Birders: The Central Park Effect

when i was in my 20s i moved to new york city from out west i fell in love with the city but i missed being surrounded by trees and animals and birds so i found myself escaping to nature whenever i could then i'd come back to new york and hang up my binoculars eventually i tried taking my binoculars into central park and discovered there was this hidden piece of nature right in the middle of the city this familiar place suddenly wasn't so familiar anymore it was like i was stepping through a portal and finding a wild world in my own backyard [Music] it's unusual that you can locate the moment in the day when you do something that kind of changes your life and i can uh 15 years ago in march i was at a lunch in manhattan not that many blocks from central park and uh someone just said apropos of nothing oh the warblers will be coming through central park soon and i had no idea what warblers were and i asked him and he said they're neo-tropical migrants which i didn't know what that meant either and he finally said they're beautiful little birds who spend the winter in central america or south america or the southern part of the country and every year they fly through central park following these ancient migratory pathways and almost mystically i just knew i was gonna go out and find them oh my god holy freaking moses hey elise it's 8 30 in the morning i know you're on your way to the park to see the hooded but there's a proponentary at the tip of the point so take a look he's gorgeous okay do you think this little bird realizes that he's like causing joy for all these primates standing around just kind of staring at him he just wants us more than 200 species of birds are seen every year in central park roughly a quarter of all the bird species found in the united states and canada toward the end of april and on into may the park explodes with bird life on a good spring morning there can be more than a hundred different species in the park where are you oh is that it fly catching right there yeah yeah got it the park hosts a community of several hundred birders most like the birds themselves are seasonal migrants visiting only in the spring and fall but some of them are the regulars coming into the park throughout the year ah the bird is still here flitting around as it always does yeah that's the bird is right there six days six days that bird has been here i know one of lloyd's friends has made the comment when he comes to park he says i've never seen birds so cooperative i mean they just whether it's because they're on migration they're used to the people they're the the yellow-sorted world over here if that bird is getting within three or four feet of view if you went to see that on the breeding grounds that bird would be 60 to 80 feet up high and you would never get the views that you're getting and that's the experience with a lot of birds that hit central park birds get here they may not have seen people for three four days or they certainly never saw right and they are friendly it's like they don't care about how many people are here did we get tired of looking at a cardinal no how could you honestly get tired of looking at these guys that's a whole different story if you get tired of looking at the common birds you might as well just pack it in i mean these birds are just gorgeous [Music] they breasted warbler boreal owl grey cat bird hermit rash indigo bunting wood duck is that the full name do you remember the bird that that first made you go oh god no that wasn't it wasn't one particular scar always looked at birds and so i can't say the first bird that has made me go whoa especially because almost any bird can make me go whoa oh baltimore oriole adult male baltimore oriole in the tree right there [Music] oh blackburnian gotta find the you can bleep that there he is and he is beautiful oh there we go yeah okay sir [Music] it turns every morning into a treasure hunt really um you never know what you're gonna find my friends mock me for what i do in the spring because i just they know i tell them they know from experience from april 15th until memorial day they won't see me because i'm birding someplace up here because i do enjoy the song so much and um pretty ear dependent that makes the spring sort of ideal for me because they're singing their guts out plus in spring they're in their gorgeous spring plumage but the main thing is it's just you know spring here in central park is so spectacular [Music] i had always wanted to have some kind of relationship with nature um i grew up loving the outdoors and feeling like there was something there for me if i could only figure out what but i never could figure out what um had a hard time figuring out what i was supposed to do with pretty scenery besides take a picture of it really was when i got involved with this woman and her sister and brother-in-law are total birders so i politely went out with them on a saturday afternoon just the park was mobbed and went to belleviere castle and they're looking at these little birds in the trees there and we stepped behind the the castle and they're in the undergrowth this little bird a little brown bird just i later realized was aviri which is beautiful little thrush cinnamon colored back and i've been walking in central park pretty much daily for the previous seven years and i thought it was a place of pigeons and sparrows uh and we proceeded on down into the ramble and it's like the trees were hung with ornaments it was amazing seeing this familiar urban park filled with birds like that and gaudy birds bright yellows greens reds blues blacks whites uh was one of those rare times in an adult's life where the world suddenly seems more magical rather than less i got so sick and tired of my friends who are non-birders asking me oh what's with the burning thing how come we're not seeing you in may blah blah blah blah blah blah that i just wrote them down and wrote down the seven pleasures of birding so i could rattle them off and say okay this is why i do birding these are the seven pleasures number one is the beauty of the birds duck number two is the joy of being in a natural setting [Music] number three would probably be the joy of scientific discovery [Music] number four is the joys of hunting without the bloodshed because you've gotta you know kind of stalk the bird very often to get it without killing the bird [Music] i can almost completely forget i'm in the city when i'm walking through central park especially in the north woods [Music] you know you feel really like you're in a wildlife refuge at times [Music] i usually walk into an area and listen i spend a lot of time listening and i find peripheral vision is sometimes better than actually looking for something [Music] but oftentimes you just see movement i'll spot a little tiny bit of movement either the color will be slightly different than anything in the surrounding area but i'll be looking up and something will catch my attention and usually it's a bird number five is the joy of puzzle solving so it's a little bit of a game what am i seeing you know what am i looking for can i figure out what this is i love it when i just see a small portion of a bird and then you have to sort of piece it together you watch you wait maybe you never see the whole bird at one time you only get little pieces here and there you would think like listening to all these little bird songs and picking out okay i hear this this and this over here you would think that you wouldn't be able to do that over helicopters and kids crying and people yelling and car alarms and construction noises but you tune all of those out pretty quickly [Music] number six is the joy of collecting it's kind of like stamp collecting in that most birders keep lists every time you get a new bird that's one word that you can add to the collection [Music] so that's an american red star it sounded like there was a black and white that's hanging from over here there's a red-eyed virio singing over there i'd like to see it i know i'm not sure it would like to be seen though that's the problem star is one of the matriarchs i think of birding in central park it's sort of like an oral tradition for musicians like folk musicians there are people who are mentors star is somebody who really loves to engage with people in addition to being obviously obsessed with birding she's part of central park there would be no denying that four times a week every spring and fall for almost 30 years star sapphire has been leading bird walks in central park i'm just raising my rates they have been six dollars i'm gonna have to raise them to eight there you go they've been six dollars for almost 10 years i make enough to sort of almost get by i used to make what could be called a living now far less so but i love what i do uh okay let's see who's right of center is this chestnut sided warbler just moving right just watch for small movement it's a joy to watch the the light go on in somebody's eyes when they see a bird and know what they're looking at and they kind of get it perfect i don't look forward to retiring i am enormously lucky in that i absolutely love what i do every day that i do it it doesn't mean that sometimes it's not tedious for moments or for hours or the day when you have to come up with 38 birds and the birds are not cooperating and you end up with 37. it's work but i could keep this up for i think for hundreds of years nobody gets the chance to find that out i just got stripes on head cause it was sort of hidden the other thing that flashed in my head was warm eating but that's high because all i had were stripes but i don't think it was kathryn was my friend we became friends instantly when she came on one of my walks she's a good birder and she has great joy in birding and she's got very sharp eyes i can't see it i'm gonna hang back here there it is just popped up i think i'm gonna go back to nuther i think it's a nut hat there it's a it's absolutely absolutely red breast acting yeah i just caught it like a bit of its head and i was like oh i think it's a nut that was awesome let's find something else good yeah that was i love this time of year when you know a surprise can happen at any second [Music] i take my binoculars pretty much everywhere female magnolia i don't take them to school but pretty much everywhere else my binoculars are with me i had a dream just before spring migration started i was standing in front of a tree and like every single migrant in the world was nutrient i was so happy that was one of the best dreams i've ever had the main question people ask me is why birds and i guess they're so alive and active and beautiful and varied there's something down here and makes you feel kind of protective i guess with the bird [Music] and i don't want them scared [Music] a male american red star he's cute number seven is the best one that's what i call the unicorn effect because after you've been birding for even a little while you become familiar with the birds just from seeing them in the book and the field guide or whatever and but you've never seen them in real life so they sort of take on this mythological status almost you're very familiar with the bird you know what it's supposed to look like but you've never seen it and then one day there it is for real live and it's as if this unicorn came walking out of the forest it's almost like seeing a movie star on the sidewalk you've seen their picture you've heard all about them you feel this artificial sense of intimacy and then you realize that they actually exist in the physical world and you're sharing space with them and that they really are there uh that's that's what it was like every time i would see these birds they really exist there they are so beautiful and strange picture yourself a migrating bird it's coming into dawn you've made your before 500 mile flight during the night you're starting to see light in the eastern sky and you want to start heading down to a place that you're going to spend the day what they're looking for what they've been looking for for millions of years evolutionarily is a woods to drop into there are nights in which millions of birds literally millions of birds fly right over manhattan and as dawn breaks a few thousand of them drop down to uh to say it's time for me to eat right here so if if the united states were all one big wonderful forest you would have these birds all scattered but what happens when they are on the northeast coast and here you have this urban mess of buildings and no green showing and they'll see a little patch of green from way up there that central park and they'll funnel in scientists call it the central park effect [Music] it's well understood now that the all the major cities the biggest parks are places that really do concentrate the migrants and they don't concentrate there by accident they concentrate there because they are choosing to land in that spot because they see and know that that's going to produce what they need most of the birds we see as migrants are coming from the tropics one part of the other tropics the songbirds largely are coming from mexico guatemala costa rica from south america in some cases the shorebirds have come all the way from argentina here comes nine o'clock at night moving across the country and all that blue is birds migrating this is a radar map that shows yeah it shows a storm but the main thing is it's showing a continent full of birds passing overhead all night long beginning around 9 00 p.m so central park located right there's a huge corridor of birds right up in there because they're migrating along the coast heading up on into the canadian provinces to breed the goal of all these migrants the whole reason they leave the tropics in the first place is to breed and raise young where they can find an abundant food supply and for a few months each year the fields and forests and tundras of the united states and canada provide an immensely rich diet of insects and other creatures birds are great because there are lots and lots of kinds of them but there aren't too many kinds of them if there were as many kinds of birds as there are beetle there wouldn't be bird watching because you know people don't beetle watch because it's just hopeless you know one one cubic yard of dirt and you know you've got probably as many species as you have in the entire united states of birds so it's uh it's a it's just the right size there's always something sort of interesting to look for um and even when there's not each bird is itself this microcosm of behavior often inscrutable mysterious so even when there's nothing interesting going on in the in the macra cosmos you've still got this toei scratching around in the dirt doing its toei thing which is so dear and so unlike anything else there's a wonderful word that e.o wilson great biologist uses biophilia that we have this innate love of the natural world love is almost the wrong word we grew up inside of it and so we needed around us to feel more like ourselves birding is this the great mediating activity between what's urban and what's wild and what's earth and what sky and i love having both simultaneously [Music] [Music] migration is really good for about four or maybe five weeks where we have at least 60 species of birds a day uh 15 to 23 warbler species per day it's it's really marvelous and then it peters out at this point in migration i'm really tired at the end of every walk i can barely get myself home and i just kind of collapse into bed okay i just need to regroup for a second so i finished the birding season on june 2nd and on june 7th i have a bone scan and i have a cat scan and then uh five days later i go to see my oncologist and talk about that so i do a bunch of medical stuff every june um but i also do go birding i'll go out to jamaica bay a few times and the coast a few times but i will probably only bird maybe eight times in june uh as opposed to five to six days a week during the month of may by early june nearly all the migrants have passed through the park and settled in their nesting grounds somewhere to the north but for a couple dozen species central park is their nesting ground central park is mainly known for its migrants it's a famous migration spot but there are birds here year round in the summer months the robins breed here the cardinals breed here a few years back there was a great robin's nest that all everybody knew about up by the shakespeare delacorte theater which was on the statue of romeo and juliet it was the nest was right there on juliet's chest with romeo looking down at it roger tory peterson predicted long ago when people thought that birds were going to all go extinct he said no no birds are going to adapt they'll adapt to cities and they have they certainly have not all species but red tails have magnificently adapted central park's most famous bird is a red-tailed hawk named pale male he built his home on the ledge of a fancy fifth avenue apartment building right across the street from the park during the breeding season his fans gather below watching for activity in the nest figured out how to use a building as a sort of artificial cliff just as birds everywhere make use of the human world it's ironic that central park has provided my link to wilderness because it is an artificially created environment this wasn't just a wild piece of new york that had been fenced off and allowed to remain wild and it's man-made entirely the streams around us are turned off with the flick of a switch the water we see running here is coming out of a pipe just out of sight and you can never see the origin of the pipe it looks like a a natural spring coming out of a little rock cave and once the exaltation of early birding wore off in me i would think i'm in this little toy environment and i want to be out in wilderness but wilderness itself is like that now you know the florida everglades are maintained by pumps and sluices that were built by the army corps of engineers who 100 years ago pretty much destroyed the everglades central park so much of it is planted so much of it was brought in so much of it was designed and yet it looks very naturalistic even though this is a landscaped environment and not a real woodland um it is it is a real we're making it into a real woodland and every single part of it is important so the insects are important the the fungus is important for breaking down plant material and adding nutrients to the soil we really are trying to get as many of those natural systems going that a real woodland would have [Music] the people who manage central park have to manage it for a whole lot of different things they're not just managing it for birds they're managing it for the use by millions of people on a daily basis managing for human safety energy for transportation managed landscapes are are the norm at this point even some of our most wild national parks and wildlife refuges have management underway at them adjusting water levels to mimic nature and so on there is no land out there in the us that we don't manage to some degree or another the truth is human impact is part of the universe and there may be a new kind of nature the nature that lives in urban islands that will reach its own dynamics its own interactions that'll be different than nature in a bigger wilder area and it's a perfectly valid way for nature to exist so the fact that birds are everywhere is fantastic of course but i remember when i started birding and i couldn't believe that central park was so full of birds i just thought i had discovered this unlimited resource that the world was filled with birds and then comes the discovery on the heels of that that actually one of the reasons central park is so great for birds is because they don't really have that many other places to land and i think the funny thing about bird watching is it can trick you into thinking that the natural world is doing great because there are so many birds you can find almost anywhere you go but they are bound up with a world that's a natural world that in fact is really in tremendous peril [Music] so [Music] beginning in the late summer and carrying on through october the park is once again filled with migrants this time they are heading south back to their wintering grounds there aren't that many spots as rich and vibrant and full of bugs as central park birds start to know the spots that they stopped in before that worked and so central park serves as a place in which a bird remembers that it wants to get there to use it for a few days on the stopover it's sort of like having a favorite motel that you stop in on because it's a halfway down to the spot you spend the winter and you love this place [Music] yes purple finches thank you catherine [Music] three there were three oh landline land they did [Music] i bird all year round because the birds of any area change through the seasons that's one of the the joys of it nice go uh this is a ruby i love the way it's uh munching the insects though charming bird [Music] time has a different meaning for birders you see the changes really from day to day and from week to week in foliage in the bird populations and so on okay i'm sitting for just one second um time has a slightly different meaning for me now that i have terminal breast cancer um i have a great deal more enjoyment it's heightened my joys in life and i always loved what i did but it's heightened even more because i know it's not only is it not going to last forever it's not going to last all that much longer for years at the end of a season i would have pangs when i said oh is this the last black-throated blue warbler i'm gonna see for this season or for this year and now i do wonder if it's the last one i think star would have been a very intense obsessive birder no matter what but given a potential end date to that which we all have but we just don't think about the sort of fury with which you might try to see as much as possible is probably increased i would guess that's true in starr's case okay this is my current notebook and i've got maybe 50 of them going back through the years since i was a little kid uh this this happens to have started at the beginning of 2010. um and i use a four-letter code and so i'm about to do today's list today is the 29th barn swallow um ooh we had that red-rested nut hatch which i didn't uh mark down here for new york city and the fun part of doing a list of course is counting 44 i'm so happy we got over 40. so 224 plus 3 is 227. that's great there's one more day in this month and i'd wanted to get to 2 30 and it's now possible i've one to two notebooks a year going back heavily over the last 30 years that's 60. i have about 80 notebooks i think all together my mother threw out the ones from when i was a child or i would have more i know but this is really fun when you're in the middle of a blizzard and you're just hunkered down with a cup of tea this is kind of fun to go through and remember what you've had remember what you've done in happier times [Music] in the early days when i i was actually missing work time to come out in the morning to go birding in central park ending up basically ruining day after day you know torpedo at morning's work the day's pretty much over and yet morning is when you want to be out in central park it did present a lot like an addiction that sense of anxiousness impatience uneased that can only be stilled by getting over to the park getting the binoculars up and seeing the first warbler of the morning sort of like the first cigarette of the morning absolutely i think that sense that when you're not birding you're missing out on something um not just intellectually but almost in a bodily way as if you were part of the flock you know as if you need to be out there with these animals speaks just to some deep human impulse [Music] [Music] really [Music] worm eating warbler yellow-throated warbler oven bird northern shoveler blackheaded go that cold water [Music] i mean i think it's a i think it's a slightly odd activity for the general public people do laugh at you you can be what would be considered a normal person interested in fashion or whatever which i'm not and still be a birder i mean birder being a birder doesn't necessarily change who the best of you is but i do think it tends to make you more interested in like science and the environment in general so i guess consider birders geeks except i don't like the term geek because it implies being not cool and with old ladies in tennis shoes with the idea of birders and men know what they would tell their wife they were going fishing and they would carry a fishing rod and they would because they wouldn't admit that they weren't bird watching because it wasn't it wasn't manly so the fishing was okay fishing was fine yeah um tell me what you thought of birds before your first experience burners burgers yeah i didn't want it i didn't want to be when i thought i thought it was embarrassing i still think it's embarrassing a little bit you know you're you're basically defenseless when you're doing this you you've got your binoculars up you're looking at something that nobody else is looking at and everybody else is looking at you and thinking you know what a dweeb uh there's there's really no way to look cool there's no way to look elegant there's no way to look sort of a remove from it all when you've got the binoculars up you are basically betraying that you want something and you're going after it and that's sort of the essence of uncoolness i get up about quarter to five i'll get into the park about 5 30 quarter to six and it's dark for another hour i guess it's a way of realizing that i'm still alive or that i am alive uh working with machines doesn't do that [Music] i've got to go out and touch a tree once in a while i've got to look at a bird i've got to see a squirrel moving there's something in me that requires that and birding opens me to all of that central park will give me a nature fix even if i'm sitting on a bus going across town on 86th street i'll look into the park through the bus window and see something i'll see a bird i'll see a squirrel i see the green or in winter the white of the snow does something to to to feed my insides my soul if i had one [Music] there's stuff going on that you never noticed before that you find fascinating or beautiful or awe-inspiring wow yeah i never saw that before it really does belong there and it really does have a life of its own uh migrating is a risky time of these birds life histories it's a dangerous process there's no doubt about it [Music] millions of birds die during this process if 10 million swings thrusters leave the north heading back to in that case the andes only about 8 million of them will get to the andes and only about 5 million and will make it back all the way to the breeding grounds again [Music] basically my work is in a machine shop and so that makes it very easy for me to make feeders the feeders in central park are only up during the winter but hanging a jug full of seeds so that the birds who are wintering have a little extra food we're not we're not making birds live that wouldn't have maybe one or two percent really the feeders are there for our entertainment they're good for the birds in a little way and they're good for the bird watchers in a big way so we have american goldfinches a lot of them wow there's a bright one tit mouse white breast in that hatch fine siskin it's a lot of plants that's good that's really cool [Music] i don't see birds as cute little things they're part of nature if you've ever seen a robin rip a worm out of the ground and hammer the thing until it's dead and then chew on it maybe break it in half and swallow it you know wild animals do what they do to survive it's their economy and they're not nice about it if you're talking about serious birders something little up here they see nature as it is you go out and you look at it it has its own raw beauty [Music] as the cold weather sets in a different kind of migration takes place birds that spend the rest of the year farther north come down to the relatively balmy climate and often unfrozen waters of central park a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that birds can't exist when it's cold out so long as they can get food a lot of birds can make a living here and they don't care specifically how cold it gets i love to get to 100 birds in the city i love numbers to 100 birds in the city by the end of january and 150 by the end of february ooh gulls yay just for a minute i want to see what's going on over here well looking at birds really takes away sadness in in a lot of us if i'm for instance if i'm in pain or something looking at birds takes you out of yourself into the real world i'm such a minut any one person is such a my new part of the world but you go out and look at some of the rest of the natural world and it puts things in perspective it also just makes you forget about yourself which is a good thing you know for a while every december for the last 110 years central park birders have been getting together for the annual christmas bird count it might seem like a hopeless task to count every last bird in the park but if enough people do it for enough years patterns do emerge you're part of a vast network of citizen scientists and volunteers who are out both enjoying birds by doing something that's really important science scramble team this way we're compiling this data and out of this we're now producing the birds and decline report that showed common birds in decline not birds that are on the endangered species list but common ones eastern meadowlarks bobwhite quail and things like that um a blue jay did you get the big flock of house foreign we found that nearly a quarter of the species of birds have declined more than 50 percent in the last 40 years these are birds that we know and love and are used to seeing every day yellow belly sap sucker unless we reverse that trend we're going to lose many of them during our lifetimes and that report was made possible by the long-term monitoring and tracking that you do and as we think about what our children and grandchildren will see they're going to be looking back at our counts now and hopefully they will be doing the same thing and maintaining this this amazing wonderful tradition tufted titmouse northeast northwest this has been a big year for us rambo 31. did anyone see the turkey today at the boathouse in the in the um the lake room he's back there by the tables the turkey was there [Music] [Music] there just appears to be a lot less birds now than there were even five or six years ago i'm burning the park 20 plus years and i have seen an unbelievable decrease certainly since since the 40s and the 50s there has been a decline it's not just central park it's it's true certainly everywhere around here just the overall general feeling is that it's the numbers are just way way down it's very disheartening [Music] i'm just going to look over here under the bridge for a minute i'm alive and i want to live my life while i'm here and i want to experience as much as i can i don't know how to not stop and look at birds guys it doesn't mean that i don't take care of myself i take my chemotherapy in the morning with breakfast yeah i have oatmeal blueberries and chemotherapy oh i didn't tell you my most fabulous birding experience of the year and possibly of the decade last sunday i had a phone call from a birding buddy of mine in england and i see something big fly at my fire escape and i'm going oh my god it's going to be a red-tailed hawk until i saw it it was a an immature female northern goshawk ah it's it's pretty uncommon and to have one land on your fire escape i was just here i am screaming long distance to england yeah it's the second best bird i've ever had from my apartment in the 22 years i've been living there the the beauty the sudden beauty where there wasn't a moment before it was just it was so thrilling it's like it's like magic when a bird just suddenly appears in front of you in a most unlikely place or time [Music] so [Music] it must be spring good morning we're seeing all of the birders who we never see at any other time of year it's almost like as the warblers start making an appearance for bird to start making appearances as well [Music] red-winged blackbird now i've seen one my spring has officially begun i don't think of it as a hobby uh any more than i think of raising my children as a hobby it's you're simply embedded in this deeply human activity you know if buffalo migrated through the park i would go out and watch them but birds are all that's left uh birds are all that's left of the wild world that we can see almost anywhere in the country and so i think one of the reasons bird watching is so popular now is this awareness of how fleeting things are everyone's hungry hungry hungry to touch something and hold something that we feel slipping away so i don't know i think some people are predisposed towards just liking birds i like birds i don't know why i tried not to i tried really hard to like not be a bird freak for a while and i mean it's like fishing you know some people don't get fishing like me fishing to me is an exercise in boredom um whereas for other people it's zen so you know everybody's got their own thing it's the writer's life really it's it's uh any artist's life is failing failing failing waiting around nothing will ever work again all the interesting birds are gone nature's falling apart and then suddenly you're seeing a prothonotary warbler and all of that is forgotten and there's this this moment when when the world's okay so it was uh great fun to have the first walk of the season just to see people again and to see the spring plants and the fact that we've all made it through another winter is um it's it's great it's a great joy it's a great joy to be back [Applause] there's all kinds of things going on in here happy spring everybody [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: The Bryan Museum

Views: 5,000

Rating: 4.9692307 out of 5

Keywords: Birding, Birders, Central Park, New York, Extinct, Save Planet, Save Lives

Id: f83VQfYDAIs

Length: 60min 11sec (3611 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020