Bird City

(by Ryan Goldberg)

I really liked this book about bird watching in NYC, though I am not a birder myself. (I think I’ve been on exactly one bird-watching walk in my life, in Prospect Park circa 2005 or 2006—and while I remember that we definitely saw a golden-crowned kinglet, I don’t remember anything else we saw. I don’t dislike birds, I just don’t know that much about them: my bird observations are pretty much limited to “look, a cardinal” or “look, a blue jay” or “look, a hawk.”) But my lack of bird knowledge wasn’t a barrier to my enjoyment of this book, which contains lots of interesting stuff.

The book is organized by season and talks about the author’s personal experiences in various NYC locations, but also incorporates stories from and interactions with others in the birding community, facts about bird migration and various kinds of birds, and larger questions about tensions between humans and the natural world. I liked reading in more detail about things I knew only very vaguely. Like: I knew that night-time light and reflective glass are very bad for migrating birds, but I was shocked by the numbers of dead birds that volunteers with Project Safe Flight find every spring and fall. (On one September day in 2021, one volunteer found 29 injured birds and 229 dead ones.) Or: I knew that the beaches in the Rockaways are an important nesting area for piping plovers, but I didn’t know anything about the migratory journeys that bring them there. I liked reading about the different birds that can be found in different areas of the city, like the grasshopper sparrows in the prairie landscapes of Freshkills Park or the wading birds of Jamaica Bay and the Bronx River. And I like Goldberg’s point that “we imagine hard edges between cities and the wild, but they’re softer than they seem”: cities aren’t just places for people, but are also habitats and stopovers for many other creatures.