Mark Lynch
Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds.
Ryan Goldberg. 2025. New York, New York: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill/Little Brown and Company.
“People think the birds are out in the country,” Peter said. “No, the best birding is actually in the cities.” More accurately: a coastal city. Excluding escapees from zoos and the pet trade, around 430 species have been seen in New York, which represents more than a third of the species in the entire US. They’re packed in just like us, shoulder to shoulder, fighting for their place here. (p. 7)
Some people are surprised that you can have a great birding day in a city. It seems so counterintuitive. After all, cities are filled with concrete, steel, noise, pollution, cars, and crowds of people. There seems to be so little to attract birds. And although this might be true for breeding species—with the exception of species such as pigeons, starlings, and the Peregrine Falcon—during spring and fall migration an argument can be made that cities are the best place to bird. Most cities have a collection of green spaces such as parks and cemeteries that, to the tired migrant, look like green havens in the midst of a concrete sea. Migrants gravitate to these areas to rest and feed before continuing their journey.
It is amazing what birds I have seen in Boston over the decades. These urban birds include a Boreal Owl roosting in the greenery in front of a row of apartments and a Gyrfalcon perched across from a parking garage. Even in landlocked Worcester I have seen Nelson’s Sparrow, Yellow-breasted Chat, Connecticut Warbler, a drake King Eider, and an adult Yellow-crowned Night Heron foraging on a lawn, to mention just a few sightings. One of my favorite places to see a Screech Owl is in Swan Point Cemetery in Providence. I won’t even begin to list the numerous species I have seen in that city.
Many birders live in cities, and for them birding in their favorite urban green spot is simply convenient. You can take a bus or a taxi or even walk to where there is a chance for some good birding. I often bird in the forests and fields in the Ware River and Quabbin watersheds. This large area has lots of great habitat and plenty of breeding birds. But sometimes it seems that there is so much good habitat that migrants can be anywhere, and migrant flocks seem to disperse quickly into the surrounding woods. But in cities, birds have a tendency to hang around in the green oasis at least for a day.
Certain urban hot spots have long birding histories, including Central Park in New York City and Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. These spots are recognized nationally as great places to go birding. Though a number of books have been published about birding in and around cities, Bird City is one of the best because it is not just about the birds.
Ryan Goldberg came late to birding in New York City, but he jumped in with both feet. His chapters are organized by seasons, beginning with winter and ticking a King Eider at Breezy Point. For him, birding in New York is about more than just accruing a long list of species.
Birding gave me license to explore, and in New York that exploration encompassed a surprising variety of landscapes, from the Hudson to the Atlantic, forests to grasslands, urban canyons to saltmarshes. I began to see a city that was shaped by birds and birders. (p. 11)
Bird City is filled with the history of the city. Goldberg often focuses on the conservation of city birds and preserving their habitat in this challenging environment. He spends time with the individuals who have put in many hours to save a parcel of land, help restore unique habitats, or understand how migrants use, and sometimes are abused by, the city. Many of the chapters read like classic pieces from The New Yorker.
Beginning with urban bird basics, there is a fine chapter on the release of starlings and English Sparrows. Though many readers will have heard that these releases were due to certain people wanting to release all the species found in Shakespeare, that story ends up being not really the entire truth. It is often written that the starling’s invasion of North America began when Eugene Schieffelin released some starlings in Central Park on March 6, 1890. To test that idea, Goldberg consults Paul Sweet of the American Museum of Natural History. Sweet pulls out trays of specimens and finds ones with an earlier date that were shot on Long Island. So the starling invasion did not begin with Schieffelin. It was actually not so much an individual but a movement that was responsible.
In the second half of the 19th century, any manner of creature could be set free in the country. It was called the acclimatization movement. Begun in France, it spread to Britain and its respective colonies and the US. In the US, European starlings and house sparrows were the most popular choices. But Roger Tory Peterson, in Birds Over America, estimates that over a hundred exotic bird species were released. Acclimatization or acclimation societies mushroomed around the country, fed by scientific and colonial ethos. Plants and animals were viewed like pieces in a game, to be moved around by rational masterminds to see whether they could succeed in new territories. At the time, the experiments seemed tidy and novel. As Peterson wrote: “Ecology was an unknown word then and little was understood about a bird’s relationship to its environment.” (p. 25)
One of the hopes was that these introduced species would gobble up certain insects that were destroying crops and trees. This idea, although popular, was based on mostly high-minded wishing, not scientific observation. As we now know, the House Sparrow did not control any insect pests and instead became a pest itself.
One of my favorite parts of this sorry tale is that William Cullen Bryant even penned a rousing ode to the House Sparrow:
And the army-worm and the Hessian fly,
And the dreaded canker-worm shall die,
And the thrip and slug and fruit-moth seek,
In vain, to escape that busy beak,
And fairer harvests shall crown the year,
For the Old-World sparrow at last is here. (p. 26)
One can imagine a rousing chorus of “Huzzah!” from the crowd after listening to this poem.
In the chapters on spring and fall migration, Bird City really grabs the attention of the reader as devoted migration twitchers canvas all the hot spots in the city hoping for a fallout. In these sections, dedicated Boston birders will identify with finding birds in unexpected locations.
In New York, as in all cities, birds can end up anywhere during migration—a Virginia rail on the roof of a car, an ovenbird on an uptown subway platform, a Kentucky warbler in a community garden—but knowing their habitat choices allows you a better chance of finding them. (p. 63-4)
Goldberg birds with a number of well-known local hardcore listers. They describe to him what makes New York such an attractive spot for migrants.
As Doug explained, New York’s geography makes it a unique corner of the country for people and for birds. Because of its location on the eastern shore of North America, European people created a center of commerce here. For bird migration, the coast also serves an important purpose. Birds come to a crossway in Brooklyn and Queens at the western end of Long Island, with east-west routes or north-south routes up the harbor or down to New Jersey. Coasts tend to concentrate migrants that don’t want to get blown offshore, he said. And the city consists of 520 miles of coastline, which are leading lines, like the terminal moraine-visual markers that birds follow during daylight hours. Only the Bronx technically sits on the North American continent; the rest of the city is an archipelago that lies within several estuaries; a rich ecosystem where fresh water and salt water meet. (p. 72)
Nocturnal migrating birds may stop first just before dawn at very small collections of trees and shrubs near the water’s edge and then move to the larger wood lots and cemeteries. City birders learn quickly how migrants use what’s available in the city. “From a bird’s perspective,” he continued, “New York City is very important during migration.” (p. 74) Though Central Park is justly famous as a migration hot spot, Bird City reveals a whole list of smaller green spots that can often be just as good for finding migrants but are mostly unknown to non-New Yorkers.
Though migration is an exciting time for the urban birder, New York City can be a death trap for the migrants because of the real possibility of collisions with buildings. The New York Bird Alliance, formerly the New York Audubon Society, runs several programs to count birds that die or are stunned when they bang into the numerous well-lit skyscrapers. The death toll every year is staggering.
NYC Bird Alliance estimates that upward of 230,000 birds are killed each year by the city’s glass windows, most of them during migration. Nationally, the annual toll is thought to be up to one billion, making it second only to feral and free-roaming cats as the leading human-caused hazard for birds. (p. 81)
These deaths must have a long-term effect on bird populations. To keep track of this annual bird mortality in the city, NYC Bird Alliance runs Project Safe Flight. A large number of volunteers walk designated routes every morning during migration looking for dead or injured birds. The species are tallied and the results submitted to a database.
These details are necessary for Project Safe Flight, NYC Bird Alliance’s collision-monitoring program for which Melissa, a writer, photographer, and editorial director of the Martha Stewart website, is one of its longest-serving volunteers. (NYC Audubon changed its name to NYC Bird Alliance in 2024; to minimize confusion, I’ll use its new name even while writing about its pre-name-change activities.) There were about 30 volunteers in Project Safe Flight when Melissa joined in the fall of 2020. Now she she’s one of more than 200. “It’s very popular with the newbies,” Melissa said. They walk 15 routes in all five boroughs, checking approximately 80 buildings during five months of spring and fall migration. Her route, which includes four World Trade Center skyscrapers within a three-by-five-block radius, sees the most collisions. (p. 83)
Goldberg walks with Melissa along her route and learns how deadly New York’s cityscape is to birds. What is amazing is that the majority of passersby never notice the colorful warblers at their feet. Some of Melissa’s mornings are simply horrifying.
With a few cold fronts in August, Melissa had found 120 collision victims, about a fivefold increase over previous years. On her worst morning she had found 41 dead birds, including nine Blackburnian warblers, their migrations to the highland forests or shade coffee plantations of South America cut way too short. Melissa posted a photo on social media of them lying in her hands above a sidewalk littered with other warblers; their orange throats were like a beacon from a more humane world. (p. 212)
A warbler weighs less than half an ounce; Melissa’s backpack weighed pounds. Back at her apartment, she locked herself in the bathroom and laid its contents on parchment paper. It took her an hour to sort through all the birds. Row after row of warblers: black-and-whites, ovenbirds, common yellowthroats, redstarts, parulas. (p. 213)
One of my favorite articles written about bird migration and collisions with urban skyscrapers appeared in an early issue of Bird Observer. “Birding At the Prudential” by Henry Wiggen (Bird Observer October 1974, Volume 2, Number 5) chronicled his years of finding birds that had collided with that building. It is a fascinating piece written by one of the great characters of Massachusetts birding. I often passed out copies of this article to my fall birding classes at Mass Audubon’s Broad Meadow Brook.
Bird City includes some amazing stories about conservation successes. One of these stories is about how the world’s largest dump, Fresh Kills, is being slowly turned into a managed long grass prairie. This transformation has been a long process, but already Savannah and even a few Grasshopper sparrows have returned to the spot to breed.
When the park is fully open, though, it will be one of the largest parks in New York, with grasslands making up over a thousand acres. Such an extraordinary amount of undeveloped spaces was only made possible by the mounds of capped trash we were standing on—yes, two million tons of it. This was once Fresh Kills, for a time the world’s largest dump. (p. 131)
When trying to save urban green spaces, it is best to prepare for the unexpected. This happened during the process of turning Fresh Kills into a grasslands.
On March 22, 2001, a blue barge full of trash left Queens bearing red, white, and blue banners that read LAST BARGE and LAST GARBAGE BARGE TO FRESH KILLS. The landfill site’s future looked brighter. On September 5, 2001, the city announced the start of an international design competition to solicit ideas for a transformative park. But one week later, the West Mound reopened to accept the wreckage from the Twin Towers. About 1.4 million tons of material—blasted steel, concrete, and glass—was brought to the landfill, and for 10 months thousands of forensic investigators and recovery workers screened and sifted through it for the traces of missing people. Over 20,000 human remains were found and brought to the medical examiner’s office. The leftover material was covered with clean soil on a 48-acre plot. (p. 137)
This might be the first time I have read about the events of 9-11 in a book about birds. Another event concerning 9-11, recounted in Bird City, describes a tragic concurrence of events, one natural and the other human made. This was the dramatic Tribute in Light event that honored the dead of the 9-11 tragedy that was set to occur at the peak of migration.
Tribute In Light debuted on the six-month anniversary of 9/11. Eighty-eight 7,000-watt xenon light bulbs were arranged in two 48-foot squares that, according to its organizer, the Municipal Art Society, echoed the shape and orientation of the Twin Towers. Visible from 60 miles away, the shafts of lights were the strongest ever projected into the night sky, and they stayed on for a week. (p. 217)
As Goldberg aptly describes the conflict between the need to mourn and distracting migrants to their death: “In a conversation about how to honor the dead, there was no place for birds.” (p. 217) Luckily, there was little migration the first time the Tribute in Light event occurred, so migrating birds were not much affected. Eventually, and a bit surprisingly, an agreement was reached that when radar showed that a large migration event was occurring, the lights would be turned off for a period of time. In 2023, Goldberg got to watch the event and witness the effect it had on birds.
I felt dazed. I’d seen close to 10,000 birds in five hours and gotten to watch nocturnal migration up close, which was extraordinary. But because of the extreme light, it was a twisted version of what it should have been. Birds are subjected to experiments in the lab all the time, but this was the real world. I didn’t like it, but I recognized the importance of working with the memorial’s organizers to monitor the effect of the light on birds and allow them safe passage at critical times. (p. 224)
Even a city birding cheerleader like Goldberg was deeply affected by that night, as he writes: “What kind of a city is this? I thought. I didn’t want an answer.” (p. 224)
A basic fact is that urban birding often occurs in areas of less than ideal conditions. In one chapter, Goldberg, who only rarely chases birds, seeks out a vagrant Gray Kingbird right next to a very busy and loud section of highway. In another chapter, while checking out a stretch of the Bronx River, the only real river in the midst of New York, he sees a Spotted Sandpiper foraging among litter and trash next to a foul run-off pipe.
The river was grungy; but birds foraged here. I wrapped my head around that. There was no perfect environment. Cities are real—if wildly imperfect—ecosystems. Even in its current state, the Bronx River had a lot to offer. (p. 207)
The overarching story in Bird City is that large, dense cities are potentially a deadly stopover for birds. Yet at the same time, in New York at least, there are individuals and organizations hard at work trying to make the city a welcoming place for birds to migrate through or even breed. Goldberg’s chapter on the Ospreys breeding in the saltmarshes of Jamaica Bay is a welcome bit of reporting on how, with some dedicated help and skilled management, even New York City habitats can be restored for wildlife. But it will always be a battle.
Bird City visits many parts of this great city. There are chapters on hawkwatching, the lives of owls in Central Park, and tales from the local Christmas Bird Counts. The book introduces readers to many areas of New York that are well known only by the birding residents and recounts some fascinating stories of the city’s unique history.
To listen to Mark Lynch’s interview with Ryan Goldberg for his Inquiry show on WICN, go to: <https://wicn.org/podcast/ryan-goldberg/>