Catching Up in the Garden

Last week, New York City had the dubious distinction of having the dirtiest air in the world because of the smoke blown on winds out of the north from wildfires that continue to rage throughout Canada. At its worst, the smoke made the sun look deep orange, kept the temperature to the mid-60s (F) and turned the sky brownish-yellow. The smell of burning wood was thick.

Stargazer lilies, supported by a tomato
cage, protected by deer fencing.
(Margo D. Beller)

Living as I do 35 miles or so due west of the Big Apple, I could not avoid this manifestation of the continuing harm of what is now called "climate change," but I still refer to as global warming. (I know there are differences between the two terms but the overall destructive effect is the same.) There has been very little rain anywhere in my area, and apparently the same is true of Canada.

This is not the first time smoke has filled the skies over my part of New Jersey. Usually the smoke comes from wildfires in the southern part of the state, such as in the Pine Barrens, during extremely dry periods during the summer. The smoke is blown north on hot winds from the south. This year will likely be no exception because with the lack of rain those fires continue, unfortunately.

But this thick yellow smoke from Canada was unprecedented. A persistent low off the eastern coast kept pulling the smoke into my region until the air was toxic to breathe for those of us in "vulnerable" groups, who were urged to stay inside with the windows closed. I was under house arrest, for the most part. If I absolutely had to go outside, I kept it short and wore a mask. 

Blooming viburnum (Margo D. Beller)

The world continued on without me, of course. People were urged to limit their pets' time outside but the wild animals - including birds - were still out there foraging for food, both for themselves and for their young. Somehow they managed, but I have to wonder about the effect of that poisonous air.

When the smoke finally cleared, literally, it was with relief I could go back outside. I walked around the yard and found some flowers had faded - the rhododendron, irises and the peony - while others were blooming (viburnum, salvia and stargazer lilies) or growing to the point where they would soon bloom (butterfly weed).

Meanwhile, what I thought were peppers growing from the seeds I'd planted a few months ago are not peppers. I'm not sure what they are. I've moved those pots to make more room for the pots of marigolds and zinnias that are definitely growing from seed. 

I don't know what this is but it isn't
a pepper. (Margo D. Beller)

The apple tree is filled with growing fruit that has been getting knocked to the ground, still too raw to be usable. I'm not sure if the squirrels are searching for ripe apples to slack their thirst of if the tree is dropping apples to save energy because of this drought. Maybe both. 

I also took note of the birds. One of my few trips outdoors was to make sure the water dish was full. It drew a pair of goldfinches, a song sparrow and a jay. (I'm sure there were others, including squirrels, but I didn't see them.) Every so often I would see the resident cardinals and catbirds hunting around the yard. Overhead I heard cedar waxwings and chimney swifts, hunting for seeds or insects. 

Apples in tree (Margo D. Beller)

And, of course, I was able to see what was happening with the house wrens. Based on their activity the eggs had hatched but the young were still small enough for either parent to go inside to feed them. When the young get bigger they will jostle for position and the parent will only be able to feed the one or ones that can push to the nest box opening. Right now the parents go in with food and come out, sometimes with chick poop, which must be removed to keep bacteria out of the nest. I estimate two or three young are in the nest.

As I watch the wrens following their instincts to feed their young so they will one day (soon?) fledge, feed themselves and continue the cycle, I have to wonder why it is that humans, the top of the food chain and the only creatures capable of creating weapons - and now weather conditions - to destroy themselves, are considered to be so damned superior.

This cropped picture was taken through my porch screen. if you look
carefully you will see the parent wren over the box. Less
obvious is the wren looking out from inside.
(Margo D. Beller)

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.

Frozen but Surviving

December 2019 (Margo D. Beller)

I have never seen either "Frozen" movie but this week I got an inkling of what it is like to live in a frozen world.

In the past week we've had freezing rain that coated tree limbs, power lines, blades of grass and shrubs; followed two days later by an intense snow squall that threw about an inch of white on everything, including the roads; then came the intense cold. Only now, on this first full day of winter, is there any expectation of above-freezing warmth to melt the ice and allow my bowed-down yew hedge to rise and me to add matter to my compost pile.

In the meantime, as I watch the thermometer, the sun is shining prettily on the iced limbs of the trees and shrubs I can see from my porch.

Bowed boughs (Margo D. Beller)

It has been a hard week, particularly because I have started a new job and, for the first time in years, I must commute into New York. The sun rises later but I must rise earlier, and I must dress in layers to be ready for the harsh cold in my town and the (somewhat) warmer temperature when I arrive in the concrete jungle. Today, on the porch, I can see the sun is lower and its arc much shorter from when I could last spend time out here.

Feeders are out, but aside from some titmice and a cardinal in one of the bushes, there's been very little activity.  But I know that will change because when the feeders have come in at night this week they have been nearly empty.

In midtown Manhattan, it's another story. If I have the time to walk through some of the smaller parks near my office, it is easy to find what I call the "usual three" types of birds - house sparrows, pigeons and starlings. These birds will eat anything, including bread tossed by people. To survive they have adapted to life and people in the city.

Frozen feeder baffle (Margo D. Beller)

So, too, have white-throated sparrows, which I'm now finding so often in my city travels I may have to start referring to the "usual four." While these sparrows don't go for tossed bread, they manage to survive by scratching the soil for insects or gleaning what they can find (insects or fruit) from foliage. At night, they roost where they can - the other day I heard something as I walked along Madison Ave., and found a white-throat atop an office tower display of Christmas trees surrounded by concrete!

White-throats are winter visitors - they are common in my yard at this time of year - but catbirds are not. On the coldest day of this past week, when the wind chill in New York City was in the single digits, I found one catbird sitting at the base of a shrub in the sun. Catbirds have been gone from my yard for months (usually the white-throats replace the catbirds) and yet the previous week, before the frozen rain and cold, I had found a total of five catbirds in two Manhattan parks.

Sun on ice (Margo D. Beller)

I was astounded. They were not perturbed by my closeness at all. One, in fact, sat on a railing and looked at me. Then the cold came. Obviously, these birds either fly to another, more hospitable habitat, work harder to find food in this park or die. On this day at least one catbird has managed to survive. But it is a tough world out there and a small bird faces large odds, so who knows what happened to the catbirds and other birds I've seen over the last two weeks that should've been elsewhere (including a brown thrasher, swamp sparrow and ovenbird).

No doubt the annual Christmas Bird Count, where people comb the streets and parks all over the U.S., if not the world, to see what birds are around at this time of year, will find all sorts of birds in the urban parks. I know there is an annual count in New York's Central Park, that oasis of green that attracts dozens of types of birds during the spring and fall migration periods and likely many staying for the winter. But for me, finding a bird in a small patch of green in an area surrounded by traffic, noise and people is more than just a bit of wonder, it is a small miracle. Like that catbird basking in the cold sun.

I've been thinking of it a lot as I make my way along in this frozen, hard world.

Frozen world (Margo D. Beller)

A River Walk Down Memory Lane

This morning I awoke thinking of Sheepshead Bay.

When I was growing up in this coastal area of southern Brooklyn, decades ago, it had the ambiance of a fishing village. This was long after the racetrack that first brought crowds to this area was demolished.

Walking east along the main commercial street, Emmons Avenue, you had the bay on your right. A small bridge over the bay (below) would take you to Manhattan Beach, through a neighborhood of stately mansions.

(Photo by Jim Henderson
courtesy of Wikipedia.)

There was a large fleet of fishing boats that went out before dawn and were back in the late afternoon with their catch, blowing their horns as they arrived so the housewives could hurry down and buy that night's supper. There were fishing boats for hire that, once three miles out, would open the liquor cabinets and turn into party boats.

On the other side of Emmons from the Bay were large homes that would be rented out for the summer, and groups of bungalows crammed together in an area separated by "courts" rather than streets. There were seafood restaurants of all sizes including the famous Lundy's, the less famous Randazzo's and the Kips comedy club where many now-famous people got their start.

Continuing east, past the bars where fights would send the wounded to my father the doctor to patch up, were the two big beach clubs, the Deauville and the Palms Shore. Here, you paid your dues and rented a cabana for the summer, bringing out your chairs to sit around the large pool to work on your tan or swim. The older ladies would sit under their beach umbrellas in their bright bathing suits and coverups, dripping with jewelry and bronzed, sagging skin.

Beyond was Plumb Beach, a dirty stretch of sand where you did not play because of the garbage strewn around. You never knew what you might step on. People would drive down here at night to make out, or "submarine race watching." Instead, if you didn't want to join the beach clubs or walk into Manhattan Beach, you would go west on Emmons to where it became Neptune Ave.,  under the elevated train tracks (where the track sign pointed you to "the city"), toward the beaches of  Brighton Beach and Coney Island.

North of Emmons Ave., you had to travel up Sheepshead Bay Rd., Ocean or Bedford or Nostrand avenues to get past the elevated Belt Parkway. Here, you had apartment buildings, schools, commercial shopping strips and rows of identical houses. This is the area where we lived, not on the water but close enough to walk over and enjoy it.

I woke up thinking of Sheepshead Bay because like other waterfront communities, what made it unique has disappeared.

The beach was rediscovered and cleaned up. It is now a destination for sunbathers and bird watchers who want to see endangered least terns and assorted shorebirds including the occasional rarity. That's a good thing.

(Plumb Beach now, courtesy of Wikipedia)

But the waterfront also drew profit-seeking developers. The old beach houses are gone. The diners where we ate are gone. The tiny summer bungalows have been winterized and people live there year around. Many of the small businesses were expanded or torn down for larger ones. The seafood places became chains or large restaurants. The big barn that was Lundy's was divided up to create two restaurants and an indoor mall.

You can still walk along the water near the small bridge to Manhattan Beach and there are still fishing boats, but there are fewer of them and the bait and tackle shops are mainly gone. LIke the party boats, the gambling boats wait until they have sailed out three miles before the real action starts.

The old beach clubs are gone. In their place are tall apartment buildings that block the view of the bay to anyone except those paying for "ocean views." Emmons Ave. is now crowded all year, not just when beach seekers from other New York City neighborhoods come off the Elevated to walk into Manhattan Beach over the foot bridge.

The same thing has happened elsewhere. Industrial areas that dumped their chemical byproducts into adjacent waterways are closing, many torn down to make way for waterfront parks to allow people access to the water again, even if that water is still slowly recovering from decades of pollution.

I can still walk along the Charles River, as I did when I went to college in Boston, but looking across to Cambridge and Charlestown you now see more huge "waterfront" apartments. On the Boston side, the removal of the elevated highway known as the Central Artery brought light to an area near the Boston Garden that I remember from my college days as being perpetually dark. Once down, however, huge apartment buildings and offices went up. This "development" has spread into the old North End, along the waterfront and down into less-scenic neighborhoods of Boston.

All because of those water views.

The first towns were built on rivers. Roads were slow going, if there were roads at all. Rivers moved you from one place to another and took your goods to market. New York City was founded on a natural port sheltered from the Atlantic, with a mighty river, the Hudson, that allowed for transport inland. Even where I live, far from the ocean, there are several rivers on which many towns were founded.

You wouldn't realize that now unless you were told. No one notices rivers. "Developments" are placed anywhere because they can get highway access. Forests are cut down. Old farms suddenly sprout "luxury townhouses" and multi-acre estates. All of them look alike.

After all that tearing down, it seems inevitable that anywhere with some water running through it would be seen as an attractive, "natural" alternative. The more built-up this world becomes, the more yearning there is to go back to a simpler time -- as long as you still have all the modern conveniences. If you are a developer, you can cash in on that.

You may not have a forest anymore but the river just keeps flowing along, at least for now.

City Birding

Most city people are not birders. They run from one place to another, ear buds providing a soundtrack to their world. If they notice them, "birds" are sparrows and pigeons. That the sparrows might be song sparrows or white-throated sparrows and the pigeons mourning doves is lost on them. They are just birds you barely notice.

High Line (R.E. Berg-Andersson)

I grew up in New York, and until I moved to New Jersey and was given a feeder as a housewarming present I didn't notice the birds either.

I've learned that if you unplug, you will find birds. The key is to be alert and be in an area where there aren't a lot of people. That can be hard in many urban areas.

Until a few years ago I was commuting by train to jobs in Jersey City and midtown Manhattan. The train took me through New Jersey's Meadowlands -- once a dumping ground but now a marvel of shorebirds, ducks and the occasional hawk -- and Hoboken, on the west side of the Hudson River where in its harbor the cormorants would mass before heading south and the ruddy ducks would spend the winter.

Jersey City hadn't filled in all its open space when I worked there. The vacant, weedy lots drew parula, goldfinch and winter wren. The waterfront drew mergansers and ducks. Around the time my company moved a light rail line was completed and the vacant lots were being converted into large apartment buildings. A good hunk of one of my favorite birding spots was turned into a dog park. The birds were harder to find.

Gansevoort end (R.E. Berg-Andersson)

I guess this is the challenge of urban birding. The more people you have, the fewer birds you will find unless you are in an area of many trees. Central Park is where MH and I usually go when we want to see birds, especially in migration. That huge, green space in the middle of the concrete jungle is big enough to accommodate tired, hungry birds as well as people.

I've been working for over two years from my home in the New Jersey suburbs so going to New York City is more of a special occasion now. On this particular trip we decided to visit the High Line, the linear park that runs from Gansevoort Street to the south to 30th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues) to the north (for now; the line is being extended to the north and west).

The High Line is the former freight line built in 1933 to connect the old Penn Yards at 30th with the St. John's terminal on Clarkson St. and literally raise train traffic off the streets. New York was a city of elevated trains -- there were elevated lines on Third and Second avenues (it has taken generations but a Second Ave. subway is being built) and there is are still elevated "subway" lines in Brooklyn and Queens -- so this west side line just added to the noise.

Trains ran until 1980 and for the next 19 years the line stood silent, a home for wildflowers and birds. In 1999 a group was formed to protect and renovate the line into a lineal park rather than tear it down.

MH and I found the lower part of the line (it does not run to Clarkson St. but farther north at Ganesvoort, around which is the old meatpacking area, now very trendy, chic and expensive and a historic district) more interesting, in part because it incorporates the old Nabisco factory, now the "Chelsea market," an urban food court similar to Boston's Faneuil Hall. Farther north the line narrows while Manhattan island widens and you lose sight of the Hudson River.

We started at the northern end, and after a few blocks we detoured to the river, which was far more interesting and where we found a flock of herring gulls aloft, reminding me of growing up along the southern coast of Brooklyn where the resident gulls were herrings.

It is nice that city officials have realized the importance of connecting people with waterfronts. They provide space and light. This was the "beach" area for the city dwellers we passed sunning themselves as we looked at the piers with open restaurants and the old piers where the railroad companies -- Pennsylvania, Erie, Lehigh Valley -- would bring their goods from New Jersey by barge across the Hudson.

(R.E. Berg-Andersson)

Back on the High Line, we felt as tho' we were in a human highway, there were so many people in the sunshine. But around us, buildings are going up. Luxury buildings where once were warehouses and factories. I wonder -- if enough of these buildings go up will they blot out the sun from the ornamental grasses, coneflowers, sedums and other flowers (which I have in my yard)?

This "park," this tourist walkway, this elevated sidewalk, seems a poor excuse for "nature" when I compare it to my backyard. Would there be more birds than the barn swallow I saw around if there had been fewer people?

The barn swallow and the herring gulls were the best birds I saw. But sometimes you can see something common from an unusual perspective.

At Chelsea Market we were resting in the shade when I pointed out to MH a female house sparrow that had flown to the open part of  a pole holding street signs. Young were calling and she was feeding them. When done she flew off. Soon her mate came up and he fed the young. I have seen this many times in my travels, but not from above. 

When my mother was sick towards the end, she said she enjoyed hearing the birds "sing" in the open space that was created when the old air conditioner was removed from the bedroom wall and a smaller one put in. The birds she heard were house sparrows, which will make a nest in human-created cavities.

House sparrows don't sing - they aren't even really sparrows but weaver birds that stowed away on ships from Europe centuries ago -- but their cheeping cheered her.

What a pity the common house sparrow may be the best bird the people who will move to the luxury residences going up around this "park" will see, presuming they even notice.

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.

Urban Birding

I spent a lot of years working in New York City. Most of my time was spent either in an office or rushing to or from it, particularly to catch transportation home.

But the nice thing about birding is you can always find something anywhere, even in the middle of the concrete jungle.

It is definitely a change of pace for MH and me when we decide to go to The City from our little New Jersey town. For one thing, people move faster. For another, there are more of them shoving into you.

White-throated sparrow

Even big places like Central Park can sometimes feel too crowded, particularly during a nice day when there are tour groups coming through or visitors enjoying a big swath of green in the midst of the city or gathering around the "Imagine" mosaic near the W. 72 Street entrance, remembering John Lennon. Dogwalkers are there, of course, sunbathers in season and, yes, birders. Alot of birders, alone and in flocks of various sizes.
But while Central Park is more famous, just about any place where there is some shrubbery can produce something interesting beyond a pigeon, even  a more common visitor such as the white-throated sparrow and its cousin the junco.

When I worked in New York I would usually go to Bryant Park at W. 40th-44th streets, especially after reading a report of an unusual visitor. Considering how often the lawn is torn up for an ice rink (winter) or concert stage (summer) and the thick crowds that pass through or sit and eat there every day, it is amazing I've found as much as I have in the shrubbery and the huge London plane trees that border the lawn.

Here are other ways urban birding is different.

When I go to the city I have to be careful what I carry, and I don't just mean money or important papers. I refuse to drive on midtown streets so that means carrying no extra boots or walking stick or Sibley guide to help me identify anything. I don't even take my big binoculars unless I have my backpack. I have small ones I can pocket.

Concrete sidewalks and blacktopped streets are harder on the feet, knees and lower back than grass or cindered trails. There’s the noise of traffic, including the incessant sirens, and people talking to each other or on their phones in a Babel of languages.

While you can go slow, look around, listen for a call and hope to be lucky, there are additional rules: Watch out for the traffic and keep one eye on your surroundings so you don’t get your pocket picked.

A male wood duck (top) with mallards at Central Park's pond.

If you can get past that, it’s always a treat to find something unusual in an urban area at the wrong time of year.

One Saturday last year as we were walking through Herald Square – a concrete triangle in midtown Manhattan filled with tables and chairs and some greenery along the edges -- MH and I found four catbirds. This was winter. Catbirds don't usually hang around this area in winter. When I would walk through here every day on the way to my old job I might see one or two. Yet, here were four, and they were quite bold, running or flying around after the crumbs dropped by the visitors, fighting bill and wing with the house sparrows, pigeons and white-throated sparrows.

Those crumbs were keeping the catbirds and the rest of the birds alive.

Union Square is another busy New York park, with a farmers market, benches, people, dogs and, as it turned out, birds. Sparrows and white-throats, of course, but last year I went there with MH after a day of wandering to look for a reported yellow-breasted chat, the largest of the warblers and a bird that should’ve been far south of where I stood.

As it got darker, I heard sparrows chirping from a holly and started looking for the larger and yellower chat. Instead, if found a yellow-bellied sapsucker roosting on a low branch. Then, despite the traffic, I heard the “laugh” of a flicker. Then, as sparrows flew up to the holly, so did the chat.

Prothonotary warbler, found in the front
garden of the New York Public Library
on Fifth Ave., not far from Bryant Park.

This happened last winter, a milder one than this year's has turned out to be. This year I haven't felt much of a desire to go into New York and bird the usual places or, when we were going to New York to meet people for supper, the weather was so dicey we just came in, dined and left.

This Saturday we will be going to a daytime party in Brooklyn. If the weather holds, we will go into lower Manhattan, perhaps by walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, and wander around. I doubt we'll get to Central Park but I know we'll be in City Hall park.

I don't doubt that somewhere, where I least expect it, I'll find something wonderful in this urban wasteland.

On Record

This morning I bought the Sunday New York Times.

This is common behavior for many people in the New York metropolitan area. You get up on a Sunday morning and you go out for the newspaper. You take it to a sunny spot with your cup of coffee and you spend a few hours learning what happened the previous day and then go to the arts section, the magazine, the week in review.

This is what I used to do every Sunday when my husband and I lived in an apartment in New York City, county of Queens. I’d walk up the block, buy the Times and Newsday. I bought Newsday because it had more local news than the Times, which had a better national and international news section as befitting its advertising as The Paper of Record.

When we moved to an apartment in New Jersey we continued our practice of buying the Times and a local paper, in this case the Star-Ledger.

But a funny thing happened when we moved to our home. Suddenly, it seemed to take a lot of time we didn’t have to get through the two newspapers. I would find myself getting to the morning papers around 5pm Sunday afternoon once I got more important homeowner errands and chores done. Frequently I’d skim most of the paper and leave the arts section, book review and magazine to read more carefully until later in the week.

We gave up both papers when the price spiked and their heft slimmed. I had better things to do on lovely Sundays, and thanks to 24-hour cable channels and the Internet you can always get the news. (We still get the daily Ledger.)

But MH is a man of scientific bent and one of the things he does is collect weather information from New York’s Central Park and from Newark.

As part of that, once a year, usually the first Sunday after Jan. 1, I am asked to pick up The Paper of Record because it contains a chart labeled The Year in Weather. Once a year I shake my head that I am paying $5 for a newspaper. Once a year I will take the time to read every section and get my $5 worth.

Here is what I have learned from this year’s chart:

The average temperature in New York City was 57.4 degrees, or 2.4 degrees above normal, making 2012 the warmest year since 1869. Rainfall was at 38.51 inches, 11.55 inches less than normal, making 2012 the 28th driest year. Total snowfall was 9.6 inches, and that was only because we got a record snowfall in November. February was among the warmest on record and one of the least snowy months of the year.

So it is now official - The Paper of Record says the world is warming. Those people I see in shorts on frigid mornings aren’t the strange ones; I am, for bundling up. That there is no snow to melt and increase the water table or that things bloom and seed before the birds that depend on them arrive north in spring is business as usual now.

Extreme hurricanes, tornados, snowstorms (when we get snow) in the New York metropolitan area - get used to it.

Better to hide yourself in your house or apartment with your Sunday newspaper and not notice what is going on around you.

Ignore those people who, after Sandy, finally started saying aloud what others have thought for years, that the climate is changing and the globe is warming and we‘re going to have to rebuild on our barrier islands and along the shore in a different way because we‘re not going back to how it was.

Stay away from The Year in Weather chart in The Paper of Record.

As long as I can wear my shorts in my overheated house and go to what's left of the Shore in summer and barbeque on weekends and use my gas-spewing snow blower or leaf fan and water my lawn every day, everything’s fine.

We’ll see what The Paper of Record says next 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.