along his monumental voyage of the beagle, charles darwin visited the literal end of the earth: the glaciated crags at the southern tip of south america. here, he shot countless wildlife specimens in the name of western science, including a handsome raptor with a gleaming white belly. today, we call this rare bird the white-throated caracara. and the easiest place to see it is the world’s most infamous dump.

that dump is the sanitary landfill in ushuaia, argentina, now implicated as the potential epicenter of the ongoing hantavirus cluster that began onboard the m/v hondius. patient zero and his wife were dutch birders who’d reportedly visited the landfill seeking the caracara, and argentinian authorities are amid studying the landfill’s rats for evidence of the virus. yet the head-scratching question remains: what’s the deal with birdwatching at dumps?

let’s start with the scene at hand. ushuaia is the world’s southernmost city and feels nordic with rows of colorful, modern buildings set in the hills between the sea and the 8,000-foot peaks of tierra del fuego national park. its unique forests, modern infrastructure, and geographical location make it a world-famous destination for wildlife lovers and a popular port of departure for antarctic cruises.

typical ushuaia birding trips begin with the southern beech forests gnarled by the inclement marine weather, where birders target rarities like the western hemisphere’s largest woodpecker, the magellanic woodpecker, and the world’s southernmost parrot, the austral parakeet. many then head to the relleno sanitario, the landfill overlooking the beagle channel east of the city.

observing from beyond the fence, birders scan immense gull and raptor flocks feeding on offal from meat processing plants, searching specifically for the white-throated caracara. this species ranges widely across the southern andes, but its solitary habits and scarcity make it exceptionally challenging to encounter—except at this dump. of the 1600 or so white-throated caracara photos in cornell’s macaulay library, a third come from ushuaia’s landfill.

birds aren’t just choosing landfills out of convenience—landfills represent refugia amid the habitat destruction of human development. humans clear vital native forests, wetlands, and grasslands with farms, cities, and infrastructure, stripping species of their homes and food sources. some birds, however, are capable of adapting to these changes if they can still find appropriate resources. landfills accepting food waste, especially animal parts from human activities like butchering or agriculture, have therefore become strongholds for scavenging species in places where they might be persecuted or where development might otherwise leave them hungry. caracaras are born scavengers.

and landfills feed birds around the world. dozens of bald eagles spend the winter at a dump in anchorage, alaska. one team of researchers tallied over 500,000 seagulls spread across three landfills in ohio. before it receded to mexico, the only consistent home of the tamaulipas crow in the united states was the brownsville, texas landfill. another study using community science data submitted to ebird found that in the united states, certain species were more likely to be observed at landfills than in their expected habitat, especially birds higher up on the food chain.

there are even species for which landfills are critical to their continued existence. the hooded vulture faces widespread persecution across subsaharan africa and is now endangered, but is the most common species at several landfills across ethiopia. it’s a similar story for the egyptian vulture, which inhabits landfills around the mediterranean, eastern africa, and southwest asia. the greater adjutant, among the world’s rarest storks, feeds and nests around landfills in south and southeast asia.

it’s not without consequences, though. birds at landfills can suffer from disease plus intentional and unintentional poisoning. landiflls are often located in the outskirts of cities near airports, where the density of birds leads to more plane strikes. unnaturally concentrating birds around feeding sites could potentially lead to faster disease spread, and sick birds might spread pathogens beyond the dump via their poop.

so it’s not really a good thing that birds gather at landfills. rather, it’s a consequence of human activity, and one that inevitably leads to human-wildlife conflict. but landfills and other waste areas can represent an opportunity. here in new york city, the city and state parks departments have capped the largest landfills with an impermeable layer and topped them with native plants. the infamous fresh kills landfill is now the city’s second-largest park and hosts a colony of a new york state-threatened bird called the grasshopper sparrow. the fountain and pennsylvania avenue landfills in brooklyn are now the beloved shirley chisholm state park, a stopover point and winter home for migrating waterfowl, shorebirds, and even owls like the snowy owl.

by concentrating birds, these areas also attract humans interested in looking at birds (including the author of this post). the ushuaia landfill was a major highlight of my antarctica trip. last week i called the head of a small town’s public works department and negotiated access to the landfill and sewage treatment complex—my brother-in-law and i found hundreds of sandpipers, including a threatened species rarely encountered in minnesota. if your target is many species at once, waste-dumping areas can sometimes host the highest diversity of any birding hotspot in the area.

birders usually don’t enter these landfills and we broadly consider it a low-risk activity. in fact, landfills are such a well-established niche for birds that experienced birders don’t bat an eye at the idea of visiting them. but landfills still have their threats to humans, too. one 1997 study found that nyc landfill employees had a higher incidence of neurological, respiratory, and dermatological ailments versus the general public. a study of child laborers at landfills in south asia found similar results. and of course, rumors abound that the ongoing cluster of the andes virus variant of the hantavirus began at ushuaia’s landfill (though experts doubt that theory—the timing is wrong, the rat responsible for the andes virus doesn’t live in ushuaia, and the tierra del fuego province has never reported a case of the andes virus before).

folks might glom onto the idea that landfill birding is gross and it’s an easy scapegoat to explain the origin of a disease cluster. but we’ve built a world where our animals feel compelled to take refuge in our most unsavory places. so rather than blame birders for visiting landfills, it might be better to ask how we can fix the world so that there are better places than landfills for our birds.

—

postscript:

my schedule is a little quiet now—currently preparing for my slate of summer events and you’ll be first to hear about them.

last weekend marked one of the most magical birding days i’ve ever had—i rented a car and drove around the prairie pothole region of central north dakota. it’s loaded with birds that we new yorkers salivate over and in incredible abundance. there were bitterns standing on the side of the road, yellow-headed blackbirds filling the air with horrible noises, phalaropes canoodling, and some of america’s skulkiest sparrows out in the open, singing. among them i was lucky to find the range-restricted baird’s sparrow, but failed to get a picture. so instead, here’s a photo of the fast-declining upland sandpiper, who eschews water for stubbly fields and grasslands.

spring migration!!! is here!!! i hope you’re getting outside to see some birds.

you may remember that i wrote a book about nature in nyc, published last year. it’s as relevant as ever, especially since it’s nice outside again so there’s more to look at. please consider buying it for yourself, for your friends, or telling your local bookshop to stock it.

if you want to come look at stuff outside with me, you have plenty of opportunities in the next few weeks. note that my walks are rain-or-shine, canceled only for lightning or severe weather.

wednesday april 29, 5:30-7pm: prospect park birding, meet at the stranahan statue. free, register here. the popular vale of cashmere is closed, but we’ll try out a new route.

monday may 4, 8-9:30am: morning birding in washington square park. free, register here for details.

friday may 8, 5:30-7pm: summer on the hudson bird walk at riverside park, meet at 120th street and riverside drive entrance. free, no registration required.

wednesday may 13, 5:30pm-7pm: prospect park birding, meet at the stranahan statue. free, register here.

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each spring, billions of migratory birds stream northward, filling forests, marshes, and even city parks with song and color. it’s among nature’s most magical spectacles and should fill you with immense joy. but sometimes it also brings an inappropriate amount of stress: why are other people seeing cool birds and i’m not!!!!

birdwatching has undergone a relatively recent transformation thanks to apps like melin and ebird plus communities growing on discord and whatsapp. it’s wonderful that you can now see almost any bird species on demand—just open the app, check what other people are reporting, and then track their sightings down. but for that system to work, you also need people regularly going out looking for new things. and for me, there’s no better joy than stumbling on some rare or beautiful bird myself. you can find rare birds, too—it just takes a little know-how.

migration means more birds means more potential to find some really wonderful critters. so to celebrate the season, i present what’s going on in my head when i go looking for birds.

• go slooooooow. imagine birding as a game of where’s waldo where there are bird-shaped waldos of many colors, shapes, and sizes hiding among non-waldoes of trees, grass, and the ground. if you quickly flip through every page of a where’s waldo book, you won’t find any waldoes. be deliberate, stop often, scan slowly.

• detect movement. i usually don’t notice birds by seeing a bird—rather, i sense movement in my peripheral vision. movement means like branches bouncing, leaves rustling, or grass blades trembling. then i inspect the movement with binoculars. often there is a bird there (or a squirrel). again, go slow—some birds plod sloth-like through the habitat.

• listen. most birds vocalize. they sing or make “jay” and “pip” and “skraw” noises to alert each other to their presence. tune in, letting bird noises guide you through the habitat. you can learn to identify many bird species just from the sounds they make. other times i hear a sound i don’t recognize—a good sign to investigate. merlin bird id features a collection of sounds for most species, plus a machine learning model that is pretty good (but not perfect!) at identifying birds by sound.

• inspect all possible habitat. some birds live in trees, some skitter on the ground, some fly over and some sit still. stay vigilant and move your eyes around all of the places a bird could be. pay attention to your peripheral vision. phase between observing the whole scene and focusing on specific features, like scanning trunks for woodpeckers and limbs for nightjars.

• find food and water. each may, migratory birds arrive after thousands of miles hoping to refuel. they’re hungry and seeking seeds, fruit, and most importantly invertebrates. spend extra time at fruiting plants and flowering native trees that attract pollinators. big oak trees with hanging catkins can be especially good in the eastern US. some transient events might draw in lots of birds, like termites hatching out of a log on a hot day. also linger at shallow water for birds descending to drink, bathe, or catch flies.

• watch the weather. specific weather patterns force migratory songbirds out of the sky and into parks, while others can make birds more active. sudden weather snaps—a cold day after a lot of hot days or vice versa—can bring an influx of birds. so, too, can a foggy or raining morning during peak migration seasons. the end of a rainstorm can ignite a flurry of avian activity. certain winds, like south winds in spring and north winds in the fall, facilitate migration and carry more birds. cornell university’s birdcast uses doppler radar and weather forecasts to report and predict the quantity of birds migrating over and is a nice tool. but note that a high migration night doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of birds in your park and vice versa.

• learn the common birds. the vast majority of birds you see will be the commonly encountered ones, so start learning the 100 most common birds really well. the best tool to understand these birds, in my opinion, are the ebird target species for your county.

• learn the schedule. every bird species has its own little schedule, and the species you see vary by the time of year. knowing your local schedule can facilitate where to look. broadly in nyc, ducks are easiest to see in winter, woodcocks in march, songbirds in april, may, september, and october. august is best for sandpipers. the best way to learn the timing is to study the ebird bar charts for your location.

• build a search image. do you have any friends with a distinctive walk or who always wear their hat weird, such that even from a mile away you know it’s them? birders are kind of like that with birds. we develop little pictures in our brains of what seeing the bird is like, making it easier to see it again. a good example: the woodcock’s cryptic plumage makes it almost impossible for a new birder to find. but once you have a search image for a woodcock, your brain starts to notice them as a familiar shape and pattern in the leaf litter.

• bird every bird. the only way you can develop that search image is if you spend time with every bird, noticing all of their different plumages, behaviors, and irregularities. even the common ones. pigeons are excellent fliers and can easily be confused for falcons (and vice versa). large single-species flocks might hold a single rarer bird—in new york city, dickcissels are rare but sometimes join house sparrow flocks in winter.

• bird the birders. if you see someone pointing binoculars at a tree, they might be looking at something interesting. go ask them! you might see a cool bird or just make a new friend. or maybe you’ll add an important datapoint to your list of people to avoid.

• find a mentor. i have learned so much from having more seasoned birders teach me about the best spots, location-specific quirks, or subjective identification points. it’s also nice to have someone to whom you can ask your silliest questions. the easiest way to find a mentor is to take guided bird tours or to join your local birding club. don’t be afraid to ask more experienced birders if they want to go birding together.

• be a good community member. give back to the birding community by sharing your interesting findings, especially if you’re regularly chasing down other people’s rare birds. keep the habitat clean, don’t get too close to the birds and scare them off, don’t be too loud, and more generally be kind to others.

• always be birding. most birds fly. they also can’t read field guides, and sometimes break the rules. birds frequently end up on the wrong coast or show up at the totally wrong time of year. the first virginia rail i ever saw was at the entrance of my local subway station. you never know when you might encounter something amazing.

—

we went to colombia again, this time focusing on the popular circuit of lodges and reserves around the city of manizales. there were so many amazing experiences, but few topped seeing my most-wanted bird of the trip: a flock of red-ruffed fruitcrows that surrounded us on our first morning, flopping between trees and filling the air with their low hoots like wind over the top of a jug. i take these trips with guide camilo orjuela-barrera, who’s one of the kindest and most patient bird guides i’ve ever met. if you want him to organize you a tour, let me know and i can provide his whatsapp number.

prescript

the clocks have changed, the potatoes have returned, and the great outsides are calling once again. and woof, after this year’s frigid winter and all of the bad stuff, i really need it. i hope you’re getting out there, too. if you need some ideas, i have my spring walk schedule below and i hope to see you at some of them!

saturday april 25, 9-10:30am: spring birding in owl’s head park with the young conservationists. free, register here.

saturday april 25, 1pm prospect park, 2:30pm fiona’s bar: i’m leading a walk to celebrate the launch of public transport magazine’s latest edition, “animals in new york.” the walk will start in at prospect park’s vanderbilt st. entrance on the sw side and end at fiona’s bar on flatbush ave.

sunday april 26: wings over wave hill! there’ll be a bird walk from 9:30-11am and an owl pellet dissection from 12-2pm. $17 including grounds admission, register here.

wednesday april 29, 5:30-7pm: prospect park birding, meet at the stranahan statue. free, register here.

monday may 4, 8-9:30am: morning birding in washington square park. free, register here.

wednesday may 13, 5:30pm-7pm: prospect park birding, meet at the stranahan statue. free, register here.

and remember, it’s never too late to buy my book wild nyc and tell your local book store to order a few copies! last week i went to the wildlife refuge visitor center and saw that they’d recently stocked it, a thing i did not ask them to do. i might do an event with them, tbd.

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aaron soh has identified over 250,000 butterflies, including species photographed alive for the first time since their scientific description. he made most of these identifications from his personal computer.

soh hasn’t seen most of these insects himself. instead, he represents a new kind of naturalist emerging in the past decade thanks to online platforms like ebird, bugguide.net, and inaturalist. rather than documenting his own sightings, soh identifies the endless butterfly photos that users upload to the inaturalist community science database. he’s especially good at pinning down rare and never-before-photographed species.

for the uninitiated: inaturalist is one of the world’s most popular community science platforms. users upload photos looking for fast machine learning-powered species identification suggestions. then, those photos enter an open database where a community of human users discuss, validate, correct, and elaborate on those identifications. the result is a vast dataset presently featuring nearly 300,000,000 observations of 550,000+ species including where and when the user observed them, providing a treasure trove of information for amateur and professional nature lovers.

the human identifiers have always fascinated me, folks who find fulfillment observing nature vicariously through others. some are professional researchers—john ascher, professor at the national university of singapore and taxonomist-in-residence at the lee kong chian natural history museum, is the site’s second most prolific identifier with over 2,000,000 identifications. others are amateurs—with nearly 2,400,000 identifications, the site’s most prolific identifier is alan horstmann, a medical doctor who just really really really likes plants. soh sits firmly in the latter camp.

i first noticed soh when he identified a butterfly photo i uploaded to inaturalist from a trip to costa rica, his “great find!” comment pointing to the fact that mine was only the second observation of the species on the internet. since then, soh often appears when i upload photos of small south american butterflies, in several cases alerting me that my findings are especially notable. a twitter friend of mine recently posted about a butterfly he’d photographed for the first time alive—and soh was the identifier, of course. so i figured i’d sit down with him and ask what makes him tick.

this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

how did you get started?

so i don’t work in a job that’s related to nature—my full time job is in the legal sector and this is just my hobby. i’ve been interested in nature, specifically butterflies, since i was young. i started reading books on butterflies and then over time started going on nature walks.

before i was on inaturalist i was on flickr a lot—i would always go through people’s photo albums where there’d be unlabeled or unidentified butterflies, and there’d be moments when i’d find something rare-looking. i think i officially got my inaturalist account in 2017, but i’d been aware of the app before that because i would look online to see which species of butterflies had been photographed and come across inaturalist sightings. sometimes the identification would be wrong, and after a while it got a little bit annoying to see all of these wrong ids. so i thought, hey, i should do something about it, and created my account and started identifying.

why are you so passionate about helping others?

to be very honest, it’s kind of a selfish reason. since i was a young kid, part of my interest in butterflies was knowing or trying to understand what people have seen in nature beyond the dead specimens in reference books. so i’m constantly trying to see which species have been photographed alive. that’s what makes inaturalist such a good website—it catalogs every sighting and it’s a convenient-to-use database where i can search for things very easily and keep up-to-date.

even if i don’t see the species myself, i’m happy that other people have sighted something great. it’s not just the relief of knowing that the species is still out there and not extinct, but it’s sometimes hard to imagine they’re actually alive, especially the weirder looking ones. so, to finally see a picture of a species in the flesh, understand its design and how it actually survives, it’s kind of an indescribable feeling for me.

how did you train yourself?

I didn’t really set out to train myself in the same manner you might study for an exam. for me it comes naturally—i’m really interested in butterflies, and i’ve been reading a lot of reference material even before i started on inaturalist including books and research papers on butterflies. since there are so many thousands of species of butterflies, it becomes an almost endless rabbit hole. i couldn’t just have my interest limited to a certain percentage of butterflies and i naturally got drawn in and immersed into all of them.

when you identify the species from a photo, how do you know for sure what it is?

this is a difficult question—it really depends on what species we’re talking about. for those rare species that have no prior live shots, i only identify them if i’m very, very certain. i basically keep in mind the species that have never been photographed alive and i’m constantly on the lookout for them, so i start to develop a special recognition for them. i make sure that it’s really what i think it is and refer to my references, but most of the time when i see one it’s like, wow, that’s definitely it and it can’t be anything else—i don’t have to force the comparison.

for the others, there’s always an identification system or diagnostic key so you need to know where to look, which source to refer to, and make sure the information is up-to-date. of course i can’t say that i’m always correct—i’ve been corrected many, many times by people giving me information i wasn’t aware of previously. then i have to update myself and correct my own understanding.

(editor’s note: here, i asked soh “how do you identify a butterfly?” and he gave me a really wonderful in-depth answer going through many of the different families and the specific traits to look for. swallowtails are well-studied, large, and attractive, making identification straightforward. meanwhile, clearwing butterflies, which are often transparent, require close looks at the pattern of their veins. these butterflies often mimic other butterflies, so unrelated species might look similar and related butterflies look different. unfortunately i looked at the clock and realized that i was running out of time. so we summarized that it helps to get the basics down, like figuring out the family or subfamily—and then there’s an endless number of rabbit holes to dive into.)

how does it feel to tell someone they’re the first to ever photograph a species alive?

it always feels great, and it’s exciting especially if the photographer or observer is not someone who’s primarily interested in butterflies. for me it’s more exciting if they say they’re a birder and probably photographed the butterfly during some lull in activity of whatever birds they were shooting. either they didn’t think much of it, or they think it’s something worth sharing because they’re in a remote region (editor’s note: as a birder, i can vouch that his diagnosis is correct). when i realize of course i freak out and tell them how monumental or historic their sighting might have been. i feel like they understand. i sometimes type in all caps because that’s the only way i can communicate just how excited i feel and how amazing their photo is.

and you’ve even gotten to contribute to science, right?

i feel honored to have had the opportunity to publish in scientific journals, because i wasn’t actively seeking to be a part of those papers. the authors contacted me and i thought, why not—i find it meaningful and fun. and i’m glad that these observations and the people who made them have the chance to have their work put to use and allow the broader scientific community to engage. it demonstrates the power of inaturalist as a social media platform for people to share their observations and to interact with others who might be more familiar with the scientific side.

finally: what’s the most exciting thing you’ve identified?

the stuff that excites me most tends to be things that haven’t been documented for 100 or so years since their scientific description. for example, there was a sighting of a lycaenid butterfly from eastern brazil called Arawacus aethesa. it’s a poorly known endangered species and in november 2025 it was photographed alive for the first time, i believe. i was shocked because of everything i’ve said previously, plus it’s a beautiful species and it has a weird pattern of colors, almost like it’s an aberration but not. it’s surreal because it looked exactly like the dead specimen. it’s so cool to see such a unique species alive.

postscript:

seven years ago i was looking for a worm-eating warbler in prospect park when a guy with binoculars came up to chat. he explained that he’s a passionate birder who visits brooklyn from the netherlands to catsit for his friends while they take their annual holiday. today he’s one of my close friends and we go on birding adventures whenever he visits. he’d always ask me to visit him in rotterdam, which we finally did this year. we had an awesome time exploring the winter birds of the zeeland region, spotting some of my most-desired eurasian species like the eurasian goshawk, bearded reedling, and arctic loon.

but my favorite sighting (and yes, this is a flex) was an immature caspian gull i spotted flying in the distance over a grassland while scanning flocks of geese. even from far away the uncommon winter visitor tripped my “weird seagull” alarm with its contrasting white head and white underwings on an obviously young bird, my photo revealing that it also had the species’ characteristically long beak. identifying the different nyc gull species is hard enough, so i felt super proud to nab a challenging european one so easily.

prescript:

it’s so horrible out!!!! i had to cancel my walk yesterday because of the extreme cold and i’ve barely been birding recently. but i did participate in a last-minute web talk about crossbills this week that i’ll share once it’s uploaded. i’m also going to the netherlands for a short trip for my birthday next week (long story) and i have some more programming coming up so long as outside isn’t, like, dangerous. as a birthday present to me, perhaps you get your friends to buy my book??

reschedule: february 22, 10-11:30am: winter birds with the nyc bird alliance young conservationists: gulls! meet at the coney island boardwalk stillwell avenue restrooms. free, register here.

february 28, 10-11:30am: winter birds with the nyc bird alliance young conservationists: ducks! meet at the jamaica bay wildlife refuge visitor’s center. free, register here.

march 8, 9:30-11am: spring birding at wave hill. $17 (including admissions to the grounds), register here.

if the below post feels a little random, that’s because it’s adapted from something i wrote for the finch research network’s newsletter, which i edit. it’s a bit different from usual tone i use for my personal substack since the finch people like spiritual mindfulness stuff like this. but it’s about nature and cities so i hope you like it, too.

buddhist scripture centers a concept called dependent origination, meaning all of the world’s phenomena are interconnected and all things exist and cease to exist only as a result of other phenomena. buddhist teachings and culture naturally suffused our two-week visit to japan last month, where nearly half the population practice the religion. but i felt it most intensely—and most personally—when i thumbed past a 150-year-old print of my favorite bird, the red crossbill, at a tiny bookstore in kyoto. dependent origination in action.

woodblock prints, ukiyo-e, emerged in the 17th century when japan’s lower classes began accumulating wealth following a period of civil war and social upheaval. ukiyo-e offered an affordable way to buy art and decorate houses and these prints typically featured everyday scenes that otherwise went undepicted in japanese artwork. meanwhile, “bird-and-flower painting” was a traditional art form imported from china and it was hokusai of “great wave off kanagawa” fame who adapted and popularized the style for ukiyo-e. these “bird-and-flower” prints have their own name, kacho-e.

kacho-e flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries under masters like hiroshige and utamaro, whose work coincidentally mirrored that of contemporary american ornithologists like alexander wilson and john james audubon in their realistic depictions of birdlife. japan’s meiji era followed, a period of industrialization and cultural exchange including the adoption of western practices like the forced assimilation and displacement of colonized indigenous people. among the most famous kacho-e artists during this period was kyoto-born kono bairei.

though bairei considered prints an afterthought to his paintings, he became a master of meiji-era kacho-e. in 1881, he published “bairei’s album of 100 birds,” a book of prints depicting birds found on the japanese archipelago—like the red crossbill. crossbills live throughout japan’s pine forests, and are more well-known to the japanese than to americans; the idiom “isuka no hashi” or “a crossbill’s beak” has been used in japanese writing since the 1500s to mean something gone awry. the bird has even inspired contemporary japanese fiction.

japanese art has been a part of my life since early childhood, when one of my older sisters developed an interest in tattooing, especially japanese-style tattooing. my jewish parents disapproved at first, but her talent, scholarship, and drive to master traditional techniques eventually won them over. soon, my jewish father was covered in japanese-style tattoos and began collecting japanese artwork. a newly-monied child of impoverished holocaust survivors himself, he especially appreciated ukiyo-e and filled our home with books and prints from his favorite ukiyo-e master, kuniyoshi.

i had no such precedent when it came to birds—i was a bird-hating child of bird-hating new yorkers. that didn’t change until my early 20s, when a journalism school assignment required me to film herons and egrets in new york city. i ultimately produced a decent video, with a new-found appreciation for wildlife and an extreme case of poison ivy as souvenirs. the next year, my long-distance partner brittany moved to new york city and we decided to take up birding as a hobby together.

I knew about crossbills even before I started birding though, thanks to an award-winning article on crossbill scientist craig benkman’s research. the bird resonated with me—especially its beady black eyes and stupid face that reminded me of a favorite character from a bygone web cartoon. it quickly assumed the role of my favorite bird. nine years later, i’ve spent many hours observing and photographing crossbills in the wild and today i’m on the board of a non-profit devoted to studying them and their overarching family, the finches.

meanwhile, actually visiting japan didn’t cross my mind until 2020—covid. brittany and i got married and, while we couldn’t have a honeymoon, my grandmother earmarked money so we could take one when the world opened back up. at the same time, we decided to start watching anime as another hobby and i casually started learning japanese. by 2025, we’d watched dozens of anime series and learned a great deal about japanese culture. we decided to visit the country for our five-year-delayed honeymoon this past december.

our trip split evenly between birds and culture, especially art, food, nightlife, and shopping. i really hoped to see ukiyo-e prints, and we planned a visit to the tokyo national museum to appreciate its collection. unfortunately, we learned on arrival that they’d closed the ukiyo-e section for renovations.

somewhat on a whim, we made a day trip to kyoto, the country’s first capital and its cultural center famous for temples, shrines, palaces, and historic architecture. we let our disdain for crowds guide our day until we ended up at the imperial palace, devoid of tourists. though not a ‘birding day,” we still encountered highly desired species like the japanese grosbeak and japanese wagtail on the palace grounds.

we left the park for lunch and passed a small bookstore across the street. i noticed ukiyo-e in the window and we went inside, hungry to see some after the museum closure. my heart jumped—the store was filled with old books and on every table sat bins of prints, some dating back to the 17th century. i walked straight to the box labeled “birds” and flipped past just a few pages before it appeared: a simple two-page print taken from an 1881 edition of bairei’s album of 100 birds showing a red crossbill.

i don’t believe in fate, but i think i’ve always believed in dependent origination. things happen because other things happen. that’s how i felt when i found my print, like i was part of something much bigger than myself. the actions of the people i know and don’t know plus millennia of history together weave a vast web spanning space and time, which brought me and that print into that store together. it’s not even a spiritual thing if you don’t want it to be—just regular cause and-and-effect. but it sure makes me feel a lot more investing in living, feeling like a necessary part of it all.

after all, i’m responsible for weaving the web, too. i bought the print and wrote this post!

postscript

first: my previous post was mentioned in an orion magazine essay by fiction writer jeff vandermeer of annihilation fame - thanks for telling him about it, sarah! check it out here.

despite the crippling cold, i have managed to get outside a couple of times for various bird-related censuses. most recently i participated in the northport winter bird count which yielded some unexpected birds like a redhead and some brown thrashers, plus a visit to an incredible haitian restaurant. the most surprising find was probably this recently-deceased toothed phigalia moth, one only a few moths that fly in the winter.

i guess i was also supposed to post a picture of an owl for superb owl sunday but you can just look at my last post for that.

prescript:

happy new year everyone, and thanks for your patience. it was a very taxing past few months but i think/hope the hardest parts are behind me. obviously i can’t say the same about the world and it’s hard finding motivation when it feels like we’re living a more-nightmarish version of 1984. but hopefully you can take some respite in fun nature writing.

i’ve got some winter events coming up and i hope you’ll join me:

february 7, 10-11:30am: winter birds with the nyc bird alliance young conservationists: gulls! meet at the coney island boardwalk stillwell avenue restrooms. free, register here.

february 28, 10-11:30am: winter birds with the nyc bird alliance young conservationists: ducks! meet at the jamaica bay wildlife refuge visitor’s center. free, register here.

march 8, 9:30-11am: spring birding at wave hill. $17 (including admissions to the grounds), register here.

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bois blanc island is a summertime paradise where michiganders delight in days spent fishing and nights spent drinking beside bonfires under a late-setting sun. my brother-in-law and i spent our last visit to paradise searching for endangered microsnails.

for new readers, my annual “boblo” trip is a recurring newsletter theme. the 34-square-mile forested island in lake huron has no paved roads, only 200 residents, and a shocking amount of biodiversity. around our rental cabin, the island features a critically imperiled ecosystem called calcareous fen supporting populations of rare plants and animals including the usa’s only federally-endangered dragonfly. in 2024, after browsing a list of species specializing on this habitat, i became fixated on finding a trio of tiny endangered snails.

rare snails love calcareous fens. these fens offer food plus lots of shelter to keep snails from freezing or being eaten—soil, nooks, fallen leaves, and rotting logs. they have the required moisture for snails to maintain their slimy lifestyles and lay eggs that won’t dry out. and most importantly, they’re abundant in limestone, offering the calcium that snails need to maintain their shells, according to a michigan natural features inventory (mnfi) document. the glut of resources allow snails to specialize in these habitats, so one fen might host many snails of many species.

mnfi lists a few threatened snails among its calcareous fen denizens including Vertigo elatior, Vertigo morsei, and Catinella exile. V. elatior, the “five-whorl vertigo” and V. morsei, the “six-whorl vertigo,” are beehive-shaped “column snails” measuring just a few millimeters. C. exile, the “pliestocene catinella,” has an irresistible story: once known only from ice age fossils, mollusc scientists (“malacologists”) rediscovered the species in iowa in 1986.

but i didn’t have a clue how to actually find these creatures aside from “look on the ground.” thankfully, i am married into a family of fellow weirdos. my brother-in-law jake knows lots about snails from his miniature aquarium building hobby and was eager to join the search. he offered suggestions on where in the habitat we should look for snails and devised a basic snail-sifting technique using a coffee filter and clear cup.

rain normally slimes boblo days, but this year we were excited to experience our rainiest week in six years of visits, since cool, damp mornings are the best times for snailing. we scoped out three spots: a puddle on the rocky shore near the cabin, the edge of a pitcher plant-filled fen, and an expanse of lakeside cobblestone flats beside “snake island,” a refuge for the endangered eastern massasauga rattlesnake. at each spot, we hunched over, filled our cups with a mixture of water, plants, and dirt, and sifted for snails while we swatted away mosquitoes.

though i’d never noticed it before, each of the habitats were totally loaded with snails. almond-shaped ambersnails climbed blades of grass and rested on rocks, spiral-shaped ramshorn snails floated on the water’s surface, and every so often a sand grain-sized column snail would materialize from the detritus. these caused the most excitement, since they were our candidates for V. elatior and V. morsei. we’d take closer looks with our iphones—say what you will about apple products, the new iphone’s macro lens works great as a pocket magnifying glass in the field. we returned to the cabin with one ziploc bag of snails per location, including many snails that fit the bill for V. elatior plus a slightly larger one that could have been our V. morsei. As for C. exile, we hoped it would reveal itself among the ambersnails we plucked.

i didn’t know much about microsnail identification, so i googled until i found a few people experienced with michigan’s molluscs. one was an mnfi biologist named ashley cole-wick, the other an often-cited professor named jeff nekola now based in the czech republic. i sent them emails mentioning our snail haul with some photos of our V. morsei candidate, the rarer of the target column snails.

ashley responded quickly and was excited about our efforts—we’d essentially carried out a free survey of michigan’s rare land snails. she was busy doing butterfly surveys, but said if i mailed her snails she’d help me identify them a few months later. she thought the photo looked reasonable for V. morsei but wanted a closer look.

jeff’s response was less enthusiastic. column snails can’t be identified without a photo of the “teeth,” tiny growths inside of the shell’s aperture, he explained—but despite that, he said he was certain my photos showed another V. elatior, which he confirmed was very common in the habitat despite its threatened status. he also attached identification resources. to identify snails, malacologists use “keys,” choose-your-own-adventure guides that say things like “if your snail is bigger than 5mm go to section 2, otherwise go to section 3,” following the snail trail until you land on your specific species. once you arrive at the Vertigo genus, your last hurdle is a photo of each species lined up showing their fingerprint—the shape of the teeth in the aperture.

i brought the snails back to new york and ran through the keys, now armed with my portable microscope. the larger shell had the exact same tooth pattern as the V. morsei specimen in the key he sent me. i responded to jeff with the better photos through my lens, and he tersely agreed with my identification. though he considered this species common, too, ashley confirmed it as the first time V. morsei was documented in michigan since 2009.

ok, two snails down, one to go. however, unlike the column snails and their toothprints, C. exile and all of the ambersnails are much harder to nail down with keys, incorporating subjective traits like color which i don’t have experience gauging or precise measurements that i don’t have tools to carry out. so i’d have to wait until ashley had time to analyze my snail mail under a microscope.

three months later, ashley kicked off the analysis at her lab in lansing, michigan. i tried to be chill, but i was regularly refreshing my email awaiting the verdict, my anxiety exacerbated by some broken microscope camera drama. eventually ashley and her coworker michelle got a good look at the snails… and among the haul noticed two small, broken, orange ambersnails from the snake island bag. after running through the keys, michelle landed on C. exile for their identity. snailed it!

i eagerly emailed the photos to jeff, using the name “Mediappendix exilis” that more modern sources use for the species. his response was a metaphorical bucket of salt.

he had no clue what species michelle’s photo showed, he said. there’s no such thing as “mediappendix,” and in his opinion, whole family of ambersnails was a cluster*&$#. oh, and ambersnails can’t be identified by their shells alone, and in fact, they can’t even be identified with DNA until someone does a study revising the entire family. many of the “endangered” species in the family aren’t species at all. he advised that i would want nothing else to do with the shell. i felt like i’d been slugged in the gut.

i forwarded jeff’s email to ashley and michelle. ashley agreed with the cluster*&$#ness assessment, but michelle’s hands were tied. the mnfi follows standards set by a well-regarded organization called natureserve, and according their resources, “Mediappendix exilis” is a real species and the one that best matches our snails, based on existing snail identification techniques. so today, the snails represent the first records of C. exile/M. exilis in michigan since 1998—with an asterisk that the species might not be a real one in the first place.

though frustrated by the asterisk, i couldn’t be that upset. jake and i had unwittingly undertaken an endangered snail survey for the state of michigan in a place rarely surveyed, confirming the continued presence of three species in the process. plus, as a birdwatcher, i’m no stranger to taxonomic cluster*&$#s. large white-headed seagulls, for example, represent a group of species that look exactly the same and regularly interbreed—gullwatchers proudly leave confounding individuals unidentified. scientists regularly declare new species based on varying amounts of evidence or do away with species altogether. we follow the “latest science,” but that science can contradict itself. after all, scientific papers aren’t be-all, end-alls—they’re evidence used to prove and disprove hypotheses.

i say it often: species is a human-defined concept we use to bucket the world, but that means humans decide what goes into the buckets. the animals themselves might not agree with those decisions. for something as understudied as two-millimeter snails, we simply don’t have much information for building an understanding of the world. so we try to classify things as best we can working with what we understand today, and expect things to change as we learn more.

in the meantime, i love a reason to play in the mud. i’m looking forward to whatever wildlife obsession i develop for my boblo visit—there are plenty of weird creatures left to find.

postscript

brittany and i got married but never had a honeymoon, so last month we took the honeymoon money that my grandma gave us and spent it on a trip to japan. we tried to balance our respective interests, so it was half birdwatching trip, half eating/culture trip, and amazing overall. among the major cultural highlights included appreciating the similarities between rural hokkaido and britt’s rural minnesota, visiting the contemporary art museum in kanazawa, and sifting through centuries-old woodblock prints at a tiny bookship in kyoto. culinary highlights included visiting several dessert shops from kantaro: the sweet-tooth salaryman, drinking milk in hokkaido, and eating a gigantic pregnant raw shrimp at a kanazawa fish market. avian highlights included a flock of 35,000 baikal teal in a lake north of tokyo, getting cracking looks at a japanese waxwing while hiking in a small village, finding ryukyu minivets minutes after wishing to see them at a shrine, and spending several nights just a few feet away from the gigantic and enigmatic blakiston’s fish owl while sitting in our pajamas.

but there was nothing more special than spending two weeks exploring and adventuring with my spouse and best friend :)

prescript

hi all! i have my winter outing schedule more or less ironed out. hope to see you there! also… have you purchased my book for all of your friends yet? :)

nyc bird alliance young conservationists “birds of winter” series, all free, registration links to come:

• saturday january 10 2026, 9am - 10:30am (free): finches @ prospect park grand army plaza entrance

• saturday february 7 2026, 9am - 10:30am (free): gulls @ coney island boardwalk, stillwell ave entrance

• saturday february 28, 9am - 10:30am (free): ducks @ jamaica bay wildlife refuge visitor center

finally: i have a post i’m soooo excited to share with you (it’s about rare snails!!!) but it’s been taking a while to put together, so here’s a fun little one to hold you over. hope you get to see some woodcocks this week.

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certain places are renowned for easy viewing of the world’s most charistmatic animals. you go to the serengeti for lions, the salish sea for orcas, the darien for harpy eagles. and if you want great looks at the american woodcock, you go to… midtown manhattan.

i’m serious!

now, i mostly just want an excuse to talk about woodcocks because they’re one of the silliest north american bird species. but i’m not lying—nyc’s bryant park could be the world’s easiest place to get good looks at the species. it’s not an especially healthy situation for the woodcocks involved, but i hope the ever-increasing attention helps spread awareness of the challenges that migratory wildlife faces while passing through nyc.

ok, let’s talk cocks. nonbirders might scoff at my listing woodcock among national geographic charismatic megafauna. but woodcocks have a cult-like following. nyc’s woodcock-themed bird walks regularly command crowds of 100+ people. there’s always some viral woodcock video circulating, plus a popular meme page dedicated to them. and my friend jorge, one of costa rica’s best birders who has seen many of the neotropics’ rarest birds, told me that the american woodcock is the bird he wants to see most.

what’s the allure? well… it’s hard to believe that woodcocks are real. stick a straw into a potato then glue on some googly eyes and you will have created something almost as silly looking as a woodcock. they waddle as if dancing to “walk like an egyptian.” they perform nighttime courtship flights of high-flying zigzags and spirals, ending with a plummet. their main vocalization is “peent.” their cockamamie aura has earned them some of the best nicknames in all of birddom: timberdoodle, bogsucker, mudbat, labrador twister, and, among my friends, potato.

while wacky, woodcocks are exceedingly hard to see. their oblong shape and patterned plumage make them virtually indistinguishable from pine cones. sometimes they’ll sit still even when nearly underfoot to avoid blowing their cover. and when you do notice them, they shoot off with a twitter before giving good looks.

unless you pay a visit to new york city’s bryant park, that is, where you can often find woodcocks sitting beneath shrubs or out in the open during the right time of year—late fall and late winter through early spring, especially in mid-november and mid-march. new york city accounts for ~2,500 of the ~20,000 woodcock photos contributed to cornell’s macaulay library and 900 of the 10,000 woodcock observations contributed to the inaturalist database. i interpret this to mean that, despite the fact that the bird ranges across the eastern united states, nyc is the easiest place to actually see woodcocks well enough to photograph.

but why?

nyc birders (and longtime newsletter readers) know that our area is an easy place to see many of eastern north america’s birds. it’s a biodiverse estuary located in the middle of the atlantic flyway, a popular coastal bird migration route. it sits at a point where the coastline takes a sharp turn, funneling species tracing the shore. further, humans have replaced much of that estuary with concrete, forcing birds into just a few parks with limited habitat options. shy birds like connecticut warblers, virginia rails, and american woodcocks end up out in the open because they don’t have other choices. then there are the obvious biases: we have lots of birdwatchers, with lots of eyes to uncover rare stuff.

that doesn’t explain everything though. woodcocks aren’t just stopping in by chance—data from the dbird database of dead birds found in new york city shows that, more than most other species, woodcocks end up dead in midtown, usually from window collisions. recent research studying five years of radio-tagged woodcocks found that they fly at lower altitudes than most other migratory birds, averaging only 1250 feet—the height of the empire state building. combined with the fact that bright lights attract birds the same way that they attract moths, and the fact that woodcocks have sacrificed some of their front-facing vision for a wider field-of-view overall, well, the city is kind of optimized for catching and killing woodcocks.

it’s tough not to be a spoilsport when bryant park’s woodcocks inevitably go viral, but i always feel uneasy seeing them swarmed by visitors focused on getting a nice look and crisp photos. because for many of these trapped critters, a neck-snapping faceplant could be their next and final move. people hoping to see woodcocks with rosier futures should consider visiting brooklyn’s green-wood cemetery, where the birds are most often encountered by walking slowly through leaf litter and under pine trees.

still, i have to remind myself—woodcocks are the best, and it’s pretty amazing that you can easily see them a stone's throw from times square. and i’d like to think that most bryant park woodcock viewers eventually hear about the bird’s dangerous trials navigating the city. you can sort of think of woodcocks as mascots for urban conservation that epitomize the city’s unique threats to wildlife and attempts to protect them. so with that i say… PEENT!

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postscript

i still haven’t written about my work trip to florida from last month, but florida, too, epitomizes human/wildlife interactions. there were animals everywhere! perhaps no species portrayed this better than the roseate spoonbill. i got there a few days early to do some birding and didn’t see any spoonbills in any of the wonderful habitats i explored. but once i had to start commuting to and from the conference center, i started noticing spoonbills in housing developments and roadside ditches being silly little gremlins.

prescript: phew! i was away in colombia, then i got really sick, then i got better and immediately had to go to florida for work. i’m good now, but thanks for your patience. as always, you should buy my book. we are speeding toward holiday season and i have been told many times that my book would make a great gift. i hope you agree.

i have a few more walks planned for the fall and more events cooking for winter and spring. hope to see y’all.

saturday october 18, 9am (free): intro to birding at marine park salt marsh nature center in brooklyn. meet at nature center entrance. no registration required.

saturday, october 25, 4:30-8:30pm ($65, $50 for members): nighthunters: an evening owl adventure @ wave hill. this event features a nature walk, a falconry demonstration, and BIRD TRIVIA!!! tickets here.

sunday october 26, 9:30 (free): fall birding in canarsie park with the young conservationists. meet at canarsie park house (seaview ave and e88 st). register here.

and now without further ado, something very different.

the kogi people of colombia’s sierra nevada de santa marta hold a worldview that weaves them, their knowledge, and all things inextricably into the fabric of the earth. naturally that fabric includes the animals, plants, the land itself, the cosmos. their culture and ethos resonated deeply with me, and reminded me of something i wish we’d incorporate into “serious” wildlife-related endeavors: the recognition of animals as our peers.

take the squirrel cuckoo—a shy and clumsy brown bird that moves squirrel-like through the trees. squirrel cuckoos carry the spirit of a deceased kogi community leader, or mamo, named dzhiñkuaxa, according to their mythology. they view these birds as extremely knowledgeable, dispensing advice as positive or negative answers and warnings through each unique vocalization. while visiting a kogi village in tayrona national park last month, a squirrel cuckoo descended upon my group with a chatter while our guide, francisca, showed us how to process the fique fibers used to weave their famous mochila sling bags. what did this one say? our guide and translator danilso explained that the cuckoo told francisca she was doing a good job.

this visit was part of jer thorp’s binoculars to binomials class’ retreat, a four-day trip to the tropical forest to think about birds, data, storytelling, art, and their intersection. on the final day, we went around recounting highlights and unanimously agreed that the squirrel cuckoo’s visit was among the very best.

anthropomorphism is the act of assigning human characteristics to non-human beings. it’s simultaneously a natural tendency of ours and a near-universal taboo in scientific study. as a science journalist, it’s been drilled into me that animals are not people and cannot be understood as such, that this thinking could even be harmful for conservation. but after a decade of close bird observation i can tell you that animals are little guys—they’re just like us. in the wake of indigenous people’s day, i wonder whether the many millennia of cultures treating animals as such could provide some lessons to people hoping to keep our animals around.

it seems silly to lay a solid empirical foundation beneath anthropomorphism. you want me to explain why your cat is your little idiot gremlin-daughter toiling away at the meow factory? it’s because she is. psychologically, we understand animals this way because we map our experiences with humans, the animals we know best, onto our observations of non-humans. but also, we’re interpreting the way animals just are. garfield, bugs bunny, snoopy, simba, these characters depict an innate shared western cultural understanding of cats, rabbits, dogs, and lions. we’ve characterized animals with human traits for the entirety of our species’ existence. some of the oldest examples of figurative art show animals with human features and vice versa. it would be maybe impossible to find a cultural tradition without talking animals. a non-human animal is the third character to speak in the bible after god and adam!

and yet we’re told that really understanding animals scientifically requires an “empirical” severing between our pre-programmed understanding that animals carry human traits and “reality” which says they’re not people and can’t be imagined as such. one atlantic essay quotes university of cinncinnati ornithologist elizabeth hobson saying that simply being accused of anthropomorphism could ruin one’s scientific credibility.

there’s truth to it, of course. animals live completely different lives, and applying western cultural understanding of ethics, cause-and-effect, and communication could lead to very incorrect conclusions about non-human behavior and conservation missteps. plenty of people assign the cowbird an evil “freeloader” persona because it’s a nest parasite, laying eggs in other birds’ nests which forces the hosts to raise a cowbird instead of their own young. yet cowbirds are native members of our american fauna that contribute to a functioning ecosystem overall. and research has well-established that it’s easier to conserve cuter charismatic species than ugly creepy-crawlies.

this separation also feels wholly unnatural to me. first off, such an “empirical” view erases other valid non-western-science ways one might develop an understanding of the natural world. but there’s also an undeniable essence i won’t shake, an innate magic to animals that prevents me from voiding them of their humanity. seeing two squirrels cuddling in a nest, or termites working together to fix a hole in their tunnel, or a sparrow taking a dust bath, these are living things with their own brains making decisions about how to navigate the world in a way that’s undeniably relatable.

that’s part of what made our kogi visit so powerful. western culture assures that human-like traits are figurative or fictional—kogi mythology does not. the kogis see themselves as responsible for maintaining the balance of the overarching global fabric—they can take, but they also must give back through thoughts, songs, gifts, and careful use of the earth’s resources. the animals are part of this fabric, too, and many carry names, roles, and stories that make them vital for the continued survival of the kogis. for example, the crimson-backed tanager, known by the kogis as godta, represents blood, marriage, and fertility. if you injure one, you risk being injured yourself. but why would you want to? the bird is responsible for healthy reproduction.

having seen it in person, there was a palpable reality and magic to the squirrel cuckoo vocalizing its content with francisca’s performance that everyone in our group understood. i won’t accept explanations otherwise. when a cardinal visits your bird feeder, that’s the spirit of your deceased grandparents paying you a visit. why wouldn’t it be? this is secretly how i experience the world’s wildlife when i’m not pretending to be an expert in “communicating science.” if a shy warbler lets me look at it, i consider it a privilege and say think you. i run an instagram account where i imagine what the animals i photograph are thinking. i don’t know. birds, mammals, insects, fungi, they’re all little guys (gender neutral) and it’s boring to think otherwise.

today, there’s an ongoing shift reconsidering anthropomorphism of animals in science. that atlantic story noted that empirical research suffers from biases that unintentionally project humanity onto animals—the former lack of women in biology produced a dearth of research into female animals, for example. some scientists also consider anthropomorphism as a useful tool to generate hypotheses to test. more broadly, one study found that a modernizing society has changed the relationship between humans and animals, that humans seem to be moving away from treating animals as exploitable resources and more toward treating them as fellow beings with human-like traits.

more compassion toward animals is good, but there’s also downsides. when i sit in the park and look at two mute swans and their babies, that’s a loving mommy and a daddy devoted to their ugly ducklings. but that makes it harder to accept swans as an introduced animal contributing to the destruction of new york’s wetland ecosystems when i see 300 of them at the wildlife refuge. unchecked anthropomorphism leads to peta-minded thinking, conservation focused on individual animals with no care for the overarching ecosystem. if we focused on conserving every individual—including every feral cat, swan, etc., then we’d risk losing our native creatures that contribute to the overarching health of the ecosystem.

i don’t have an easy answer for this. but it’s in direct conflict to benefit from the land-stealing of colonial and capitalist architects responsible for fragmenting forests, over-extracting resources, and introducing species while also co-opting indigenous-inspired one-with-all-animals ideals if we’re going to shirk the responsibility of maintaining balance in the world’s ecosystems. after all, if our true allegiance is to the fabric of the earth, then above all else we need to think about how to maintain that fabric as the only ones capable of doing so. and that comes with some tough choices.

that being said, i think wildlife experts should lean into our natural tendency to anthropomorphize animals as part of a broader strategy to restore and maintain healthy ecosystems. maybe we nature nerds can be the cultural stewards of the animals we study, like explaining unique feline body language to guests. i liked some of the ideas in this essay on “critical anthropomorphism” about using empathy and metaphor rooted in anthropomorphism to help communicate animal behavior and conservation topics at zoos. in nyc, for example, i relate the struggles of our threatened piping plovers to those of native new yorkers—the plovers—facing thoughtless gentrification at the hand of greedy developers. sometimes it works!

where does that leave us? well…i think we need more bird lore. internalize the animal folklore from your own cultures. support your local indigenous tribes and help them share their stories (if they want to). write your own lore where you can’t find any. welcome their spirits into your wildlife-observing practice. go outside and talk to the animals. they are magic little guys with secrets to share.

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i love bird lore and am eager for your recommendations. i recently purchased the multi-ethnic bird guide of the subantarctic forests of south america which compiles indigenous stories about many birds i saw on my trip to antarctica last year. i was also texting danilso about this post and he sent me a spanish-language guide to the birds of tayrona national park in colombia with kogi stories for some of the birds.

usually these efforts take a lot of thoughtful coordination and collaboration with the local indigenous people, plus their permission. they are often wary given the history of exploitation by colonizers, so i’m thankful that the maintainers of these stories felt like they could trust their interviewers with them.

below you can find a few translations of the bird legends that danilso’s pamphlet included.

the lance-tailed manakin, or abwintulo, knows an ancient, sacred dialect of a kogi language called teyyua. the bird’s hallmark songs and dances are messages passed along to the kogis by their ancestors.

the tiny santa marta woodstar, or sinduldi tácacu, is the guardian of all the birds that inhabit the earth (ryan note: i love that the smallest birds often have the biggest roles in bird stories). the kogis know that this bird inhabits higher-elevation areas of the mountains and only descends seasonally—movements responsible for bringing them fire and coca. its presence is used to signal the start of the initiation ceremonies for the children training to become mamos.

the brown pelican, known as duanabujú, is the leader of the sea birds. he was born in the lagoons at the top of the sierra nevada de santa marta where he was supposed to stay. however, he disobeyed his duty and traveled to the sea. now, every six months he travels back up the mountain at night because he is forbidden by the other birds from visiting during the day. the kogi mamos have songs and dances to honor him.

the black vulture, mama shexá, received wisdom and a good education from his mother, but abandoned it because he didn’t care about others and didn’t like following rules. because he enjoyed good meals, he was punished by having to eat rotting animals.

prescript

i have so much programming this fall, so if you’ve wanted to take one of my walks but haven’t been able to make it, you have no excuse!!!

saturday september 6, 9am (free): i’m leading a walk for nyc queer birders at marine park salt marsh nature center in brooklyn! meet at nature center entrance, no registration required

thursday september 18, 5:30pm (free): prospect park birding with the young convervationists, meet at stranahan monument in prospect park, across from grand army plaza. register here.

sunday september 21, 9am (free): intro to birding at marine park salt marsh nature center. meet at nature center entrance. no registration required.

thursday september 25, 5:30pm (free): prospect park birding with the young convervationists, meet at stranahan monument in prospect park, across from grand army plaza. register here.

friday, september 26, 5pm (free): birding tour of bryant park, meet at bryant park info kiosk by fountain. no registration required.

saturday september 27, 10am (free): signs of fall birds walk @ shirley chisholm state park in brooklyn, meet at fountain avenue entrance. registration required, register here.

sunday, october 12, 9:30am ($17, comes with park admission): fall birding @ wave hill. meet at book shop, tickets here.

saturday october 18, 9am (free): intro to birding at marine park salt marsh nature center. meet at nature center entrance. no registration required.

saturday, october 25, 4:30-8:30pm ($65, $50 for members): nighthunters: an evening owl adventure @ wave hill. this event features a nature walk, a falconry demonstration, and BIRD TRIVIA!!! tickets here.

sunday october 26, 9:30 (free): fall birding in canarsie park with the young conservationists. meet at canarsie park house (seaview ave and e88 st). register here.

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and now without further ado: a good old-fashioned blog like the ones i was once paid a living wage to write. those were the good ol’ days.

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i often look at butterflies and think, wow. it’s incredible that the random forces of evolution could have created something so beautiful, so intricately patterned and ornamented. but the truth is, they’re not totally random—any number of pressures from predators, prey, competition within a species, or the environment can lead to some strange traits arising.

and for a significant number of butterfly species, that means having a butt that looks like a head. well, technically a hindwing that looks like a head. but for this post i will be using “hindwing” and “butt” interchangeably for comedic effect.

how exactly does a butt-head come about? that’s what a new paper from researchers at the indian institute of science education and research thiruvananthapuram seeks to uncover. and while the answer is “evolution,” the researchers deem their work the first comprehensive analysis of the pareidolic rear end of the large lycaenidae family of butterflies. this family happens to comprise many butterfly-watcher favorites like the hairstreaks, coppers, and harvesters.

let’s start with a primer on natural selection and evolution. a given population of creatures will demonstrate variability caused by small differences and random genetic mutations. some individuals are larger, while some have bigger legs, or coarser hair, or slightly longer wings, etc. add pressures like finding food, not being food, attracting a mate, or withstanding the elements, and certain differences will prove beneficial and more likely for the next generation to inherit. others will prove less beneficial and less likely to be inherited. some traits might prove neither positive nor negative and be inherited because they’re already there.

evolution is a dynamic force and the driver of speciation. populations separated by distance will adapt to different pressures and eventually accumulate enough differences that they become new species. subgroups of the same population might find different opportunities and diverge as each group adapts to better exploit what’s available, like birds developing smaller or larger beaks to eat smaller or larger prey. every living thing experiences these forces together, and inter-species interactions add further pressures that cause species to evolve together. flowers evolve to accommodate the insects that pollinate them, while peregrine falcons and pigeon undergo a sort of evolutoinary arms race, each growing faster to better catch their prey or escape their predator, respectively.

but i think a major misunderstanding about evolution is that it points someplace. this is not the case—it’s a random walk taken over generations. selective pressures might ping-pong to prefer one trait or another; cyclic prey availability might favor large-billed birds in some years and small-billed birds in other years. an animal adapting to a very specific evolutionary pressure, like hyper-specializing to feed on one kind of food, will go extinct if that food disappears. some traits exist for no reason. long-lasting evolutionary pressures might lead to increasingly complex traits like a head for a butt—but also, there’s no rule saying things have to get more complex over time. the pressures that lead to a butt-head could go away and so, too, would the need to waste energy producing such a complex structure. maybe one day humans will evolve into bugs!

now, for prey, a common selective pressure is not being eaten. sometimes this leads to amazing camouflage, like crickets mimicking leaves or moths patterned like bark. other times it leads to the production of foul-tasting or poisonous chemicals alongside bright colors to signal the creature’s unpalatability. and still other times, it leads to features meant to distract predators.

for many butterflies, distraction features manifest as circles that look like eyes placed far from their vital organs. a predator might go for the eyes and leave with a mouth full of wing scales, allowing for the butterfly to escape mostly intact. in one 1985 study researchers painted various fake head features onto the rears of butterflies without fake heads and fed them to great tits; the tits were more likely to bite the wrong end of the insects with eyespots specifically, and the more complex the fake head, the more likely the bird was to handle the butterfly by the hindwing versus the real head. those with false heads were also more likely to be mishandled by the predators and then escape.

painting a butterfly rear is one thing—the random walk of evolution doing it independently is another. uncovering the evolutionary story leading to a butterfly butt shaped like a head was the goal of researchers tarunkishwor yumnam and ullasa kondandaramaiah.

the pair began by establishing five traits that make up the false head defense. the first, of course, is the eye-like spot. the second, false antennae. the third, a ridge on the wing that looks like the contour of the head. the fourth, bright coloration, and the fifth, lines on the wings that draw predator eyes toward the false head. they analyzed 928 butterfly species, noting which ones had which traits, and used a model to create the most likely evolutionary family trees based on the genomes of these butterflies. they also created statistical models of what these family trees might look like if each of the five traits were correlated (or not) and models to establish the order that these traits arose. they analyzed their trees, capturing how each trait moved along the branches.

the results? well, bright color, fake antennae, eye spots, and the false head contour were all correlated, meaning they generally arose and were inherited together. they also seemed to arise in that order, chronologically. stripes pointing to the fake head weren’t correlated with the other four, meaning that the trait apparently evolved independently. the analysis also revealed that head-butts arose multiple times in the family tree, but didn’t always increase in complexity over time. different selective pressures could cause one or more of the traits to disappear, and head-butts that fooled some predators might not fool others.

of course, this work is based on fancy models, and models can’t reveal everything, nor do they necessarily tell a 100% accurate story about the past. what specific selective pressures, and which predators, promote which of the fake head traits? is deflecting a predator the only thing keeping the trait around, or is the trait also supported by sexual selection and/or other unstudied forces?

and now i get to answer the most important question, which is “why should you care.” well first, this is a great case study on the messiness of evolution. on the surface, complex structures like these might feel like intelligent design. but as the models show, these butterflies aren’t racing to evolve the most beautiful head-butt. rather, there’s a whole spectrum of headbutthood in the family, where some butterflies have heads for butts, some don’t, and different selection pressures lead to differeing appearances of those fake heads—or the loss of them completely.

but honestly you should mostly care because butterfly nerds (me included) will like you better if you’re excited about the butterflies in the lycaenidae family, because it means you’re as nerdy as we are. i don’t make the rules, that’s just how it works.

postscript

there’s heads-for-butts, and then there’s whatever the hell is going on here—an eighty-eight butterfly (here looking more like a 98) which i saw in colombia earlier this year. nature is amazing.

• NEXT FRIDAY i’m doing a book signing and bird walk at books are magic, august 15, 6pm. we’ll start at the shop then walk over to brooklyn bridge park. register here!

• the shorebird festival at jamaica bay wildlife refuge is next weekend, 8/17 from 10am to 1pm. i might be leading a tour there but not sure yet—keep your eyes open on my social media. you should come regardless.

• probably last reminder! i’m co-facilitating jer thorp’s binoculars to binomials retreat in santa marta, colombia. september 11 to september 16—it’s an immersive experience where we’ll use birding as one of several tools to understand the natural world, with the goal of creating a collaborative data art piece in the style of jer’s 2017 work ‘in the map room.’ learn more here!!!

• i have a bunch of walks coming up in the fall, will hopefully have my full schedule ready by the next newsletter.

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last weekend chelsea beck and i led a nature journaling class in prospect park for the lofty pigeon bookstore. it was one of my favorite events i’ve ever done! ~30 people came and i wish i could share some of their work because they made some great zines. instead, you can look at one of chelsea’s zines and three of mine. i thought you would all enjoy the sillier and/or more personal content this week.

also, ugh, i tested this in the substack preview and it looked fine but then it looks stupid in the email. sorry about that. it seems to look ok on the mobile site.

above are the ones we drew at the event itself. scribble is chelsea’s adorable dog.

i drew this one at the coffee shop while we were finalizing our plants for the class.

and i felt kind of inspired by this damselfly that landed on me while i was walking home from the event.

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postscript: it’s hard to do alt text with the galleries. if you need it, just reply to the email and i’ll write you some.

here’s the little gull my friends and i found in the rockaways a few weeks ago. it’s a rare bird in nyc and in north america overall. it’s also the smallest gull species. it was kinda shy when we first found it but then settled in for a few weeks before moving on. while it was visiting, it displayed extreme ire toward the piping plovers.

prescript

lots going on! buy book!

• THIS SUNDAY! chelsea and i are doing a book talk, nature walk, and guided journaling/sketching class in propect park, hosted by lofty pigeon books. meet at machate circle (prospect park southernmost entrance) august 3, 11am-1pm, tickets $18.

• i’m also doing a book signing and bird walk for books are magic in brooklyn bridge park, august 15, 6pm. register here!

• reminder! i’m co-facilitating jer thorp’s binoculars to binomials retreat in santa marta, colombia. september 11 to september 16—it’s an immersive experience where we’ll use birding as one of several tools to understand the natural world, with the goal of creating a collaborative data art piece in the style of jer’s 2017 work ‘in the map room.’ learn more here!!!

separately, i am reading moby dick alongside my friend , who’s hosting a moby dick book club. i’m posting my thoughts in my notes and encuorage you to join the conversation!

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last year, i had the privilege of visiting antarctica—but despite the worldview-changing scenery, animal abundance, and never-before-smelled odors, few moments topped seeing a bird i encounter regularly in new york.

i’m not talking about albatrosses or penguins but the wilson’s storm-petrel, a teeny brown bird ranking among the world’s commonest that breeds in antarctica and spreads across the world’s oceans by the million. seeing them on their breeding grounds reminded me that common does not mean uninteresting—in fact, the sheer abundance is part of what makes antarctic wildlife exciting. plus, now’s a good time to write about them because midsummer is when they appear in new york city waters and i need to think cold thoughts while basting in the urinous miasma of 100-degree manhattan.

since this may be a new bird for some of you: wilson’s storm-petrel is a “tubenose,” the order of birds that includes the seafaring albatrosses, petrels, and shearwaters. tubenoses are so-named because of the tube atop their beak—these birds drink ocean water and excrete the excess salt as a saline solution out of that tube. it also offers them a strong sense of smell for locating distant food sources at sea. the storm-petrels are a smaller member of this group, with the wilson’s storm-petrel measuring barely larger than a house sparrow in length and mass.

my first encounter with this species started out magical: at sunrise 100+ miles due east of new jersey’s cape may in 6500+ feet of water i witnessed a few brownish sprites bound by the boat, flashing white rumps as they fluttered and dipped their spindly legs into the water’s surface. someone called out “wilson’s storm-petrel!” and i lifted my binoculars to internalize my first-ever tubenose. but shortly afterward, the rarer northern hemisphere-dwelling band-rumped storm-petrel flew by, and some experienced birders’ reactions led me to believe that wilson’s was the less interesting species. throughout the day, someone would shout “i have a bird!” and people would lift their binoculars, then call out “wilson’s storm-petrel!” and most would put their binoculars right back down.

i noticed the same pattern on subsequent trips—even the most outspoken “i love common birds” people would ignore them by midday. printed trip recaps would only mention them as notable if observers tallied especially high or low numbers. i started feeling similarly uninspired by them. after all, they were small, brown, and common, and only showed two main behaviors: sitting and fluttering around. even when i saw one on a california seabirding trip where the species is rare i uttered the supremely annoying “oh, we see those by the dozen at home.”

but i was WRONG, ignoring the wilson’s storm-petrel is a BIRD SIN for which i MUST ATONE!!!!

i started warming to the species when i learned they were my friend tripper’s favorite bird—he’s an experienced and knowledgeable birder, so i must have been missing something. but my change of heart really started on day two of the antarctic cruise, still within sight of south america. our friend/guide doug informed us that we’d need to scan each wilson’s storm-petrel carefully—while most breed around the antarctic continent and surrounding islands, some instead breed in southern chile and argentina, representing a different subspecies. rather than writing off every dark-bodied, long-legged, short-winged storm-petrel as a wilson’s as i would in new york, i now had to inspect every wilson’s storm-petrel for a faint stripe of white feathers along the underside of its wing, a trait found only in these so-called “fuegian” birds.

we saw the species nearly every day of the trip, but the sightings only improved as we pushed south. one evening while docked in a quiet cove on south georgia island, we noticed small birds flying erratically hundreds of feet in the air. our first impression was swifts, a group of aerial insectivores representing some of the world’s best fliers—but there shouldn’t be any swifts on a small southern ocean island. they were storm-petrels, probably wilson’s. never had i seen a storm-petrel fly above eye level, and here they were soaring over a mountain. we considered that their swift-like nature was probably convergent evolution, given how much time the seabird spends on the wing.

wilson’s storm-petrels became a dynamic ornament on the austere antarctic landscape and a constant source of entertainment. each time we left the ship we’d witness them weaving amid icebergs and occasionally approaching close. they darted among penguins and skuas on antarctica’s rocky slopes, and produced ripples as they flew low over glassy seas. as we approached our southernmost point of the trip, we were sure to call out our “southernmost wilson’s storm-petrel.” i mentioned wilson’s storm-petrels in seven of my 19 daily ship logs, perhaps more than any other species.

the grand finale came on south shetland islands, our final stop before returning to south america. here, tripper monitored as high-flying wilson’s storm-petrels circled swallow-like and then approached the lichen-painted talus beside the island’s dramatic rock formations. finally one landed and wiggled into a small crevice, its nest. the rest of us joined and watched another bird do the same. we considered that we were witnessing the creation of birds that would later fly northward and join the hordes of wilson’s storm-petrels that we encounter each summer 7,000 miles away.

i see the species totally differently today, and find it as interesting in the north atlantic as i did in the southern ocean. the globetrotting nature of this bird, combined with its abundance, makes it a valuable tool to study how seemingly local human behaviors have world-spanning consequences. because of humans, wilson’s storm-petrels inadvertently bring pollutants to pristine antarctic habitats: one study found increased levels of toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—pfas, also known as “forever chemicals”—in the storm-petrel’s feathers, acquired during their nonbreeding season. the species can also bring bird flu back south.

but more generally, the bird could serve as a “canary-in-the-coal-mine,” giving researchers a lens to study changing ocean conditions such as temperature and salinity, and of course, climate change overall. environmental changes are likely responsible for a 90% decline in one wilson’s storm-petrel colony on the south shetland islands, for example. it’s amazing that you can glean insights about antarctica from a bird in the north atlantic, or about the north atlantic from a bird in antarctica.

the wilson’s storm-petrel is a vastly underappreciated demonstration of just how interconnected our world is. so next time you find yourself sitting idly while sipping a beer on an atlantic beach, scan the horizon for small, black specks fluttering along the sea surface. and if you’re lucky enough to spot one (they’re only occasionally seen from shore) then consider that you’re witnessing wildlife every bit as antarctic as the penguin.

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postscript

last weekend i visited great swamp national wildlife refuge in new jersey since i’d never been before. it was a slow day, but i did hear several birds i’d never encountered in new jersey before and enjoyed a public transit adventure to true wilderness close to nyc. my favorite thing i encountered was this mulberry-wing, a new butterfly for me. the skipper family of butterflies from which it hails are very hard to identify and while i didn’t recognize this one, i was proud to have pinpointed it as something different from what i usually see.

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i have lots of events coming up this summer! join me and consider buying my book so you can get it signed by me at said event.

1. come find me leading a waterbird walk at marine park salt marsh nature center this saturday, july 12 at 9am. free!

2. bird collective is organizing a pop-up shop and bird trivia hosted by moi at moot bar at 579 myrtle avenue in brooklyn, july 13 from 4-9pm. free! the questions are really good, i swear.

3. chelsea and i are doing a book talk, nature walk, and guided journaling/sketching class in propect park, hosted by lofty pigeon books. meet at machate circle (prospect park southernmost entrance) august 3, 11am-1pm, tickets $18.

4. i’m also doing a book signing and bird walk for books are magic in brooklyn bridge park, august 15, 6pm. info on how to register tbd.

5. reminder! i’m co-facilitating jer thorp’s binoculars to binomials retreat in santa marta, colombia. september 11 to september 16—it’s an immersive experience where we’ll use birding as one of several tools to understand the natural world, with the goal of creating a collaborative data art piece in the style of jer’s 2017 work ‘in the map room.’ learn more here!!!

finding a rare plant isn’t like finding a rare bird. birders have access to comprehensive field guides, powerful apps, and a large community of passionate experts providing vast troves of real-time data. but when i went looking for a rare plant with my in-laws last month, well, we didn’t have any of that.

instead, we embarked on pingquest 2025: an epic search for a secret population of a rare carnivorous plant on a barely inhabited island.

ok maybe i’m exaggerating a little, but pingquest was a major highlight of our michigan trip this year. coming from the resource-rich world of birding, it was pretty cool to search for a rare creature the old fashioned way, using nothing but museum specimens, an old map, and our intuition. i hope it inspires you to plan similar quests.

but first, a recap of my mighian lore. we visit my spouse brittany’s parents in rural minnesota annually, but covid foiled our 2020 plans. so, britt’s dad picked a spot halfway between them and us where we’d be mostly outside and socially distant: michigan’s bois blanc island. “boblo” is a forested landmass half the size of brooklyn in the straits of mackinac with no paved roads and a population of 100 people served by one bar, one general store, and a true single-room schoolhouse.

visiting boblo has become an annual tradition, and the activities are mostly “looking for stuff outside.” i look for birds and bugs, brittany and their dad look for rocks, and audrey, the master gardener partner of britt’s brother jake, looks for plants. audrey is especially passionate about carnivorous plants which she grows at home, and the island is loaded with pitcher plants, sundews, and bladderworts. but she’d never seen any “pings” in the wild—pinguicula vulgaris, common butterwort.

last year, the sum of our sightings revealed that boblo’s habitats actually represent critically imperiled ecosystems hosting a variety of rare species. you can read about that in a previous eyy i’m walkin here post. and through my research, i found a michigan natural features inventory document describing the habitat and promising butterwort among the expected inhabitants. so we really wanted to find them this year.

what were we looking for? well, butterworts are fist-sized plants with a half-dozen or so snot-green leaves growing in rosettes, producing a few tall stalks each with a single purple flower. unlucky insects land on the mucous-lined leaves and struggle, spurring the plant to produce more mucous plus enzymes that digest the insect in the open. these plants are rare because of their strict preference for wet, alkaline habitats, especially along cliffs and rocky shores, but can be hard to find even in appropriate habitat. during winter the plant loses its leaves and roots and persists as a “hibernaculum,” a bud dispersed by animals, wind, or water.

we started our search the way i start all non-bird searches: by checking the inaturalist database. inaturalist is a community science app which uses machine learning to help naturalists identify species, their uploaded photos going into a database which scientists use for ecology research. inat featured a single butterwort sighting on boblo, logged a decade prior by the island’s second most-prolific user (guess who #1 is 😉). we naively drove to the pin included in the report and arrived at a large wetland.

but something didn’t feel right. aside from the no trespassing signs, our fact sheet said the plant likes to grow on rocky substrates, and this was a regular swamp. we opened up the county’s land ownership map and saw that the far side of the wetland was on state land, so a few days later, we tried to access the patch via an offroad vehicle track. but there wasn’t appropriate habitat there, either. we re-checked the inat report and realized that the interesting habitat was coincidental. the finder used an approximate location to obscure the true location of their find. rats.

back at the cabin, audrey searched through some of the natural feature inventory databases maintained by michigan institutions. the university of michigan’s michigan flora website details the butterwort specimens in its collection‚ including six from bois blanc island dating from 1914 to 1973. some of the written descriptions included numbered “sections” and old names that don’t appear on any modern maps—but they did appear on a very old map that was provided in the information guide made by our cabin’s owners.

so we headed to one of the locations suggested by the 1973 report, “section 11 near point detachee,” an area i was knew from birding with a place to park and a maintained trail to the point. after stopping by a coastal fen to look at pitcher plans, we hiked east through mist along the rocky lakeshore toward the supposed point detachee, diligently scanning the roadsides. this habitat seemed far more appropriate, with alkaline-loving plants like dwarf lake iris, shrubby cinquefoil, and indian paintbrushes. we had a rare encounter with another human, who biked by and asked if we’d seen the bald eagle. but no butterwort. we kept walking.

things changed when we approached the point. the ever-present cedars appeared more stunted and i noticed a flower species that we hadn’t seen yet on the walk. and then i looked down, and there sat a few clumps of lime-green leaves. victory! we took lots of pictures and observed the plants up close, noting their recently-digested meals. audrey felt one of the plants (ok, she kissed one of the plants) and its leaves felt as greasy as the name suggested. notable was the obvious presence of the threats described by the fact sheets: the colony had grown right next to the road, and several plants had been flattened by passing off-road vehicles.

then we went to eat ice cream to celebrate.

i often joke that “everything is birds,” and our quest felt much like a rare bird chase, but with some very notable differences. information about non-birds can be disorganized and incomplete, making a non-bird search harder but often more rewarding. i wonder whether more widespread, organized, and easier-to-access knowledge about these plants and their rarity would prevent them from being regularly flattened. at the same time, rare carnivorous plants are often subject to overzealous collectors, and we, too, obscured the location of our find when we uploaded it to inaturalist. this is why we can’t have nice things, i suppose.

regardless, i hope i’ve inspired you to try and find some of the overlooked rarities in your area—the snails, plants, insects, and more with unique habits and habitat preferences that aren’t regularly documented. it took us a lot more research than finding a rare bird, but that’s a good thing. made me feel like a real naturalist!

postscript

i joined some friends whale watching last weekend and had a pretty epic time. the new york bay is utterly loaded with atlantic menhaden right now and the humpback whales were giving drama, lunging into the air to feed and sending fish flying.

prescript:

I had a few book events in the past two weeks that were really awesome—keep your eyes open for a few more this summer. But otherwise, come find me at Marine Park Salt Marsh Nature Center on July 12 at 9am.

I’m co-facilitating Jer Thorp’s Binoculars to Binomials retreat in Santa Marta, Colombia and we have open slots! September 11 to September 16—It’ll be really fun and is very reasonably priced. It’s an immersive experience where we’ll use birding as one of several tools to understand the natural world, with the goal of creating a collaborative data art piece in the style of Jer’s 2017 work ‘In the Map Room.’ Learn more here!!!

Finally: I told you that salamander season was over… and then I was able to chat with wildlife biologist Ellen Pehek who rediscovered the dusky salamander in Manhattan’s Highbridge Park based on a 60-year-old paper by biologist Carl Gans. It was too much fun not to share, so enjoy the first-ever “eyy i’m walkin here” Q+A! And for more context, you can check out my last post.

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How did you get started?

I had always been interested in salamanders and frogs and I always wanted to be a biologist. As a kid in New Jersey, I had a little nature center in my neighborhood and collected salamanders for my neighbors to see and then return them to the wild. It was a dream of mine to be able to study them, but someone told me that you needed a master’s degree and I thought that would be impossible. So I went through a somewhat circuitous route, but eventually ended up at Rutgers and got my Ph.D there. I studied pine barrens tree frogs.

It was difficult to get a job in the northeast in wildlife biology, especially back then. I worked for the Nature Conservancy for a while in South Jersey, and then did some work with a lot of different threatened and endangered wildlife with New Jersey Fish and Wildlife. And then a friend of mine from graduate school told me that there was an opportunity at NYC Parks’ Natural Resources Group (NRG), an opening for a wildlife biologist, so I jumped at the chance. Luckily they hired me. That was in 1998.

How did you feel doing wildlife biology work in NYC?

People give NYC really short shrift when it comes to wildlife. But no matter where you go there’s wildlife, so even in a city you’re going to find interesting things. We have a great beach-nesting bird population and rare plants that have been eliminated elsewhere like the seabeach amaranth. We have the Atlantic Coast Leopard Frog that was discovered to be a new species—and that was discovered on Staten Island, of all places. I really don’t subscribe to the notion that you have to go to an exotic place to experience nature.

What did you do at the NRG?

One thing I noticed is that there were a lot of reports of what lived in our parks, some hand-written, some typed out, plus people with information in their brains. But there wasn’t a whole lot on the computer and it wasn’t really accessible. There was a botanist Marge Gargiullo who had compiled a huge document on each plant in each park in each location in the city, but no one had done that for the animals. My real desire was to compile all of that information. How are you going to manage land if you don’t know what lives there? Let’s say they want to put ball fields somewhere. How do you give guidance on where to do that and where not to do that?

We were doing a lot of other things, too. New York State had grants to do restorations from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Bond Act. so I helped design some of those. I did a lot of monitoring of the forest restorations and wetland restorations to see how the work affected the plants and animals that lived there before and after, and then comparing that to a model community we thought was good. Then there was a lot of work doing environmental review of projects either adjacent to the parks or in parks to make sure that they did as little harm as possible.

What made you go looking for the dusky salamander?

If you’re lost, Ellen references a lot of things I covered in my last post.

When I had the time, I would do literature searches for everything I could find about different animals in the parks. That’s how I found that article by Carl Gans. It was fascinating because when I first started with NRG, one of the first things I heard about Highbridge Park was that the Urban Forestry program was working there and found a bag of human remains. It’s a much better place now, but Highbridge at the time was kind of a no-go zone for a lot of people. And it may be the only place in Manhattan that has this species. If you look at John Kieran’s Natural History of New York City from 1959, he said it was the most common salamander in New York City, but it isn’t anymore. So what happened to the dusky, and was it still there in this very densely developed part of Manhattan? We decided to explore.

We came in from the top at the cross street where Gans repored it. Getting down those rock formations was pretty difficult—it’s very steep. We ended up finding several different subpopulations, maybe in three locations. We always found lots of larvae and big healthy adults. It was just amazing that here we had what is now one of the rarest salamanders in New York City. I worked for NYC Parks for 21 years and we never found the dusky in the other boroughs, it’s only found on Staten Island and at Highbridge Park in Manhattan. Today, one of the populations has kind of winked out but might have moved a bit uptown, and I’m not sure if one is still there. But the third is still there.

How has it held on for so long? I saw your 2013 paper detailing how its isolation was leading to decreased genetic diversity.

You can’t do much about the genetic diversity, really. I mean, on Staten Island you have duskies that are in these seeps that feed into larger streams, so you can see there being dispersal if the larvae get swept into those streams and crawl out into a different seep. But that’s not the case with Highbridge Park. Those waters always went down to the East River—they never went into a bigger stream that the salamanders could have used to disperse. Let’s say that Manhattan had never been colonized and we did a genetic study of the dusky salamanders and the interchange between nearby Inwood Hill Park and Highbridge. I can’t imagine that there would have been much.

The whole idea that low genetic diversity is deleterious isn’t true in every case. Genetically, they were reproducing and we had all life stages. We didn’t see any signs of degeneration, like a bunch of them with deformities. They’ve hung around for all of this time. Gans described them in 1945, but they’ve been there for thousands and thousands of years. This population, without any problems in the habitat, maybe it could survive another 10,000 years. Could a population with more genetic diversity survive longer? We don’t know. You can think about bringing some individuals in from another population, but that’s very risky. For salamanders and most herps, disease is a really big consideration when introducing animals from another population. But in the short term, say a human lifespan, I don’t think the genetic diversity will affect the population that much.

Now, for the one population that winked out, there was some kind of project along the pathways and somehow the storm water got rerouted right over the salamanders. There were some torrential rains and afterward the whole area was covered with trash. The salamanders can handle the trash, but with it comes sediment that smothers their habitat. They need the cracks between the rocks to live in, and that pretty much disappeared in that one section after that. We never figured out exactly how it happened—there wasn’t a huge construction project, someone might have just unclogged a drain pipe. Those are the bigger problems. Really, the way to preserve the salamanders is to preserve the habitat.

The way I feel is that the dusky salamanders are one of the best gems in New York City if you talk about natural phenomena. It’s something we should treasure, because we really just have that one historical location on Manhattan. Combined with the story of Carl Gans and his family of refugees from Germany, it’s just altogether a very fascinating story and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to preserve them.

What have you done since then?

I really sought to make data accessible on what lived in the parks for the purpose of planning and reviewing projects and protecting species. We used a lot of that data to assist the state with wildlife projects, determining the species of greatest conservation need. I worked with a lot of nonprofits like NYC Bird Alliance, and did work Hofstra University and JFK Airport—we worked on terrapins in Queens, found out some really interesting things about their populations and did some protection of nests. I also worked with Jeremy Feinberg on looking for the Atlantic coast leopard frog.

Today, I live out in New Jersey where I grew up and volunteer for the local watershed. I still go out with NYC Bird Alliance and do the Harbor Heron survey every May. I have a route on the North American Breeding Bird Survey I do each June. I’m a little involved in politics, which is not something I love, but it’s essential on the local level. Now one of the big things I’m interested in are hoverflies—also known as syrphid flies or flower flies. A lot of them are bee and wasp mimics and they visit flowers. Many of them are fascinating little creatures—they do some pollination and some of their larvae eat aphids, but they’re really understudied, so I’m spending time identifying them.

Anything else?

When I was with NYC Parks, I had a hard time getting people to engage on these salamanders. But now the Parks Department is stepping up quite a bit more. Recently there was a plan to do a project along the Harlem River Drive and George Washington Bridge where they tried not to impact the salamanders. The people at NRG are doing a really good job and I want to acknowledge that because it’s hard to fight against development and projects like that.

—

postscript:

You may notice that I used proper capitalization for this blog post. It was an accident on account of how I took my notes during my and Ellen’s conversation I but decided to be consistent for this post. Let me know if you like it or don’t like it.

Also, last year I told you about an endangered dragonfly I found on a little island in Michigan. I’m back there now, and as promised, I am spending my time looking for endangered snails. All of the ones I hope to find measure no more than three millimeters and one of them hasn’t been seen here in decades. On top of that, I have no idea how to identify a snail. Wish me luck!

prescript

the reviews are in: 1. goodreads readers are enjoying wild nyc 2. chelsea’s dad left a 5-star review on amazon 3. yesterday my friend, renowned biologist-provocateur and lifelong new yorker douglas futuyma, told me my book was “fantastic” and was especially happy with how it captured his home borough of the bronx. that means you should buy it! here’s doug’s most recent book for you to buy, too.

and now i’m excited to announce that i’ll be facilitating my friend jer thorp’s binoculars to binomials retreat in santa marta, colombia!! it’ll go from september 11 to september 16 and is very reasonably priced, given what’s included. it’s not a birding trip—it’s more like an immersive experience where we’ll use birding as one of several tools to understand the natural world, with the goal of creating a collaborative data art piece in the style of jer’s 2017 piece ‘in the map room.’ learn more here!!!

also mark your calendars: i’ll be leading a walk at marine park salt marsh nature center on july 12 at 9am, one of my favorite nyc wildlife destinations. no registration required, learn more here.

—

sorry for the delay, i know you all have been eagerly awaiting the final installment of the nyc salamander trilogy. as a reminder, i thought it would be funny to devote all of the peak birdwatching season to writing about salamanders, which are abundant outside of nyc but rarely encountered in the city itself. previous installments explained why the east’s most abundant salamander (and most abundant animal generally) shuns the city and how a large, polka-dotted salamander has persisted thanks to our ice age history. barring some major discovery, non-salamander programming will resume with the next post.

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as a kid growing up near nyc at the end of the 20th century, you did not go to manhattan’s highbridge park. highbridge carried a reputation of crime and neglect, passed along by parents and newspapers as horror stories featuring the usual new york city tropes of crack-cocaine, homelessness, and gang violence. it was considered the city's “most damaged, most cluttered” major park by former (and disgraced) parks commissioner henry j. stern.

against this backdrop, nyc parks senior ecologist ellen pehek made one of the most shocking rediscoveries in the history of new york nature in 2005. hiding beneath logs and trash in the water dribbling from the park’s rocky outcrops lived a population of northern dusky salamanders, recorded for the first time since the 1950s. they have presisted into the present—but the continued existence of duskies here in nyc will likely require human help as a result of isolation from development.

northern dusky salamanders are small, brownish-red amphibians distributed throughout eastern north america, with a habitat preference for clear, rocky freshwater streams and seepages. as a lungless salamander they require constant moisture to breathe, plus cover to maintain their body temperature and the ability to burrow so that they don’t freeze in winter. while some salamanders migrate between upland woods and wetlands, duskies mostly spend their lives in one spot. like other salamanders, northern dusky salamanders are extremely sensitive to human development, which renders their habitats uninhabitable by muddying waters and introducing heavy metals and non-native species.

even so, they stuck around in new york city well past the industrial revolution, both on staten island and, surprisingly, in highbridge park. back in 1939, carl gans and his jewish refugee family escaped nazi germany and settled in manhattan near the george washington bridge. as a teenager he dreamed of becoming a globetrotting biologist, and would explore sites around manhattan and across the bridge in new jersey to collect reptiles. in 1942 he visited nearby highbridge, a thin strip of rocky woodland overlooking the east river. he found a few dekay’s brownsnakes, a garter snake… and an entire population of dusky salamanders. this was apparently the first time anyone had noticed the species on manhattan island since biologist constantine samuel rafinesque first described it over 120 years prior. gans noted in his 1945 paper that the population survived despite frequent foot traffic through the area, and suggested that others leave the critters alone.

northern dusky salamanders apparently weren’t rare back then, though. in his seminal “a natural history of new york city” published in 1959, naturalist john kieran describes duskies as “probably the most common salamander within the city limits.” however, he also notes that “only a limited amount remains of the clear running water” that they and other nyc salamanders like the eastern red-backed require to survive.

and then no one heard from the highbridge duskies again for decades. or maybe no one looked for them. the park’s popularity had been waning since 1940, when robert moses replaced the equestrian track along its edge with the 6-lane harlem river drive, severing access to the east river. the city’s financial crisis in the 1970s led to a downsizing of the parks department and neglect of the parks overall, with highbridge especially becoming a home for the homeless and a hotbed of criminal activity. it took just a few days after a 1980s cleanup attempt for highbridge to return to its littered state. “only the most intrepid or foolhardy visitors dared to explore highbridge” prior to its restoration, according to a 1999 new york times article.

that same article describes an attempt to revitalize highbridge led by actress bette midler. by the start of the 21st century, visitors were returning to the park in part thanks to her leadership and amid an overall renewed interest in the city’s parks.

then in 2005, nyc parks senior biologist ellen pehek found gans’ 1945 paper and decided to go look for the northern dusky salamanders once again. and there among the logs, rocks, and litter she found them persisting in the cliffside seeps as they had been decades prior. i visited with my salamander-loving friend tim healy two months ago—20 years after pehek and 80 years after gans—and can confirm that they’re still there, slithering through the wet cracks in the cliffs.

normally, i’d stress that it shouldn’t be surprising when an animal inhabits or attempts to inhabit its expected habitat inside of the city limits. but salamanders aren’t like birds, bees, and bushes. salamanders are super-sensitive to urban development, as changes in the water quality or volume, introduced predators, and chemistry of the surrounding soil can easily kill them off. and once the concrete ocean of urban development turns their home into an island, there’s no mechanism for them to repopulate on their own, even if we restore it.

a closer look at the duskies reveals that this isolation itself is a further threat. a 2013 study of northern dusky salamanders across sites in the city found that their dna is beginning to diverge from that of the populations outside of the city—evolution under the natural selection pressures of urban life. they also face an overall loss of genetic diversity, as there are no new genes flowing in from those outside populations. according to this paper, isolation itself is ”an underappreciated cause and/or consequence of their continued decline,” atop the usual forces like habitat degredation and climate change.

there’s hope for some of the city’s duskies, though. the staten island population persists, and the 2013 study suggests potential avenues to further protect them from the negative effects of habitat fragmentation and isolation caused by urbanization. that includes improving water quality, removing barriers to the flow of the streams they live in, considering new ways to surface underwater streams, or building culverts under highways to connect waterways. perhaps thoughtfully introducing members from outside populations could help increase genetic diversity.

fewer opportunities exist for the duskies at highbridge. perhaps the best we can do is leave them alone, allow them to persist for as long as they can, and use their story to nudge urban development in directions that permit the continued existence of salamanders elsewhere. but for now, well, i just think it’s cool that they’re still there.

prescript

thanks to all who came to my events this month—i was delighted by the turnout for our pigeon portraits and prose event, and so many people got to experience bird migration with me! reminder, you can buy my book here or ask for it wherever books are sold. i have some upcoming events, with a couple more brewing for the summer.

1: wings over wave hill, may 18. bird walk 9:30-11am, bird talk on how to document urban wildlife 4:30-5:30pm. all @ wave hill. free with admission to the grounds.

2: they blinded me with science bird drag, june 1. details tba, follow they.blinded.me.with.science on instagram!

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last time, i decided that i was going to do a three-part series about the salamanders that live in new york city. while salamanders are among the most common animals in the eastern forest, new york city has very few of them. those that remain all have unique stories demonstrating the resilience and quirks required for an animal to survive in extremely altered habitat. check out part one here, and read on for part two.

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remnants of the last ice age are everywhere in new york city, if you know where to look. ice-pushed boulders sit awkwardly in the marshes of pelham bay park, exposed bedrock in inwood features etched stripes from receding glaciers, and the spine of long island itself represents the rubble deposited at the outermost edge of the last ice age’s ice sheet. but it’s the most understated remnants, amounting to little more than puddles, that harbor the most interesting biodiversity—including the city’s most colorful amphibian.

enter the vernal pool, a kind of temporary forest wetland. the last ice age’s receding glaciers left behind chunks of buried ice throughout the northeastern united states, which melted and pockmarked the surface with depressions. some of these depressions fill annually with seasonal sources of water like melting ice and spring rains, then dry up as the year goes on. temporary ponds can’t support egg- and insect-eating fish, allowing a new kind of ecosystem to thrive, one dominated by amphibians and crustaceans.

a few weeks ago, some friends and i went searching for nyc’s spotted salamanders, creatures whose lives depend on these temproary landscapes. our ice age-carved city still features some vernal pools in the outer boroughs alongside their associated cast of characters—they just take a bit of extra effort to find.

spotted salamanders do not compute as eastern forest amphibians. their bright yellow spots make them look like poison dart frogs and they can measure a shocking seven inches from head to tail. yet they’re a common species east of the mississippi. not only do they like vernal pools, but alongside wood frogs, they’re often used as indicators of vernal pool health, like canaries in a coal mine.

these sallies live most of their lives underground in the forest and spend the winter in a hibernation-like state called brumation. but stretches of warm rain and warming temperatures in early spring triggers migration, where they awake and move from upland areas to vernal pools. this journey can span a quarter-mile. adults breed in the pool and then return to their feeding and sleeping grounds, while their aquatic larva mature and then metamorphose in the pool. when they’re ready (or when the pool dries up), the young, too, go find someplace else to live until the next year. in some places, the migration between the forest and the pool can be spectacular. you can check out jason bittel’s awesome newsletter on the subject here.

Sort Of Funny Field Guides

Be Here Now: The Spotted Salamander's Guide to the Present

Hi, I’m Jason Bittel. I write about animals for a living. And today, I’m here to admit that I only recently learned that spotted salamanders are a thing that exists…

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a year ago · 7 likes · Jason Bittel

finding new york city’s spotted salamanders features less spectacle and more stress. we were welcomed at the suburban trailhead by a parade of off-leash dogs tearing through the woods, followed by their oblivious owners—some sort of deranged dog-walkers club. northbound bird migration had just started, but the early spring woods were quiet in the unusually high winds. we worried that the cold snap and less-than-predicted rain would keep the salamanders hidden.

my friends max, tim, and i spread across the leaf-litter beneath leafless trees uphill from the park’s pools, following proper flipping protocol by turning logs and rocks toward, rather than away from us and replacing them after a scan. this went on for an hour or two, with mostly photos of woodlice and worms to show for our efforts. while i have minimal herping experience, i started to feel like woodlice are to herping what bottle caps are to metal detecting.

but activity started picking up as the sun warmed the ground. a few eastern phoebes awoke, pumping their tails as they scanned for breakfast. a pair of wood ducks vocalized and watched us from high in a tree. we started finding some red-backed salamanders—not our target, but they instilled confidence that there were actually salamanders around. and finally, beneath a pool-side wooden board that felt like it was placed intentionally, max spotted two spotted salamanders and a red-backed salamander. he shouted for us and a photoshoot ensued, followed by some celebratory korean fried chicken.

the scale of habitat destruction has prevented vernal pool specialists from thriving in most of new york city—our vernal pools have broadly been replaced by city streets or other less-natural areas. after all, to the untrained eye, vernal pools are an easy target for filling, draining, and dumping. for a long time, new york state didn’t deem them large enough to receive protections as regulated wetland. they were an afterthought—who cares about a puddle?

but thankfully, things are changing for the health of these vernal pools and their inhabitants. just this past year, the state department of environmental conservation updated its regulations. previously, the state could designate wetlands, and then set up a 100-foot regulated area nearby. the new rule also allows for custom designations for vernal pools. after all, vernal pools form just part of the habitat. equally important is the connection to the upland forest where salamanders spend the rest of the year, as part of a broader patchwork of habitat types. so if the pool is especially important to breeding amphibians, they receive a protected area that also includes the adjacent upland areas used in the nonbreeding season.

as with the last salamander blog, i can’t offer such a rosy ending—while young spotted salamanders are capable of dispersing a few dozen meters, nyc isn’t getting any new populations without human intervention. but i can leave you with the reminder that new york city is part of the natural world, and the same natural forces that have shaped the eastern forests create similar ecosystems inside of the city. the result is that we still get to see some awesome animals within the city’s limits.

prescript

for as long as it’s book season (another month or two) the postscript will be a prescript and the posting frequency will be up so i can continue hawking my wares :) as a reminder, you can buy my book here or ask for it wherever books are sold. otherwise, please please come see me at one of these upcoming events! more to come.

#1: pigeon portraits and prose, may 3, 1:30-3:00pm @ caveat on the les. $15, $20 at the door, tickets available here. chelsea and i are hosting an irreverent nature writing and illustration workshop.

#2: intro to birding, may 4, 9-10:30am @ marine park salt marsh nature center. free, no registration required.

#3: golden hour bird walk, may 8, 6-7:30pm @ prospect park stranahan monument. free, registration encouraged.

#4: wings over wave hill, may 18. bird walk 9:30-11am, bird talk on how to document urban wildlife 4:30-5:30pm. all @ wave hill. free with admission to the grounds.

it’s the most wonderful time of year for new york city naturalists: salamander season!!! …or at least, it would be the most wonderful time if it wasn’t also the best time for migrating birds and if there were actually salamanders to look at.

outside of nyc, salamanders likely represent eastern north america’s most abundant animal by mass, thanks to the eastern red-backed salamander. inside nyc, the forces of urbanization have made salamanders a rarity, confined to the city’s outer limits plus a few urban greenspaces. but there are still species hanging on—surprisingly so, in some cases. they become more active and visible in spring as temperatures warm, so i went on a few salamander-viewing trips with friends last month.

to celebrate this exciting time of year, i’m putting together a series of posts about the complex relationship between nyc and these salamanders. the first will explore why a city that supports so much biodiversity can’t manage to host the eastern forest’s most common animal. the second details how the city’s ice age history allows a large, polka-dotted creature to thrive. and the third visits the surprising place in manhattan where a habitat-restricted salamander has held on, against all odds.

but first: what is a salamander and how do you observe them? salamanders are amphibians like frogs but with long bodies and tails that make them look like lizards. they live mostly in the northern hemisphere’s temperate regions. they have a wide diversity of life histories: some begin their lives as aquatic larvae with gills and then mature into terrestrial beings, some spend their whole lives underwater, some spend their whole lives on land, and some—the newts—are born in water, move to the land for a few years, then return to the water.

finding salamanders usually requires searching for shady, moist areas and peering beneath rocks, logs, trash, or other things on the ground. it’s good habit to flip the object toward you—if there’s a snake under the log, you’ll be happy to have the barrier. if you choose to handle salamanders, avoid touching them with bare hands and be very gentle with them. leave no trace on the scene — return the animals and their cover to their initial positions. but none of that matters in prospect park or central park, because there are no salamanders. find out why below.

for a long time, i assumed that the eastern united states’ animals were just the normal ones. we don’t have elephants, polar bears, flamingoes, or other animals that you’d see in nature documentaries that make us unique, i thought. the lowly salamander proved me wrong.

the nearby appalachian mountains are the salamander’s center of diversity, hosting at least 70 of the world’s 550 or so species especially in the southern half of the mountain range. the habitat is perfect with its shady, moist, temperate forests, and the southern appalachians resisted glaciation during the last ice age, allowing them to serve as a refuge for salamanders who could continue filling available niches instead of succumbing to the glaciers. though not as diverse here, new york still supports 18 salamander species.

the abundance is even more shocking than the diversity thanks to the eastern red-backed salamander. red-backed salamanders primarily live underground in forested areas with moist soil, a requirement to stay cool and breathe through their skin since they’re cold-blooded and don’t have lungs. there’s lots of appropriate habitat in our forests, and large-scale studies have found that eastern north america averages around 10,000 red-backed salamanders per hectare (~two american football fields). they might even surpass the total mass of our white-tailed deer.

and yet despite this abundance, eastern red-backed salamanders are missing from many nyc parks, including both prospect park and central park, even though both host forests that would look like fine salamander habitat elsewhere.

i couldn’t find specific studies about their absence, but i could guess why. you can’t overstate the scale of alteration that nyc’s land has undergone. though the city was once a mega-biodiverse region with forests, marshes, grasslands, and more, old photos of central park and prospect park reveal rolling hills devoid of vegetation, the land cleared, plowed, and tilled for farming and grazing. plus, new york was once significantly more polluted, and a skin-breathing, moisture-needing creature is sensitive to a toxic environment. salamanders may be resilient, but they require clean soil, tree cover, and ground cover like downed trees—which were largely missing from nyc during european colonization

today, some of nyc’s parks simulate the forests outside of the city with artificial waterways and human-planted flora. some species have responded and re-colonized the region in kind. most notably, the city today has far more lichen diversity than it did during the mid-20th century since lichen is very sensitive to air pollution. but paved areas stymie salamander dispersal. so, even after we restore some habitat, there’s no natural way for red-backed salamanders to return.

thankfully, while many of the city’s natural ares are too far-gone to host salamanders, others have preserved them. rocky terrain in uptown manhattan, north queens, and the bronx left areas unsuitable for urban development, in some instances becoming fenced off as part of wealthy estates. you can still find salamanders with regularity in these areas, including inwood hill park, van cortlandt park, forest park, and the staten island greenbelt, though often localized to specific areas.

and then there’s the curious case of brooklyn’s green-wood cemetery. aside from one well-known actress’ yard, for some reason (????) , green-wood hosts brooklyn’s only population of eastern red-backed salamanders. from my understanding, they’re mostly confined to the dell water. dell water is an artificially constructed but natural-feeling part of the cemtery with lots of leaf litter, downed logs, low shrubs, and tall trees on its steep slopes. researchers have recently placed rubber mats specifically for the salamanders.

i have no idea why salamanders persist at green-wood but not at prospect park, which looks far more like salamander habitat. logic tells me that green-wood’s soil wasn’t disturbed intensely enough to eradicate them so they’ve held on, but i don’t know for sure. and they’re not totally safe; studies have found that in urban areas, fragmenting salamander habitats can lead to genetic bottlenecks and loss of diversity which can result in inbreeding and threaten the population.

for the past few years, i’ve been focusing on the fact that cities are wildlife habitat, critical wildlife habitat in some cases. this might leave the reader with a rosy feeling that it’s possible to live harmoniously with wildlife in cities. but our missing red-backed salamanders represent permanent damage done—much of what we’ve lost through urbanization may never return. let it be a reminder, lest we lose something else. and let’s be nice to the salamanders that remain :)

it’s here! my book! it’s published! you can order it! if you’re in nyc, you should also attend one of the following upcoming launch events. i would really appreciate if you bought tickets to the caveat event, since that’s the one that requires the most prep work. (also there is more to this post than advertising—article after the jump).

#1: bird walk, talk, and drag show, april 23, meet 7pm @ sunset stoop in sunset park — 4114 5av in brooklyn. we’re gonna explore sunset park, then i’m gonna give a fun intro to nyc nature, my friend alex will do a drag set, and then i’m gonna sign books and maybe more.

#2: pigeon portraits and prose, may 3, 1:30-3:00pm @ caveat on the les. $15, tickets available here. chelsea and i are hosting an irreverent nature writing and illustration workshop. i am SO EXCITED.

#3: intro to birding, may 4, 9-10:30am @ marine park salt marsh nature center. free, no registration required.

#4: golden hour bird walk, may 8, 6-7:30pm @ prospect park stranahan monument. free, registration encouraged.

#5: wings over wave hill, may 18. bird walk 9:30-11am, bird talk on how to document urban wildlife 4:30-5:30pm. all @ wave hill. free with admission to the grounds.

and now, back to our regularly scheduled programming! this is a section of book i really like with a new intro written special for y’all.

on first glance, new york city looks like the largest city in the united states: like concrete, brick, steel, glass, and the occasional park. its inhabitants appear mostly human, pigeon, or rodent, covering its surfaces in paint, trash, and shit (of which it occasionally smells). when i first started birding, i mostly saw it the same way, with the addition of some pretty birds.

but looking beyond birds reveals new patterns. plant and animal species change based on the elevation, distance to the coast, and amount of sunlight. creatures form assemblages: fiddler crabs and cordgrass, hickories and oaks, grass and geese. thankfully, nyc parks has a codex for untangling it all, translating the assemblages into underlying forest types to provide urban foresters with a guide for preserving the city as wildlife habitat. the pdf, titled "guidelines for urban forest restoration,” plays a major role in my understanding of the city, and in turn the book.

nor do the city’s habitats exist in isolation—we live in a uniquely biodiverse area. new york sits at the juncture of land and water, atop an estuary where saltwater and freshwater intermingle. it’s bisected by the boundary between two climate zones, humid subtropical and humid continental. it covers land that dates back over a billion years and land that dates only to the last ice age. the result is far more species diversity than you’d expect from 300 square miles. in brooklyn alone, inaturalist users have logged nearly 2000 plant species, 3000 insects, 350 birds, and 30 mammals. those high numbers can also be explained by the city’s human density, and therefore its many human observers. and there have been lots of humans here for millennia.

biodiversity and ecological abundance was a major draw for the city’s previous inhabitants, mostly lenape people speaking the munsee and unami languages. around 15,000 people from tribes including the canarsee, rockaway, siwanoy, raritan, and wecquaesgeek would have lived throughout the archipelago, moving between its islands to hunt, trade, process wampum, and more. european colonizers largely removed any evidence of these people, either by killing them directly, indirectly via new diseases, or by forcing them out. archaeologists still occasionally uncover evidence of our indigenous predecessors during excavations for new construction.

and then we filled the marshes, paved the grid, and built the skyscrapers. but we didn’t destroy everything—parks, estates, farms, and now landfills preserved patches of the ecosystems and different habitats that supported the lenape and new york’s wildlife. you can still identify these habitats today based on vibes and what kinds of species they contain. of course, they continue to face threats, and i hope people agree that given the city’s biodiversity, its wildlife habitat is extra important to preserve.

combining info from that urban forest restoration pdf, the new york natural heritage program, my observations, and conversations with other naturalists, i wrote the below guide to nyc’s different wildlife habitats which appears in my new book, wild nyc.

appalachian oak-hickory forest

as the name suggests, appalachian oak-hickory forest makes up much of the inland forests nearby, such as in the catskills or the appalachian mountains. it appears in sites with drier soil that drain water quickly where the water doesn’t pool, like on hilltops. in much of the state, this forest type serves as the overarching forest that surrounds other forest types.

this forest features oaks like red, white, and black, hickories like shagbark and bitternut, and understory shrubs like mapleleaf viburnum and witch-hazel. on the ground you might find pennsylvania sedge, mayapple, and wild sarsaparilla. look for pollinators on its flowering plants, plenty of squirrels, and in undisturbed areas you might find raccoons and opossums or breeding songbirds like red-eyed vireos and wood thrushes. some of these forests even have flying squirrels—yes, in nyc.

our oak-hickory forests are prone to invasive species like tree-of-heaven and multiflora rose, plus overbrowsing by deer. forest fragmentation can also negatively impact the species that live in this ecosystem.

you can find examples of this forest type in forest park in queens, parts of the midwood in brooklyn’s prospect park, and high rock park on staten island, and on hills in uptown parks like inwood hill park and van cortlandt park.

rich mesophytic forest

nyc parks uses the term “rich mesophytic forest” differently from new york state, referring specifically to forests with moist, deep, and nutrient-rich soil that allows many tree species to grow. they’re similar-looking to appalachian oak-hickory forests, but they have moister soil.

certain tree communities might outnumber the others depending on the forest, such as oaks and tuliptrees or beeches and maples. here in nyc, these forests often host some of the city’s most impressive trees. in the understory, look for witch-hazel, blackberries, and snakeroot. you might find spring ephemeral flowers—plants that take advantage of the lack of leaves and extra sunlight to flower earlier in spring. perhaps you’ll even find american chestnuts low on the ground—there are a few parks where the city is attempting to bring back this critically endangered tree that was once a cornerstone of the eastern forest.

plus, moister soil means they’re more likely to host salamanders, which can be hard to find in nyc parks. i’ll be featuring more on that in the newsletter next week.

you can find examples of these forests in van cortlandt park, staten island’s mount loretto state forest, forest park, and alley pond park. alley pond is a great place to look for salamanders, especially around its vernal pools—those that fill temporarily and annually, usually during the late winter and spring.

floodplain forests

floodplain forests are hardwood forests that grow in wet areas and experience regular flooding, especially beside rivers. they feature plants that can handle those conditions, such as hardwood trees like swamp white oak and pin oak, maples, and sycamores; shrubs like spicebush, alder, and hornbeam; and low herbs like sedges, jewelweed, american jumpseed, and skunk cabbage.

though these forests were once common in the state of new york, they’re much rarer today. their water and mineral-rich soil made them especially vulnerable to clearing for farmland. humans continue to develop and inhabit areas along the waterways lining these forests. because of the scale of human interaction, floodplain forests are prone to invasions by nonnative species like garlic mustard, multiflora rose, and japanese knotweed.

new york city features floodplain forests near its freshwater rivers, such as along the bronx river, along tibbets brook in van cortlandt park, the ambergill of prospect park, and along central park’s loch. these forests are fun places to go birdwatching, as migratory birds come down to bathe in the rivers’ shallow pools on hot afternoons.

red maple hardwood swamp

like floodplain forest, red maple–hardwood swamp features plants that can tolerate wet soil. but in the case of these swamps, it’s because the soil doesn’t drain well, causing water to pool. as the name suggests, you can find red maples here, alongside blueberries and spicebush. look for jewelweed and a ground covered by ferns like like cinnamon fern and sensitive fern.

the state recognizes a few kinds of red maple–hardwood swamp that you can identify based on what other trees are around. staten island, for example, has red maple–sweetgum swamps, where sweetgum trees and red maples are co-dominant. the city once held swamps of red maple and swamp white oak, too, though most examples of these are degraded.

these swamps are all threatened by development and runoff (water draining from developed areas that carries chemicals and trash). runoff can bury plants, and its chemicals can prevent natural growth and cause algae to spread, depriving other plants of oxygen.

you can find examples of these swamps at clay pit ponds state park preserve and wolfe’s pond park on staten island, van cortlandt park in the bronx, and alley pond park in queens.

successional forest

following a disturbance (fire or a tree fall, for example), forests begin the process of ecological succession. in place of the old vegetation, you might find a mix of species from other habitats, especially plants you’d expect to find in meadows and understories.

these areas don’t occur alone—rather, they’re part of the patchwork making up the broader forest. the disturbance clears the forest, fast-growing, sun-loving plants take over, and eventually slow-growing trees shade out the early colonizers and the forest matures to a different forest type. this process is happening constantly across the landscape.

here in nyc, these habitats host pioneer species like black cherries, eastern redcedar, and birches; shorter shrubby plants like spicebush, arrowwood, and sassafras; sensitive ferns; grasses; and wildflowers like wild bergamot and snakeroot. but they’re often subject to invasion by more aggressive introduced species—black locust, porcelainberry, mugwort, and bittersweet. regardless of the plant makeup, these areas hold abundant fruit in the fall, and can attract a variety of common and uncommon birds, pollinators, and mammals like cottontails and groundhogs.

coastal and marine forests

many nyc habitats are influenced by the city’s location on the ocean. salty air and sea spray can kill plant cells, which means certain plants struggle to grow and end up stunted by the harsh conditions, while the salt-tolerant plants survive.

in the city’s seaside habitats, you might find forests and shrublands with plants like pitch pine, eastern redcedar, bayberry, beach plum, beach grasses, and seaside goldenrod. some areas even have stunted trees that look like bonsai. usually, forest succession would lead to new forest types, but salt spray keeps the forest stuck in a state of arrested development. unfortunately, their desirable seaside locations make these marine habitats prone to development pressure, which leads to habitat fragmentation and invasive species.

these forests comprise some of nyc’s best migratory-bird hotspots—the rockaway peninsula and jamaica bay, for example—as migratory birds hit the coast and stop from fear of crossing the water. these habitats transition into dunes and beaches, and while plant diversity drops, interesting creatures thrive like the rare seabeach amaranth, piping plovers, harbor seals, and ghost crabs. you can find good examples at the marine park salt marsh nature center in brooklyn and idlewild park in queens.

salt marsh

salt marshes once blanketed the five boroughs. but less than 20 percent of those marshes remain. intense landfilling and development since the beginning of european colonization have caused major losses to this threatened habitat.

the city’s 4000 acres of remaining (though often degraded) salt marsh still play an important role, though. they create habitat for birds, insects, plants, and fish, filtering pollutants from water, and buffering the land against the effects of storm surges. thankfully, the city continues to restore marshland along the coast.

salt marshes feature their own structure governed by tides. most of the marsh occurs in what we call the “intertidal zone,” the area of land that’s submerged during high tide and revealed during low tide. closest to the water, you’ll find mudflats dotted with mollusks, clumps of sea lettuce, and sometimes flocks of feeding birds like gulls, sandpipers, and waterfowl. around the average tide level, you’ll see what we call low marsh, the part dominated by salt marsh cordgrass. low marsh transitions into high marsh, the part of the intertidal zone least often covered by saltwater, with a new selection of plants and higher plant diversity. further inshore, you see taller, woodier plants as the marsh turns into marine and coastal forest.

salt marshes supporting breeding populations of interesting flora and fauna include brooklyn’s plumb beach, the thomas pell wildlife sanctuary in the bronx’s pelham bay park, idlewild park in the farthest stretches of queens, jamaica bay, and parts of staten island, such as the saw mill creek park.

repurposed landfills

while much of nyc is built atop filled land, certain city dumps became notorious for their scale and stench. but today, they’ve become some of the city’s most interesting places to observe wildlife.

let’s take the former fresh kills landfill. fresh kills was once valuable salt marsh habitat until landfill extraordinaire robert moses came along in 1948. like other sites in the city, it was meant to be filled for a few years, then capped and developed for other uses. but instead, it remained the fresh kills garbage dump for municipal and residential waste for a half-century, becoming the world’s largest dump during that time. the site eventually hit capacity, and ny state ordered it to close in the late 1990s. It accepted its last fill in 2001—material from the world trade center after 9/11.

following the landfill’s closure, fresh kills was rebranded to freshkills and received a cap consisting of a soil layer, a venting layer to absorb and collect gas emitted from the soil, an impermeable plastic liner, a layer to prevent water from entering the trash, and then two feet of soil to protect the drainage layer. atop that is planting soil. and in that soil, freshkills staff planted native grasses, shrubs, and trees, creating a vast grassland.

today, you can find red foxes, diamondback terrapins, grasshopper sparrows, and other animals rare in the city. recently, sedge wrens—a bird more common in midwestern wetlands—have bred at freshkills park. it’s probably the best example of a landfill grassland, but not the only one: you can visit shirley chisholm state park, too, while the pelham bay landfill and edgemere landfill have also received caps.

the street

while researching for the book, some of the most interesting animals and plants i noticed weren’t in parks—they were in sidewalk trees. but if you look at old photos of nyc, you’ll see very few trees lining the streets.

back before air conditioning, people would die during the summer from heat exhaustion. but in the late nineteenth century, a doctor named stephen smith proposed that plants could help protect people from the extreme temperatures. he noted that even a spot with a “clump of trees” is cooler in summer and warmer in winter.

the city government, community boards, and private residents have since started filling the city streets with trees, creating an urban canopy of human design. nyc parks maintains an approved species list for street tree plantings, determining which to plant based on factors like the soil, amount of water, and how the tree’s height will impact surrounding structures.

our street trees benefit humans, but they don’t always benefit our native ecosystems. london plane, for instance, lacks the native insect diversity required to make it attractive to migrating songbirds. but other trees, like our native oaks, can harbor lots of biodiversity—interesting bugs, birds, mammals, and more.

another habitat you might find on the street is the lawn, fields of mowed grass. lawns take lots of water to maintain, lack biodiversity, and the constant mowing releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. these days, naturalists encourage folks to mow less—even going a few weeks between mowing could be helpful. or, think about replacing your lawn with native plants to help support biodiversity.

but no matter what we do to the city, it’ll always be wildlife habitat. weeds will continue to grow from cracks in the sidewalk, birds will continue to land in the street trees or run into duane reade, and insects will continue to scare and bite you. i hope folks can learn to accept these facts, and develop the city into a place that welcomes, rather than ignores its innate biodiversity and the species assemblages that make it special. after all, the city’s borders are arbitrary to all creatures but us.

yesterday, i was standing at the side of a brooklyn pond when, suddenly, an egret from africa landed beside me and started pecking insects off of a dead snapping turtle. typical, i thought.

enter the wacky world of the cattle egret. two days ago, my friends tripper and daisy spotted a gorgeous breeding plumage male sauntering around brooklyn’s green-wood cemetery. given the holiday (and the fact that i love cattle egrets) i wanted to bang out a post about how one of bird-dom’s strangest creatures took over the world.

herons and egrets are long-legged, long-necked wading birds designed for life snatching fish out of shallow water. but not the cattle egret. at some point in herons’ evolutionary history, one species decided instead to ride around on african buffalo and eat whatever prey the buffalo flushed up. there wasn’t a lot of competition in this niche and it seemed to work well. and soon, cattle egrets took to feeding alongside camels, elephants, rhinos, zebras, anything big that walked through grass. today, there are two species of cattle egrets: the western cattle-egret of africa, europe, and the americas, and the eastern cattle-egret of asia and oceania.

as an aside: mostly the host animals ignore the egrets. but sometimes the egrets get hungry and annoy napping hosts until they wake up and start moving around again. apparantly there is at least one observation of an elephant snatching a cattle egret and slamming it against another elephant, killing the egret instantly, according to birds of the world.

anyway. birds have wings and show up in weird places. it is crazy, but not unprecedented, for a single heron to cross the atlantic—in 2007, an african heron called the western reef-heron spent a summer hanging around the new york harbor.

but that is not the context in which our cattle egret arrived. beginning in the 19th century, western cattle-egrets began breeding beyond africa and southern europe, seemingly by their own decision. observers first reported the species in south america in 1877, and by 1977 they had colonized the whole continent all the way to southern argentina. in the early 1950s they seemed to invade north america, and established themselves as breeding birds throughout the southern half of the united states. by the 1980s hundreds were breeding in new york city. it could be one of the largest and fastest documented natural range expansions of any bird.

perhaps that depends on your definition of “natural,” though. it’s true that young cattle egrets have a propensity to wander—they’re seen regularly at sea, including records in antarctica. wandering birds aren’t enough to establish a new population, though—in addition, recent history has featured widespread forest clearing and cattle farming, often a result of european colonization. so, starting in the 19th century, wayward cattle egrets that would previously have been doomed instead found savannah-like farms with buffalo-like animals flushing up prey all the same.

today, cattle egrets are ubiquitous throughout much of the world, begging for food from people, filling the air over dumps and farms, riding whatever moving thing they can stand on, and bringing their head-bobbing foolishness wherever they go. but cattle egrets have fled new york city as quickly as they appeared. today we only see them as single vagrants or rarely as breeders on isolated islands in the harbor.

it’s likely that the species’ decline across the atlantic coast is equally a reflection of humans—fewer cattle pastures means less cattle egret habitat and fewer cattle egrets. there’s other threats, too—flooding and predation, for examples, plus negative interactions with the humans who were once the reason for their success.

but its interesting: the species is now listed as threatened in new york and in new jersey. one website i saw stated that “conservation and restoration of farmland will be essential to their long-term survival in [new jersey].” but what does it mean to conserve a species fond of human-altered habitat, and is that a priority? does its absence signal a degradation of habitat, or a return to the pre-colonial habitats where cattle egrets didn’t thrive? and which habitat is preferable, from a conservation perspective?

anyway, it is 10:30pm as i write this sentence. these are literally the things that keep me up at night. happy april fools day.

postscript:

i’m about to leave for a week but wanted to write a lil’ something before i left. posting frequency will continue to increase as book stuff picks up—here’s a reminder of my schedule!

bird walk, april 19, 8am @ owl’s head park in bay ridge. free, registration is encouraged.

bird walk, talk, and drag show, april 23, meet 7pm @ sunset stoop in sunset park. we’re gonna explore sunset park, then i’m gonna give a fun intro to nyc nature, my friend alex will do a drag set, and then i’m gonna sign books and do bird readings! it’s like taro but i’ll tell you what kind of bird you are.

pigeon portraits and prose, may 3, 1:30-3:00pm @ caveat. $15, tickets available here. chelsea and i are hosting an irreverent nature writing and illustration workshop called. i am SO EXCITED.

intro to birding, may 4, 9-10:30am @ marine park salt marsh nature center. free, no registration required.

golden hour bird walk, may 8, 6-7:30pm @ prospect park stranahan monument. free, registration encouraged.

wings over wave hill, may 18. bird walk 9:30-11am, bird talk on how to document urban wildlife 4:30-5:30pm. all @ wave hill. free with admission to the grounds.

—

one more thing: it’s gannet migration, and we’re seeing some pretty incredible gannet spectacles off of new york city right now. i took a quick boat ride with britt on the american princess and we get absolutely incredible looks at a feeding frenzy with maybe 5,000 birds. gotta be one of my favorite nyc nature spectacles.

back in 2021, i photographed a handsome moth in brooklyn’s prospect park. it was an understated creature that rewarded a close look: tan with black-outlined brown stripes across its wings, its back a daub of orange slightly covered by blue-fringed tan curtains. what was it? well, i’d been observing moths for a few months and i was starting to get the hang of it. i opened my field guide, turned to the page with the paper airplane-shaped tiger moths, and found one identical in every way to my creature: the banded tussock moth. easy.

i posted the image and species name online without a second thought, confident in my moth identification skills. but shortly after, i received a comment from my friend (and far more experienced naturalist) taylor. “I don’t think it can be separated from sycamore [tussock moth] without observing the male genitalia.” the sycamore tussock moth wasn’t even in my field guide. but of course, taylor was right—the sycamore tussock moth adult looks identical to the banded tussock moth, and is common in nyc. though i’d successfully identified hundreds of moth species by then, everything came crashing down. i don’t know shit.

these blows happen regularly enough that today, i know more than ever…and i feel like i don’t know more than ever. it’s a common pattern across any area of expertise, feeling most confident after picking up the basics and taking a long time, perhaps years, before acquiring enough skill to know when to say “i don’t know.” i’ve been reflecting on what this means on the eve of my book’s publication and of course in the broader context of our idiot-run country. how can one disseminate and receive information accurately when confidence isn’t correlated with experience?

i’ll start by explaining “experience.” for my nature-watching hobby, it means internalizing that the world is far bigger than it appears, its rules unsatisfyingly fluid, and its observers inherently biased. for example, in just a year or two, one could learn to confidently identify all of new york city’s expected birds by sight and sound. but it takes longer to learn that birds feature an incredible diversity of life histories, behaviors, appearances, and contexts—even within a single species. i learn a lot from observing one individual for a while, but one can’t necessarily extrapolate those lessons to the next individual. knowledge requires many observations, and expectations set by an individual could be broken by the next one.

my friend tim tells a great story about a small black-backed seagull he photographed. tim has seen a lot of nyc’s two black-backed gull species, and this one appeared far too small to be the “great” one, but looked totally unlike the “lesser” one. he sent his photos to an expert. the expert responded “wow!” without further comment, sending tim into an anxious spiral—was it some mega rare seagull from the southern hemisphere?—until the expert finally responded that the bird was a shockingly runty version of the abundant great black-backed gull.

meanwhile, it would be hard to overstate a cameras’ ability to distort size, shape, and color to the point that a photograph can present the illusion of a different species versus its real-life identity. photographers are biased to assume the picture shows the creature it appears to show (or what they want it to show) rather than what sat in front of them. every year i see a photo of a distant loon where the sun hits the beak just right, making it appear like the rare yellow-billed loon and sending birders into disarray. in most cases, it’s a common loon.

and the nuance. oh, the nuance! moving on from birds: a few years ago i got excited about a purple coneflower that started growing in my apartment’s tree planter on its own, since i knew coneflower was a native species. nope, stupid ryan. sure, it’s native to parts of the eastern united states and part of native plant seed mixes because it’s good at growing. but technically it is not native to new york city. trying to understand the coneflower in the planter will one day be an eyy i’m walkin here post itself.

given that context, experienced nature observers deploy the phrase i don’t know often, even in places where they might have previously been confident. my friend asked me to identify birds in a recording recently—it was the call of a red-shouldered hawk, followed by the calls of blue jays. i could have told him as much. but instead i told him i don’t know for sure, because experience has told me that blue jays often mimic red-shoulders.

it might seem frustrating at first, but i don’t know is an exciting, powerful phrase. it sends you off in new directions, opens your mind to new possibilities, and prepares you for the next situation. if i don’t know, then there’s something left to learn, something to write for the newsletter. and the core reason i go look at animals all day is because i really like learning and sharing.

but the frustrating-at-first part is also the source of peril. “i don’t know” and nuance doesn’t instantly satisfy our internet-addled minds, or in the case of nature observation, our impulse to check boxes and build lists of species like we’re collecting pokemon for our pokedex. not to mention that experts who feel like they don’t know are probably less likely to provide an answer unless asked. and most insidiously, we often don’t know what we don’t know—the result is, as i mentioned before, confidence and knowledge are often uncorrelated.

fans of popular science writing know that this anticorrelation has a name: the dunning-krueger effect. back in 1999, psychologists david dunning and justin krueger published a paper detailing four studies comparing participants’ test scores with self-assessments on how well they thought they did. dunning and krueger found that on average, those scoring in the lowest percentile far overestimated their ability. from a summary of that paper: “people tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains… this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

the result is the easily availability of confident answers made by those unaware of their inexperience. and perhaps equally worrying is the creations of human-less tools that will dispense such experience-free answers without accountability. in birding, this means reliance on apps that use image recognition in order to identify species. though quick and easy, these apps are unlikely to say “i don’t know” and incapable of dispensing nuance based on experience. i am not opposed to them—accessibility of knowledge is an incredible thing—but i wish they were more forthcoming about their limitation, and that users were encouraged to seek out the broader context that comes with interactions with other people. i quite like how the inaturalist app attempts to provide both ai-generated help and interactions with experienced humans.

why does all of this matter—it’s just a hobby, isn’t it? well, overconfident non-expertise and blind reliance on the outputs of artificial intelligence are pervasive far beyond birding. self-declared expertise fueled solely by confidence has led to the opinions of folks without a broader grasp of the topic having an outsized impact on the public’s understanding or on decisions. then we end up with robert f. kennedy jr. as the secretary of health and human services (and i don’t think i need to get into what blind reliance on ai has done to the internet). bringing it back to birds, i also contend that this effect is partially responsible for the death of flaco the owl, with discourse led by random people online rather than experts on urban ecology or captive animals.

i love nature and i love sharing what i know. by no means do i want to stop others from doing the same. trust me, i was sharing my knowledge and identifying birds for random people on the internet months after i first picked up binoculars. and i will never stop writing excitedly about things i have only just learned about—that’s a big part of being a journalist. but journalism school also gave me some ideas about how to be aware of my own limitations. my book starts with a page-long reflection on my experience, and explicitly tells the reader that it’s a book by a near-novice for novices, that we’re discovering the city together. i try to reflect on my limits and then speak solely from my own knowledge and experience, adding caveats detailing those limits. i seek out mentorship and expertise from those who know more, and build my knowledge from multiple kinds of sources. i try to be aware of what i do and don’t know, and try to be wrong transparently. i hope all of us overconfident newbies can work together to build some self-awareness on this front.

it’s certainly not the sole responsibility of newbies to self-regulate, though, since it’s hard for one to tell whether they’re overconfident or a seasoned expert—we don’t know what we don’t know. more important, in my opinion, is experienced folks offering patient, empathetic mentorship with kindness. we should work to build a culture of being excited not just about what we know but also what we don’t know, and when necessary, accept being wrong as an opportunity to be right next time. and i think we can all do better providing thoughtful mentorship—we were all new once.

but ultimately…………………….i don’t know what the hell i’m talking about.

—

postscript: while written by a self-proclaimed near-novice, my book is fact-checked (THANK YOU ELIZA) and was reviewed by people way smarter than me :) so you should buy it :) because it’s good :)

that being said, since it’s book release season (april 22!!!!!!), i have lots of cool things coming up that you should save the date for!

events:

bird trivia, march 20, 7pm @ the ditty in astoria. free, registration is encouraged. come ready to win!!

bird walk, april 19, 8am @ owl’s head park in bay ridge. free, registration is encouraged.

bird walk, talk, and drag show, april 23, time tba @ sunset stoop in sunset park. details tba but it’s going to be awesome.

pigeon portraits and prose, may 3, 1:30-3:00pm @ caveat. $15, tickets available here. chelsea and i are hosting an irreverent nature writing and illustration workshop called. i am SO EXCITED.

intro to birding, may 4, 9-10:30am @ marine park salt marsh nature center. free, no registration required.

golden hour bird walk, may 8, 6-7:30pm @ prospect park stranahan monument. free, registration encouraged.

bird walk, may 18, 9:30-11am @ wave hill. free with admission to the grounds.

—

ok last thing! i like to spend my birthday someplace else, and this year britt and i went to sax-zim bog in northern minnesota to try my hand at seeing some owls. i saw a lot—one boreal owl, one snowy owl, two northern hawk-owls, and seven great gray owls! i am writing about it for the brooklyn bird club newsletter and will share that story here once it’s out. but my favorite animal i saw was the bog’s famous pine marten, who occasionally stops by one of the bird feeders to feast on peanut butter.

a long island-sized sliver of glacier-capped rock rises nearly 10,000 feet above the southern ocean, as if someone had misplaced the alps at sea. millions of penguins and seals inhabit its shores; it feels like animals cover basically every surface. the scenes here on south georgia left me slack-jawed—but it was amid the human-sized tufts of tussock grass dotting the island’s slopes where i found hope for planet earth’s future… in the form of a boring brown bird called the south georgia pipit.

south georgia pipits had stopped breeding on all but the most inaccessible rocks surrounding the island, falling victim to the abundant rats that arrived with whalers in the 1800s. but beginning in 2011, a nonprofit called the south georgia heritage trust undertook the world’s largest rat eradication campaign. today, the pipits are returning to breed on the mainland, where they and other threatened seabirds once again have a chance to breed without the threat of being killed by rats. in the face of innumerable human-caused threats to wildlife, i tell myself, humans can fix things if we try.

south georgia is a home base for animals taking advantage of the productive southern ocean. here, phytoplankton thrives since cold water holds more carbon dioxide and oxygen than warm water, antarctic summers provide long days for phytoplankton to photosynthesize, and the island’s rock offers important inorganic nutrients. immense swarms of krill feed on the phytoplankton, in turn feeding whales, seabirds, and seals. these creatures can then take refuge on the island to raise their young.

every scene ashore south georgia could be an attenborough-narrated spectacle. king penguins gather on flats by the hundred-thousand, trumpeting, whistling, and flapping their flippers (occasionally in hilarious slap-fights). millions of macaroni penguins blanket the grassy hills, journeying up rocky sea cliffs to their nests in awkward hops. stinky fur seals squabble and chase each other on the beaches, stumbling over molting elephant seals giving fart-like grunts as they nap. and during austral spring, the streaky, robin-like south georgia pipits flutter high above the din singing a consonant tune to delineate territory and woo potential mates.

but such abundance naturally attracts humans. british merchant anthony de la roché was first to sight south georgia, and it was the infamous explorer/cartographer captain james cook and his crew who first landed there. but the whalers and sealers were especially drawn to the abundant life on and offshore the island. eventually, they set up whaling stations dotting the shores. today, most people know south georgia from the story of ernest shackleton, who successfully rescued his entire crew in 1916 after losing their ship, the endurance, to the crush of antarctic sea ice. he sailed with five other men in a small lifeboat across 800 miles of treacherous ocean to south georgia, and upon landing there, three of the crew hiked over the island’s ice-covered mountains to find help at the stromness whaling station.

whalers decimated the island’s wildlife, hunting so many whales that they abandoned the island in 1966 because there were too few remaining to make a profit. they left behind a host of species introduced intentionally and unintentionally, but no animals caused as much harm as the reindeer, rats, and mice. the reindeer defoliated the island of its tussock grass, which provided shelter for seals, seabirds, pipits, and a cute little duck called the south georgia pintail. the rats and mice were even more insidious, feasting on ground-nesting birds directly. according to one paper: “the [south georgia] pipit rarely if ever nests in rat-infested areas.”

the rats and reindeer endured for nearly five decades after the whalers left. ground- and burrow-nesting birds held out mainly on the island’s southern coast and off shore islands, blocked from the rat-infested parts by glaciers. but glaciers retreating due to climate change became a time bomb, worrying conservationists that rats would soon be able to access the island’s entirety. and the outlook didn’t look good—according to that same 1980 paper, “no management procedures would be possible.”

the invasive species and their impacts persisted into the 21st century, until a former commander of the british forces in the falkland islands named david nicholls came along. nicholls began leading mountaineering tours to the island and worried about the future of its wildlife, but didn’t think the south georgia government would have the funds to protect it. so in 2005, he co-founded the south georgia heritage trust with dundee university professor elaine shemilt. its two-part mission was to conserve the island’s breeding wildlife and preserve its historical heritage.

what followed was the largest rodent eradication effort in the history of wildlife conservation. the south georgia heritage trust raised £10 million in donations and grants to finance the so-named habitat restoration project, kicking off the project in 2011. in three phases, they dropped many tons of poisoned bait across the island. in 2013 and 2014, trained rangers scoured the island to corral and slaughter or hunt all of the invasive reindeer, salvaging what they could for meat. in 2017, three rat-sniffing dogs and their handlers surveyed the entire island, covering over 2400km (1500 miles). in 2018, south georgia was declared rat-free.

the south georgia heritage trust and government continues to remain vigilant—all incoming boats must be inspected by rodent-sniffing dogs, while visitors receive biosecurity briefings and must follow strict rules, like no sitting or kneeling, no approaching wildlife, and no putting objects on the ground. we had to scour all of our clothes for hitchhiking seeds and scrub our shoes with the biocide virkon to stop the spread of any viruses, bacteria, or fungi. all shipments are strictly regulated and inspected to stymie any future invasions.

and it seems to be working. today, pipits, pintails, and burrowing seabirds are returning to sites once vacated from the rats. at the godthul bay in the center of the island’s east coast, we encountered at least seven birds perching on tussock and serenading us from high above—and we saw a baby pintail chasing its mother.

rats and reindeer were just one problem facing the island’s wildlife, of course. long-line fishing threatens albatrosses across the southern ocean, while krill fishing, especially exploitative unlicensed krill fishing, threatens the balance of southern ocean food webs. climate change is causing glaciers recede, and ice-loving animals like snow petrels may abandon south georgia entirely should it get too warm. finally, bird flu is killing seals and seabirds alike, its impacts made clear by strange-acting animals and corpses littering beaches on our visit.

and yet—we fixed the island’s rat problem for just £10 million. like… someone just bought the run-down three-story new york city apartment building i used to live in for a quarter of that. people have purchased watches for more than £10 million. if i had purchased enough bitcoin to buy a fake id in college and forgotten about it, i today i would have enough money to finance a similar campaign. you could finance it for 15 cents from every british citizen.

it’s hard to think about the natural world’s future without despairing. but then i think of the rats on south georgia. maybe i sound naive, but humans turned the tides on threatened species with a few helicopters, a few dogs, and some rat bait. and so i tell myself: we can fix a place if we try!

postscript:

book!!! soon!!! i am currently planning a few nyc events to promote my book wild nyc which you should consider attending, including an irreverant nature drawing and writing class, panel discussions, and more. you’ll hear about it here, of course. in the meantime, please preorder it!!!

this weekend is one of my favorite days of the year: gullentine’s day!!!! join us on saturday at 10am for a lover’s stroll along sheepshead bay—we will look at all of the seagulls and tell them how much we love them. we have previously encountered uncommon nyc gulls like the iceland gull, lesser black-backed gull, and black-headed gull on this trip, so i’m hoping we find something cool!

below is a picture of a very weird gull from i encountered last week. it is the common new york gull species, the herring gull. what seems to have happened is, first, it’s just eaten something, so looks very fat, and second, it has something weird going on with its feathers. this bird was born two years ago. usually gulls begin getting their adult-colored feathers on their backs, but this one instead has just a stripe of adult feathers along its wing. is eyes are already striking white, but would usually still be dark in this age. weird!

prescript: first, as a reminder, my book comes out on april 21 and you can already preorder it. second, this is a eulogy and personal essay dealing with the controversial subject of christian missionary work and the violent death of my good friend. it makes statements that may upset readers. i ask you to offer some grace, if you can.

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beau and i were nothing alike. he was a father of five, a cop and real estate agent who upended his comfortable minnesota life to serve jesus as a missionary in angola. i am a childless nonbinary jewish new york leftist. yet we both liked birds, which sustained our long, close friendship.

i recently learned that beau was murdered in angola, allegedly in circumstances too lurid to discuss here. but i knew beau differently from everyone else, and he shaped my worldview—maybe we shaped each other’s worldview—in a way that few other people have. i have probably told all of my friends about beau at some point. so i wanted to write something about him.

beau and i only met twice in person. each year around christmas, i visit my in-laws in northwestern minnesota. and around the same time, the national audubon society organizes a global christmas bird count where community scientist volunteers survey the birds inhabiting a 15-mile radius around a center point. in 2018 i emailed nancy, the compiler of a count in northwestern minnesota, and told her i was a newer birder with basic bird identification skills who was eager to participate. she paired me with beau and she hoped we’d get along.

it didn’t look like we’d get along, at first. i parked my rental car behind a diner and hopped into his car’s passenger seat, his son in the back. i thought i’d had experience with minnesotans from my in-laws, but i could barely talk to beau. he spoke in a thick minnesotan accent with a deliberate cadence, always pausing after i finished my fast city kid rambling to think before constructing a short response. often he wouldn’t respond at all. i thought he hated me.

we drove slowly around town, mostly in silence, stopping at a patch of weeds, a pond, some bird feeders. he paid more attention to his son, who eagerly noted every sign of deer. but beau was a far better spotter than me—never before had i seen someone turn specks into species from a moving car like he could. it was a skill he learned while on police patrol duty, he said (silence again, this time from me). but then he rolled down the window and asked me what i was hearing (american goldfinches and a white-breasted nuthatch). no one had confidently trusted me to identify birds like that, and i think i told him as much. he lost his high-pitched hearing from years of hunting and he respected my inexperienced ears as preferable to his poorly functioning ones. we went on like that, him identifying birds by sight and me by sound. it broke the ice and we got chatting. i picked up that he was more interested than off-put by my city energy—and i realized that he enjoyed my company.

the drive turned to hijinks as we warmed to each other. beau pulled over to inspect a dead grouse—he would have kept it if it was still steaming, he said. he asked if i thought he was a redneck. i responded that i’d taken taxidermy classes and didn’t care. he taught me how to track deer. he explained how to identify a northern shrike from a moving car (they drop before they fly), allowing me to find my coveted “lifer,” or first-ever personal sighting, as he sped down a country road. he even broke his cardinal birdwatching rule—he never chased rare bird reports if they would be lifers—so i could see a northwestern bird called a varied thrush that had traveled far from its usual home and ended up in a frozen minnesota driveway.

i understood his perspective as a duck hunter, which i don’t think he expected. to him, shooting a rare duck was the same as me photographing a rare duck. he really wanted to shoot a tufted duck, a vagrant from europe rarely seen in north america. “as long as you’d let me see it first,” i probably told him. after all, like my hunting in-laws, it was clear that beau did more conservation work than the average birder.

he took me to his house to introduce me to his family, the kids kinder than any gaggle of children i’d met prior. he rummaged through the freezer. have i ever eaten snipe before? no, i told him. snipes are a coveted bird to new york city birdwatchers. “well, there’s at least one snipe in this,” he said, holding up a bag of shredded meat, mostly ring-necked duck (another uncommon bird for brooklyn!). he made me a sandwich, and to this day, i tell people that snipe is the most interesting bird i’ve ever eaten.

at the end of christmas bird counts, there’s often a compilation dinner where you report your sightings as a group. beau couldn’t make it, so he dropped me back at my car and i headed there alone. i walked in and introduced myself—i was the new yorker. without missing a beat, nancy’s husband bill said “huh… you say you’re from new york… but you sound like us!”—like a day spent with beau.

beau and i didn’t speak regularly, at first. but a month after my trip, a little brown bird showed up at beau’s feeders—a european species rarely seen in the united states called a brambling. and i was among the first, if not the first person he texted. i returned to minnesota the following year, and once again participated in a northern minnesota christmas bird count—with my teammate beau, of course. we didn’t really count the birds this time. rather, beau showed me around his favorite haunts. we found a porcupine atop a tree in a farm field and he encouraged me to sneak over to photograph it. we hiked to a spit of land between two ponds with a single tree where migratory birds concentrate on spring mornings—he’d seen a dozen species of colorful warblers there once. we watched a bald eagle chase a duck relentlessly, and a great horned owl hunt in the dusk light above a frozen field.

that day, beau revealed that he’d soon upend his life to move to angola as a christian missionary. silence from me again. had he told me the previous year, our friendship would have ended at the end of the day. as i saw it, missionary work is a colonialist effort responsible for whitewashing cultures, infecting indigenous people with disease, and sowing the seeds of imperialism. just a year before, i’d been disgusted by the story of missionary john allen chau, who was broadly condemned after dying at the hands of uncontacted people while trying to spread the gospel. but now, after a year of companionship, i was compelled to consider things from his perspective. beau was sure he’d be making the world a better place. he’d bring binoculars so the angolan children could learn to identify birds. he’d build their appreciation so that the kids could help conserve the under-studied wildlife of a country amid rampant land clearing. i’m not sure he even mentioned christianity or the gospel. i listened, gave my tepid support, and prodded for the details of angola’s birds.

once again we stopped at beau’s house for lunch. feeding a family of five children isn’t easy, so they had snack lunch. they cut up some summer sausage and cheese and crackers and laid it out on a wooden block and the kids grazed as they came and went. during the first covid winter, brittany and i had snack lunch for our christmas meal, inspired by beau’s family.

covid delayed beau’s departure for angola, and our conversation slowed. but as he prepared to go, i started receiving regular texts and he’d call randomly to ask questions—what affordable binoculars should he bring? how does he use the ebird app? keeping track of bird lists is a central task of intense birders, including lists of birds seen in one’s life, in specific places, or in specific years, and ebird makes this process easy. but beau was old fashioned and kept paper lists, so i helped him set it up. he grumbled mostly, but eagerly recounted past experiences encountering rare birds in minnesota like the lewis’ woodpecker as he entered his old data. we started speaking more frequently than we’d ever communicated before. i bought him a hat from the bird collective website for christmas that year.

as his trip approached, i struggled to fathom remaining friends with someone on a christian mission and thought angola might spell the end of our friendship. but in january of 2022 he sent me a screenshot of an apple note with descriptions of angolan birds he saw, and circled ones he needed help identifying. when he was in the field he took as many notes as he could, then he’d look for birds that matched his notes in his paper guide. but the book’s illustrations weren’t good, so he’d use google or me to confirm the identity. he could only identify half of the birds he observed or less, which frustrated him. i asked whether he had heard of the merlin app—it has packs of bird photos to download for a specific region, and uses artificial intelligence to identify birds by photo or sound. the sound id was of no real use in angola, but he got along well with the photo guide and photo id.

ebird and merlin have a way of transforming a birder. with endless knowledge at your fingertips and top birder rankings, you might become competitive. how many birds have you seen in your life, and how do you see more? how many have you seen in your home country? your home county? beau sent me updates about his lists. he’d only seen two or three hundred bird species prior to his move, and now he was racking the lifers up. he was rising the ranks of angola’s birders. he was taking trips around the country and birding new places whenever he could. he texted me about everything—first, screenshots with lists of species he’d seen, then blurry photos he’d taken with his cell phone through his binoculars. in three years, i think i got an update about every new bird he saw. i told him that he was probably going to make some huge discovery. “can’t wait until i get to chase beau’s sparrow,” i said. we’d jokingly compete for who’d seen more birds. i pulled ahead with my regular birding trips. but he’d retort with countless stories of birds that only he and a few dozen other people on earth had seen. he’d call them “mandelbaum lifers” to entice me.

i don’t accept missionary work broadly as something other than a self-satisfying means of forcing western society and religion onto people without their best interest in mind. but beau was different. beau sent me a message in march of 2023 that he and others were attempting to reintroduce the near-threatened cape buffalo from namibia to a missionary farm property in angola where they’d be protected. beau had never asked me for anything before, but he was passionate about the project and asked if i wanted to help. i skeptically donated several hundred dollars—then received near-daily reports of their progress transporting the animals until the herd of nearly 50 were successfully released at the farm, with just a single buffalo casualty. other times, beau would lament about finding rare birds in spots, and then returning and seeing the woodland cleared—laws ban the clearing, but there’s little enforcement, he said. he’d been working on a proposal to buy forest for the ministry and steward it to protect the wildlife and continue seeing the birds he cared so much about.

the birding never slowed. he’d gone from identifying a fraction of the species he saw to finding mega rarities, county firsts, expanding the range maps of birds, birding places that no one had ever been before. each new spot beau visited, i’d get updates on his lifers and sometimes help identify the birds he was seeing. rare owls, colorful bee-eaters, furtive finches, secretary birds, he was excitedly sharing each new sighting while knowingly enticing me, too. there were entire regions of the country where no one had reported birds in ebird and he asked when i was going to come join him to be the first. the bird that cracked me was the white-headed barbet, more because beau didn’t see it after several failed attempts and asked for me to gather intel on the species from birders i knew who’d visited angola. mandelbaum lifers became more than just a joke, and beau began suggesting potential itineraries. i realized he was serious after he proposed dates for a 2026 trip and i agreed to visit. i was supposed to have started planning the trip around now.

i’ll admit, i wasn’t always the best at responding—i’m not great at responding to texts, generally, and sometimes struggled to understand beau’s intentions in keeping up with me. that is, until beau texted me: “Sorry I keep blasting you with bird stuff. You’re literally the only one who even pretends to care, so…” i realized that he wasn’t proselytizing to me or anything. sharing was just how beau showed he cared, and my earnest interest was a lifeline that allowed him celebrate wins in his otherwise extremely challenging life. and when i sent him something back, he’d always ask me more and share in my excitement. and so i tried to be a lot more intentional about sharing, too, and asking for him to share more. after all, i wasn’t pretending to care—beau was one of the most active birders in angola and updating me constantly on the most interesting, least-known birds in the world in a place where few other people were observing them.

i reassured that i wasn’t ignoring him and wasn’t annoyed. and i’m glad he didn’t stop texting, because later while he was visiting south africa, i was the first to receive the picture of a small brown and orange songbird he’d spotted—a whinchat he’d identified with the help of merlin. it was only the fifth time the north african and european species had been found in the country, and soon birders were swarming to see it. i couldn’t believe how chill he was—always was—upon finding something rare. but humility was a core virtue of his. even the whinchat, all he said to acknowledge its rarity was “it’s a lifer :)”

beau briefly returned to the united states last summer, and i got to hear all about it. thanks to merlin’s sound identification, beau was finding american birds he’d never seen before. in north carolina, the app found him a black-throated blue warbler, a bird that’s rare in minnesota and a coveted lifer for him. i was happy that once again i could be beau’s ears indirectly through the app.

we were supposed to meet up this past august so i could take beau birding in nyc, and when he couldn’t make it, he was going to try and send his 17 year old daughter bella who really wanted to see the city. i was sort of shocked when he asked whether i could give her room and board and protect her for a few days, and even more shocked when i asked if he had any restrictions for her. nope, he said—just the basics, no drugs, no sex, no tattoos. she’s practically a woman enrolled in university and it was time for her to grow up, he said. i am pretty sure that beau knew i was not a prime example of a god-fearing sinless christian, but this was emblematic of how he treated me, and i assume how he treated others—innately trusting of the good in those who he cared for. the trip ended up falling through, but i told him our door was always open to him and his family. (still is!)

beau and i spoke almost every week after. he was itching to return to angola and was birding as soon as he got off the plane. he was lucky enough to accompany a fancy american tour group around the country and see a lot of birds—including the white-headed barbet he and i had talked so much about. unbelievably blessed to have had the opportunity, he said—and he let me know that he was ready to show me all of the angola endemics on our trip. we kept chatting as always until late last autumn when i sent him a photo of a great gray owl i saw, to which he responded “I like great grays.” then i got busy with work travel and went on my antarctica trip and he didn’t text again. i didn’t think anything was wrong—we’d gone a few months without talking before—but i noticed his silence the other day, just before nancy reached out and shared the news of his tragic passing shortly after he and i had last spoken.

as it stands, beau has submitted the highest number of ebird checklists of anyone in angola, and has seen the third highest number of species at 552. his 1000th “lifer” was the congo pied hornbill, which he saw on the tour back in september. once, i suggested that he was single-handedly increasing the knowledge of angola’s birds, just by living there. “yes. I have seen several species that are not supposed to exist at all in angola,” he told me. “and recently almost every ebird report I make has at least one species that’s marked as rare.” in december 2022, he recorded angola’s first ebird record of striped crake, a shy water bird seen only 100 times ever by users of the ebird app—a bird “unlikely to be seen by those not expressly looking for it.” he found three of them—probably one of his most exciting finds. a week before he died, he posted a photo of the temminck’s courser—he was the first birder to observe the species in all of southwest angola, finding several places where they regularly occured in numbers.

of course, he reminded me that his purpose is spreading the gospel. the birds were just a bonus.

i’m thankful that i got to see a side of beau that no one else saw, and to have seen the world through the eyes of someone so different from me. and while i can’t say my opinions of christian missionary work are much higher, i can say that beau used the avenues available in his universe to literally give his life to build the world he wanted to see—in some ways, a world i also want to see, where humanity can prosper while living harmoniously with nature and wildlife. he permanently shaped the way i think about other people and about the core nature of what being a good person means in the context of someone’s circumstances.

i hope your white-headed barbets are still around when i get to angola, beau. wish you could be the one who showed them to me.

postscript: i won’t be answering any questions about beau or his life beyond my personal opinions expressed in this eulogy, and i ask that if you’re not directly related to beau, that you not reach out to me about his personal life. if you are related, i am happy to send you all of the photos he sent me.