Article in Bird Watching on The trans-Atlantic terns of Great Gull Island. “The island is also the home of a famous long-term research project overseen since 1969 by researcher Helen Hays, of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York.
The Society’s Annual Meeting & Dinner was held at the Liederkranz Club on March 8 2016. The featured speaker and recipient of the 2015 Eisenmann Medal for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur was Professor Tim R Birkhead, FRS from the University of Sheffield. His presentation entitled “What it’s like to be an ornithologist” provided a personal and often humorous account of his own career, beginning as a small boy with a natural curiosity in birds that blossomed over time into a very successful academic career that uses birds to understand the evolution of mating systems.
About Tim Bilkhead https://www.shef.ac.uk/aps/staff-and-students/acadstaff/birkhead
About Bob Montgomerie https://biology.queensu.ca/people/department/professors/montgomerie/
A field observation: There was been a vagrant Painted Bunting in Prospect Park late November, 2015 on.
You’d be hard pressed to miss it – a painted bunting looks like something from a coloring book. I first saw the Painted Bunting (a life bird) on Friday, December 4, 2015 at 9:30 am. The moment I entered the park I saw a group of people by a tree. I rushed over and there was the Painted Bunting sitting on a branch of a pine tree in full view. I didn’t even have my camera or binoculars out yet. I followed the bird around for a while, along with its entourage of birders. Next day I returned to try and get a semi-decent photograph. There were at least 50 birders at a time surrounding the little bird, who didn’t care a fig about the people. It was very hard to photograph because of all the birders. I couldn’t get a good view and when I did someone invariably jostled me. I tried for two days and managed to get a few semi-usable shots on the second day.
Environmental note: habitat restoration and management is crucial to our local birds not just to vagrants. There a lots of feral cats wandering the parks in NYC. Vagrant birds are not a good thing if global warming is the cause.
On September 14th while bicycling into Manhattan on the Williamsburg bridge, 84-year-old David Lloyd Wilkie, aka Adam Purple, suffered a fatal heart attack. A unique N.Y.C. character and urban legend was lost when Adam Purple died.
Born in Independence, Missouri, and a graduate of the University of Missouri with a master’s degree in journalism, Adam Purple then worked his way across the country, teaching high school in Missouri and as a Newspaper reporter in New Jersey. In 1968 he came to New York and the Lower Eastside.
In 1973 as the neighborhood disintegrated about him, he looked upon an empty lot of broken bricks and saw a garden. Here, he would remake himself as the “Guerilla Gardener” and take on the persona of Adam Purple. Adam and his partner Eve began clearing the lot with only hand tools. Adam considered machinery “counter revolutionary.”
Adam and Eve dressed in purple tie dyed clothes. They soon became a regular sight, riding their purple bikes around together and going back and forth to Central Park where they would collect horse manure for their “Garden of Eden.” The garden was constructed out of concentric circles of stone walls that enclosed 15K square feet of flowering bushes, fruit trees and vegetables. There were black berries, strawberries, cucumbers and corn. Eight walnut trees were among the forty-five trees in the garden. All grown for the benefit of the community. This was truly a “paradise” (the Persian word for garden) in a waste land.
On a cold and grey day in January 8th 1986 Eden came to an end. This was after a long and protracted effort to get the city to incorporate the garden into a scheme to build low income housing came to naught. A bull dozer arrived and set to work, neither the stone walls or walnut trees could resist. In a day the garden, that took over a decade to create, was obliterated.
Adam never really recovered. This may have even led to his separation with the now mother of his Daughter. What Adam Purple had pioneered vest-pocket parks on vacant land, and these parks have now been reproduced many times over in every borough of this city as “Community Gardens.”
Just in the East Village there are over forty gardens of various sizes. Most of these gardens are open to the general public. In addition to bringing contentment to the human soul, each of these little patches of green are like an oasis’s in a concrete desert to migrating birds.
Next Spring, take a walk in the East Village and Lower Eastside. In addition to the trendy new eateries and boutiques, you will be pleasantly surprised by these little Edens. And while strolling between the tomato vines and sun flowers and perhaps hearing the chatter of a Mockingbird or a Towhee’s “drink your tea,” give a thought to Adam Purple, who looked upon rubble and saw a garden.
— By Marc Felix of www.marcvillagewalk.com and Linnaean Society of NY member
Linnaean Society of New York Homecoming Party on September 9, 2015, at the Cultural Center.
I’ve always wondered what my 400th bird species in New York State would be. Thirty something years into this life of birding would imply it had to be something good. Unless of course, it’s not. It could have been the dreaded clerical achievement, the by-product of the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Union deciding to raise a subspecies to full species status and wham, you wake up one morning with a new species on your list. No, the 400th needs to be something worthy. And you need to get out of bed for it.
Fast forward to May 24, 2015. One final check of reports on the spider web of online birding sites New Yorkers utilize before I hit the hay and there it was: a Franklin’s Gull was photographed earlier in the day (at Plum Beach, Brooklyn no less). A breeder of the Upper Midwest and Canada, Franklin’s Gulls migrate through Texas from their wintering grounds on the west coast of South America. They occasionally show up in western New York in fall, but to have a breeding plumage adult anywhere in New York in spring is a big deal. Not just a state bird for me, a coveted life bird as well, a worthy candidate. Similar in appearance to our most common summer gull, the Laughing Gull, this search was going to be the proverbial needle in the haystack.
Emails were sent. Calls were made. A plan was hatched. My friend Rob and I would search alternate sites knowing a large group of birders would scour Plum. After coming up empty we eventually headed there ourselves deciding to start at the far western end. Seemingly out of the ether I watched the bird materialized a long way out in the channel to our southeast. To the delight of the twenty or so birders down the beach, we managed to communicate the location over the phone. Views were distant, but clearly identifiable before the bird departed unseen. Franklin’s Gull was my 400th species in New York. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, an adrenaline rush, high fives, an end zone dance? I don’t know, but nothing did. In fact, after congratulations from Rob I felt kind of empty. I chalked it up to being tired. I just couldn’t reconcile the moment with the feeling. It got me thinking.
You see, as a new birder the flood of information can be intense. Eight hundred regularly occurring species in the US give or take a few. Then there’s sexual dimorphism in the majority of those species (the males and females look different). If that wasn’t enough many songbird species look completely different in spring and fall. Get the hint? There is a lot to figure out.
As I kid, I would thumb through my grandparents Peterson field guide. The possibilities were endless. Illustrations of bluebirds and curlews seemed almost mythical in that moment. To this day I’m not sure if it was my desire to see them or the overwhelming feeling I never would that stirred something in me, but either way the effect was profound.
And then it began. When I was ten years old I was given my own field guide. Each species I saw would earn a check next to it’s name in the index. Life birds! Early on it’s magical. Ask any birder when they saw their first Scarlet Tanager and they could tell you. Even if like me, it was over thirty years ago (on a roadside trail off Oneida Drive in Silver Bay, NY if you’re wondering). Moments seared in memory like stamps on a timecard.
I had been watching birds for years before I actually counted how many species I had seen. I vaguely remember being in my early 20′s and realizing I had seen 175 species in New York, I gave myself a mental pat on the back and thought “Hmmm. Pretty cool.” Ten years and a fair bit of effort later that number became 300.
And then something started to change. I became acutely aware of numbers. At that time the New York State list was roughly 430 species. After 300 species the majority of annually occurring breeders and migrants diminish rapidly. Basically, it becomes a tough road to see new birds.
My 300th species in New York was a Boreal Owl in December of 2004. My 350th was a Golden Eagle in November 2006. Fifty species in two years. My 375th was a Loggerhead Shrike in November 2010. Half the new species in double the time.
Birding with friends over the years we would say things like, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if a (insert most coveted bird here) flew over right now? Yeah, I need that for the state.”
That single word “need” represented a sea change for me. What used to be exploring the unknown and experiencing things for the sake of experience and understanding quietly morphed into filling in blanks. The joy of discovery reduced instead to relief if a target species was seen, disappointment if not.
Add to this the rise of competitive listing on the coat tails of the ever-popular Ebird database’s Top 100 list and it seemed a perfect storm was brewed. (Yes, I have had strangers walk up to me in Prospect Park and after introducing themselves announce they’re gunning for me! Nice to meet you too.) The cherished experience of discovery replaced by a numbers game measured in success and failure, in gamesmanship, but without joy. Four hundred should have felt special, but it didn’t.
Milestones can and should be evaluative moments in time. It’s human nature. Take stock. Adjust perspective. What I have come to understand as I crossed this particular threshold is that for me, 400 was less a milestone and more a nod to the miles travelled. It speaks to effort, but really says little of ability.
As I entered my checklist into Ebird, describing the field marks I was able to ascertain during my brief and distant sighting this notion was driven home. This just wasn’t me.
Days later I made it back to Plum with my friend Doug. To my relief the gull eventually appeared on the south flats. A slow approach was rewarded. For the better part of an hour the bird actively fed and defended whatever patch of sand it stood on. Without fanfare in the warming afternoon light the opportunity to study this incredible bird was afforded to a small group of us. It was amazing to see this species alongside Atlantic Brant, Laughing Gulls and Eastern Willets, birds it probably never encountered before. The gull may have been out of place, but in that moment I was right at home.
The best experiences in nature both answer and ask questions and this was no exception. My time with this bird left me with a greater understanding of the species yet wondering about its journey here and how it was able to identify and adjust to a food source not native to it.
As the Franklin’s Gull screamed up the beach one last time it dawned on me. Although perhaps not at first, my 400th species had just showed me exactly what I needed, and it wasn’t another “tick.”
On May 10, 2015, the University of Connecticut awarded Helen Hays an honorary degree and selected her as the 2015 College of Liberal Arts commencement speaker. The event took place in Storrs CT and these awards recognize Helen’s notable achievements as an ornithologist and her remarkable 45 years as the director of the Great Gull Island Project.
The birding world, of which Central Park is a microcosm that I entered into in May 1932, is incomparable to today’s world. Of the several factors involved, the most obvious is that today there are more birders than birds. In 1932, there were very few birders but many more birds. You have waves of water today. We had waves too, but of birds, lots of birds.
In referring to my notebooks of the thirties, I found a good example of one such day. I lived at that time on the upper West Side, one block from the Central Park West and 100th street park entrance. On the morning of May 6, 1934, I walked through that entrance to witness a tremendous wave in progress to be immediately surrounded by all manners of passerines and others. My species list for that day, a child’s list, was 66 species, all sight identifications, none by ear. The rationale for the sight identifications is simply explained. I did not learn songs for several years, not that I lacked the natural ability to do so. But, on any good day, there was such a welter of songs that it was extremely difficult to filter out the songs of individual species so you could concentrate your attention enough to learn them.
There are many more examples from my records of the abundance of birds in those times: forty Canada Warblers on May 26, 1935; twenty- five Black-and-white Warblers and forty-five American Redstarts on August 11, 1936; thirty- five Blackpoll Warblers on September 9, 1936; eight Bay-breasted Warblers on September 25, 1936; May 11, 1938, 103 warblers of sixteen species; Sept 2, 1938 sixty American Redstarts; March 14, 1939 seventy-one Purple Finches; April 22, 1940 five hundred White-throated Sparrows; March 18, 1940 sixty Fox and fifty-five Song Sparrows; one hundred Song Sparrows on April 1, 1940.
We are all familiar with the usual reasons for the huge decline in bird numbers – population growth and urbanization resulting in destruction of habitat, both here and on the tropical wintering grounds, acid rain and pesticides. But there is one factor that affects Central Park birding that you may not be aware of. Eighty years ago, there were still open spaces nearby. I went to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. One day during lunch hour, I found four Spotted Sandpiper nests with eggs in the open lots around the school. In nearby Van Cortland Park, there were breeding warblers and Eastern Bluebirds. The suburbs around the city were much less developed. Breeding bird counts in Greenbrook Sanctuary in the adjacent Palisades have documented the decline in woodland birds. These reservoirs of birds no longer contribute to the migrants in Central Park.
Eight decades are time enough for some major changes to occur that effect our Central Park birding today. It was much colder then. One day in February 1934 I attended high school in fourteen degree below zero weather, the coldest day in New York City history. Piles of snow would remain in the streets of Manhattan until the spring thaw, because they would freeze so hard the plows could not budge them. Of course, this had an effect on the common wintering birds we see today. American Robins did not winter then. I saw my first robin of 1935 on March 1st. I took a Xmas count in the Park in 1935 and had a total of fifteen species. Northern Cardinals and Northern Mockingbirds were rare; Mourning Doves and Tufted Titmouse were very rare; Red-bellied Woodpeckers, an accidental with one record.
Some birds have adjusted to life in the big city. It was four years before I saw my first American Crow in the Park and almost six years before the first Red-tailed Hawk. The Park also bore witness to population shifts in our common water birds over those eight decades. Some examples: Buffleheads unknown; Ruddy Ducks and Northern Shovelers very rare; Great and Snowy Egrets unknown; Double-crested Cormorants accidental; Great Black-backed and Ring-billed Gulls rare, but Laughing Gulls were common transients.
In conclusion, I repeat my opening remarks – the Central Park birding world of the Thirties is incomparable to today’s world. Editor’s Note: Irving Cantor, Fellow of the Linnaean Society, has been a member of the Society for 75 years. Next month Irv will celebrate his 83rd year of birding.
