The Flora and Fauna of 42nd Street

Bryant Park (photo credit: megalosaurus, Bryant Park Flickr photostream)

At 42nd and Sixth, you could just about die of exhaust fumes, horn blasts, and taxis careening through red lights at any hour. But if you step inside Bryant Park, which borders this intersection, much of the city’s noise and grit disappears in the canopy of leaves and stretch of lawn. The Park’s cafe chairs and tables (straight out of the Luxembourg Gardens) are dotted–even at eight o’clock on a Monday morning–with people in business suits who’ve opted out of the mindless commute and into a few minutes of sanity. During Fashion Week, Bryant Park’s rarefied air is that of haute couture and designers. But last week, I was there for the birds.

Since the first week of April, Bryant Park has hosted a free morning birdwatching session under the auspices of the New York City branch of the Audubon Society. Last Monday morning, the walk attracted two timid German tourists, two American tourists (husband and wife), a CNN reporter whose long turquoise-colored leather coat drove me to distraction, a sprightly elderly lady in sneakers who went hopping off after various birds, and me. A few of the participants, including the CNN reporter and Vita (a park employee, smartly wrapped in a coat, scarf, and gloves), were regulars who made the walk part of their Monday-morning routine. (The CNN reporter headed off to her office at 9:00 am.)

Gabriel Willow, the Audubon’s knowledgeable and upbeat guide, kicked off the walk with a list of the birds you can typically see in the park during spring migration (which is now beginning to wind down): thrushes, warblers, orioles, and common yellowthroats. (Not to mention a host of sparrows and pigeons.) New York (and Bryant Park) is on the Eastern Seaboard migration route, but there’s so little habitat here, according to Gabriel, that every little patch of green, the birds will go for. If they can see it in the sky, he said, they’ll swoop down.

As we walked into the park from the ‘wichcraft kiosk, Gabriel urged us to look closely at the undergrowth, which is where most of the birds would be.

Most birds, he went on, migrate at night to avoid predators, who are visual hunters. New York, as a city, however, poses a big problem to migrating birds; peregrine falcons perch on the Empire State Building, watch migratory birds stray into the path of the building’s lights, and then sail in for the kill. (The building has begun dimming its lights.) In similar fashion, the two cones of lights for the 9/11 memorial threw off the navigational abilities of migratory birds like warblers and finches, with the same results. The city has its own dangers to humans, sure, but outside the green swaths of park land it presents a whole other set of perils to birds.

We started out on the northwest side of the park, walking quietly along one of the paths along the lawn. Although plenty of cheeping echoed through the park, nothing rustled near us. I’d worn sandals, but the fog was only slowly burning off, and my feet were freezing. Part of the reason we weren’t seeing much bird activity was because it was so cold. Gabriel kept up a steady stream of bird lore, though, and pointed out that not all of the birds that looked like sparrows were really sparrows.

We watched a few pigeons strut across a stone railing. “That clapping sound that the male is doing is intentional,” Gabriel remarked. The male, clapping his wings like mad, chased his prospective love right off the railing and then stopped clapping.

The group listened as a funny call went out above the cheeping.

“Hear that song?” Gabriel asked. “‘Teacher, teacher, teacher.‘ It’s an oven bird, a warbler, called that way because its domed nest looks like a bread oven on the ground. There he is–” A taupe-colored little bird went across the path in a jerky stagger, from one clump of ivy to another. “It’s got a distinctive orange streak on the chest.” Gabriel passed a pair of binoculars around as the bird paced in the dirt. “Songbird migration season is ending; it runs from the end of March through mid-May.”

“What’s the rarest bird you’ve seen in the park?” one of the American tourists, a man in a tie and spring jacket, asked.

“Probably a Brown Thrasher or a White-eyed Vireo,” Gabriel told him.

Some of the group (including me) seemed to have naively expected the walk to be a wild animal park of birds, but we were seeing only house sparrows and white-throated sparrows. These, Gabriel noted, have a song that’s anthropomorphized in different ways, depending on where you’re from.

“One of the calls is ‘Pure sweet Canada, Canada, Canada,’” he grinned. “But, if you’re from Boston, it’s ‘Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.’”

Halfway through the walk, though, it was clear that Gabriel’s expertise and the chance to explore the park in the off hours more than made up for not seeing any celebrities of the avian world.

A man in a blue pinstriped suit, with a black leather satchel slung over one shoulder, stopped and chatted to Gabriel while our group was peering into the ivy bushes, trying to coax out chilly birds. “That’s Dan, the president of the Bryant Park Corporation,” Gabriel said, after the man continued his way toward the terrace. “He said he saw a towhee this morning, over on the east side, so we’ll head over there.” (Dan Biederman, it turns out, is a birding enthusiast, which might explain why the park is so supportive of these spring birding walks.)

We didn’t see towhees, but the lawn was popping with starlings, and Gabriel launched into the story of why there are so many starlings in New York. (In the late 1800s, a naturalist decided to release every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays in Central Park; the thousands of starlings are all descended from those sixteen imported European–Shakespearean–starlings.) By this point, the fog had vanished, the lawn was brightening in the sun, and my feet were getting warmer, just as the walk ended. Although I hadn’t seen all the birds Bryant Park shelters, I’d heard an incredible amount about New York as a habitat, and had had a glimpse of the park at its quietest.

The verdict: a great and unexpected experience for tourists and New Yorkers alike, and I’m looking forward to next year’s series.