued to walk up and around the Reservoir over to the east side, because MH wanted to eventually go to a bookstore on Lexington Ave. from the park and then home.

We got to an area of benches at one of the Fifth Ave. openings near the Reservoir and I put my foot down - and my backside. We sat. I tried to get feeling into my legs.

I thought of my car back in the Jersey City parking garage. I thought of how many hours it would be until we could get to that car via public transportation and drive home to my suburban home, bird feeders and a warm shower.

I sat there and felt very old. There was a time when I could walk over the Queensboro Bridge to Central Park, but I was a lot younger then and I wasn't a birder. What could I have found had I been one?

New York, specifically Manhattan, is a city for younger people (and the wealthy, who can afford to be driven around). I once heard someone say that when you feel good, New York makes you feel on top of the world, but when you feel bad it makes you feel like you're dying. It's a very fast-paced life and you have to work hard to keep up.

The Dutch founded New Amsterdam not as a refuge from religious persecution, but as a commercial venture. New York has run on that principle ever since.

Should we have moved to the suburbs? MH would remind me of the gunshots and the blaring music and the sirens of our old Queens neighborhood. Would the fast pace have worn us down? MH would remind me we didn't become birdwatchers until we moved to our home and got a house-shaped feeder as a housewarming present.

The day after our New York trip, I got into the car (stiff legs and all) and went to a flat area in a county park not far from the house and walked along the Whippany River. I saw a lot of birds in a quiet area with few people. 

When I got tired and footsore, I walked back to my car and drove home.

Life is what happens when you're making other plans, John Lennon once sang. He liked New York City. He liked walking around. He wasn't allowed to get older, his life brutally ended in the doorway of his apartment building across the street from Central Park. 

My life is now tied to the suburbs, where I hope to age gracefully and accept it. 

Suddenly...

Suddenly, the wind is blowing out of the south.

Suddenly, bare trees have foliage, sprouting bright new red flowers or yellow skeins of seeds or green leaves. Even the larches, the only conifer that sheds its needles and goes bare in fall, look alive again as I hike through Greystone.

Carolina wrens will sing just about any time of the
day or year.

Suddenly, there is bird song, usually in the early morning but frequently all day. The carolina wren likes to sing anytime, and so do the titmouse, the white-breasted nuthatch and the cardinal. I go on my early morning walks into Greystone and find these birds plus robins, chipping sparrows, bluebirds, white-throated sparrows, mockingbirds and redwinged blackbirds. Even the fish crows are doing their croaking song. Vultures circle over my head and rise as the sun warms the air.

This is the most wonderful time of year for me. Every day there’s something new. One day the phoebes show up to build their nest under the bridge over a brook. Another day a female hooded merganser comes to a Greystone pond, joining the wood ducks and mallards. A lovely, trilling and unfamiliar song turns out to be a rubycrowned kinglet.

Suddenly, there are birds on nests. Harold and Maud, the redtails, are taking turns sitting on their eggs as the trees leaf out and make it harder to see the nest. A robin is suddenly seen sitting snugly on her little nest on a lower branch of a tree. A Canada goose is sits still on her nest on the side of a pond, a good place, undisturbed by people (although vulnerable to animal predators) but easy for someone who knows where it is to see her.

The other morning I watched a Cooper’s hawk break branches and take them to the top of a spruce over a busy street. Cooper's are agile flyers, able to hunt birds in deep woods, so this one could easily make its way through the branches to its nest and disappear into the evergreen foliage.  When the young are born and need feeding the other birds will have to watch out.

Suddenly, just as the trees are covered in seeds and the leaves obscure the branches, the warblers show up.

This pine warbler was singing, making it easy to find
despite the bad light and how high it sat.

Of course they do. If there is anything more aggravating than a warbler WAY UP THERE in the leafy treetops with the sun behind it, making a silhouette of its identifying pattern, I don't know it. They can literally be a pain in the neck.

I don’t know why it is many birders tend to go nuts when it comes to warblers. Maybe it is because when they come through seeking them among the leaves makes it almost a game. Maybe it is because there are so many different types to find. Maybe it's the sheer joy of suddenly realizing by that certain leaf movement that something is up there, something new and different that you don't see every day.

For me it is because in spring the warbler males are in their bright breeding colors and singing, so even if you can’t see it, you can identify it if you know the song.

It took until early April before my husband and I found palm and pine warblers - the early ones - along with some myrtle warblers that didn't mind New Jersey's relatively warm winter and cold, windy spring. They were all looking for insects in trees along the Passaic River. It was weeks later that I heard a prairie warbler and saw a black and white warbler - one of the few with no yellow in it - in a Bergen County park. I feel as though I'm way behind on my warblers.

At Garrett Mountain, which towers over the gritty city of Paterson, warbler seekers have already found hooded warbler and Louisiana waterthrush along with the myrtles, pines and palms. Garrett is one of those places known as a migrant “trap,” an area of natural habitat surrounded by an urban area. Birds tired after a night of flying with the south tailwind need a place to feed and rest, and that bit of green in a built-up area looks very appealing.

Central Park in New York City is probably the best known migrant trap, but anywhere you have a park or at least some greenery you will find a migrant. Even the enclosed courtyard of my office building, in the middle of a glass box, has had birds fly in for a day or two.

You never know what you’ll see, and it’s the prospect of something new that makes one willing to get out of bed in the dark and walk for miles hoping to see a bit of movement, hear a tiny chip call, something that will draw you to a bird you’ve never seen before or haven’t seen for years

It’s nuts, but it’s a lot of fun and it’s why you’ll see me out there absurdly early in the morning at this time of year.

A bird in the bush

When Marie Winn wrote about the redtailed hawk nicknamed Pale Male in "Red-Tails In Love" she showcased birding in Central Park, a place that was coming through bad times along with the City of New York.

Central Park couldn't have had better press agents than Marie Winn and Pale Male.

When I got her book from the library I discovered almanac data in the back - what birds have been reported at particular times of year, for instance - and maps of the park. Maps were the key to getting me, and particularly my husband (MH, for short), into the park. I bought the book in paperback and one day MH and I came in from NJ to bird Central Park.

It is a big park, stretching from 59th Street north to 110th Street and from Fifth Ave. on the east to Eighth Ave. on the west. You can walk in anywhere and immediately get lost unless you can keep the tops of the old apartment towers in sight (and sometimes you get lost anyway). Despite its natural beauty, every single thing in the park - the trees, the rocks, the flowers - were trucked in and placed as per the design of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux.

About the only things not placed there by man are the birds passing through, drawn by an island of green in the middle of the concrete city after a long flight. Most of those flights are by night, but some birds fly by day. One time MH and I were walking south on 6th Ave. as night was coming on and a black-crowned night-heron was flying north on 6th Ave., obviously headed for some body of water within the park.

We've also found oddities, such as this male wood duck I photographed swimming with the mallards at the Pond in the southern end of the park. Two males spent this past winter here, even when much of the water was iced over.

Marie's book also identified the places where warblers could be found within the wooded area known as the Ramble.

Warblers are a post unto themselves. In spring they flit in the highest parts of the leafing trees or skulk under bushes. Many are brightly colored, having yellow somewhere, and the males look distinctly different from females (not the case in the fall, which presents its own identification challenges).

Warblers bring out the birders in droves, particularly in Central Park. When an unusual warbler shows up in the park, that number goes up exponentially.

A few years ago one of those vistors was a bright yellow bird with a big dark eye and solid gray wings, a prothonotary warbler. When we were in Florida we saw them in the swamps as often as we see white-breasted nuthatches in the backyard. In Central Park it was a big deal.

I don't fly across the country when a rarity is seen but if I am in the area anyway, I'll check it out. A warm spring weekend day was my excuse for the prothonotary.

This one had been seen along the western shore of a body of water known as the Lake, which one passes on the way to one of the entrances to the Ramble. The prothonotary was seen. It was sorta seen. It had just been missed, according to the birding lists. A little golden needle in a big green haystack.

So we weren't expecting much, being new birders. We walked along the water's edge and down to one of the rustic benches. We looked to the north and suddenly the bird flew out of the bushes on the shoreline and onto a rock jutting into the water, almost daring us to take a picture. Of course we had no cameras with us (or even a cellphone with a camera).

Wow, that was easy, MH said. Are they all that easy?

As we now know, no way. But I admit to some pleasure that day when another birder rushed up while we were birding in the Ramble and asked if we'd seen the prothonotary, rushing away when we said we had, and where. He'd sought it for hours. We saw it in minutes.

Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.

What was your easiest bird sighting? Let me know at bellerbirder@gmail.com

I have a little list

When I was growing up in Brooklyn and then living in Queens with my husband, New York's Central Park did not have a good reputation - muggers behind every tree, bicyclists and wallets stolen at gunpoint, homeless men and women sleeping (and doing lord knows what else) on park benches.

That was particularly bad in the 1980s when the city had devastating fiscal problems and police couldn't keep up with simple crime like graffiti on subway cars, much less murder.

Things changed as the economy improved and, for better or worse, Rudy Giuliani became mayor in the early 1990s on a platform of, among other things, fighting crime and encouraging tourism. More police were hired and hit the streets as well as Central Park and, slowly, more people started to feel safe going in there.

In the late 1990s, a Wall Street Journal reporter named Marie Winn collected her writings about a particularly light redtailed hawk who'd improbably made a nest on an upper 5th Avenue building facade facing Central Park. The book was "Red-Tails In Love." It not only put the focus on the redtail nicknamed Pale Male (inspiring two movies and at least one song, by Steve Earle) but on Central Park in general and the birders who'd never stopped going there even during the bad times in particular.

I have never met Marie Winn but she is a wonderful email correspondent. Thanks to her website, http://mariewin.server304.com/index.htm, you can find Central Park nature notes and information about Pale Male's story and her other books.

But what I found most valuable about her site when I first went to it was her publicizing the New York City Bird Report. Unfortunately, the site no longer posts active sightings and is now a historical database. But between 2003 and 2007 it told you what visiting birds were in different New York City parks every day.

A correspondent to this list was Tom Fiore, also featured in Marie's book, whose detailed reports were a major reason I (and no doubt others) started birding Central Park more often.

When nycbirdreport.com ended active reporting, Marie mentioned other interesting sites including ebirdsnyc (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebirdsnyc/) and the NY Birding List, part of www.birdingonthe.net, a service that provides lists of bird sightings by state and by rarity.

One recent mention on the New Jersey list, for instance, sent hundreds of birders from across the state and beyond to a small private lake in Washington Township (Bergen County), NJ, for a sight of a rare pinkfooted goose. Based on subsequent list comments, township residents didn't know what hit them when the birders flew into town. Such is the power of the list.

I enjoy reading the lists, and those who wish to subscribe can post their own sightings and comments. These list services are great when you want to bird beyond your backyard, so check them out.