New York City Can’t Live With Its Birds, And It Can’t Live Without Them

No place in America has occupied a more dramatic intersection between its people and its birds than New York City. It was the end of the rail for birds killed for food, which poured into the city’s markets by the ton. It was the destination for feathers for the Millinery Trade, which defined the country’s fashions and cost the lives of millions of herons and egrets. For two centuries, it’s been a center for ornithology and the birthplace of writers who shaped the way we think about birds. It sits on the migratory flyway for tens of millions of birds representing three hundred species that travel up and down the Atlantic coast every spring and fall. And today, it’s the home of some of the finest nature writing in the country.

Last week, I talked with the journalist Ryan Goldberg about his new book, Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds. While Ryan started his career in sports reporting, his life took a turn when he started birding in New York City about ten years ago. In Bird City, he takes a look at the army of volunteers helping birds coexist with people in the country’s most densely-packed metropolis—the city is as indispensable for its birds as it is dangerous. What really drew me to his writing was the way he connected the birds we see—or don’t see—to the decisions made over the last century and a half. The city’s birdscape today is a product of introduced starlings, rehabilitated rivers, and manufactured wetlands, just like tomorrow’s birdscape will be a result of the conservation decisions we make today.  

You can find more of Ryan’s work here and buy Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds here. Be sure to subscribe to his substack! The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Robert: New York City gets enough attention for its arts and business and politics, and New Yorkers tend to think that the world revolves around the city. So why should people in the rest of the country care about New York City’s birds? 

Ryan: Yeah, we do have some New York exceptionalism here. I think people should care because what happens in New York happens in all cities in America. I wrote the book because I live here, but if I lived in Chicago, I could have easily written a bird city about Chicago or Dallas or Houston or LA. The stories of the people whose lives revolve around birds here and the work that they’re doing on conservation apply to any other city. 

Clearly the country and the world is moving toward more urbanization. Seventy percent of the global population will be living in cities by 2050. What’s happening here, as far as decisions on the landscape, decisions about conservation can be examples or cautionary tales for the rest of the country. What happens here matters because we’re going to be crowding into cities and we need to find a way to make room for birds and biodiversity. 

In your book, you express some discomfort with the way that we talk about introduced birds like sparrows and starlings in an almost exclusively negative light. At the same time, we live in a city that itself is a non-native environment. What place do sparrows, starlings, pigeons have in New York City? 

Yeah, it’s such a hard question because the general feeling among birders is that these are pests. I think if they see their numbers declining, they kind of rejoice inside. But these are birds that actually are declining here. And even in their native range in Europe, they have seen pretty steep declines. 

I was surprised in the reading of the book that their numbers in the city are just a quarter of what they were in the 70s? 

Yeah, even much fewer. Their Christmas Bird Count in New York City at peak was somewhere around 750,000 starlings in the 60s and 70s. And now it’s just several thousand. Even that is a reflection of land use decisions and use of chemicals. Even starlings are not immune to our changes to the landscape and our decisions we make on farmland and open space. 

These birds actually occupy a really great place for introducing people to birds. Once you get into birding, you very quickly shift over to wondering, what are the native birds? What are the migrating birds? But the number one bird that’s brought to the Wild Bird Fund for rehabilitation is the pigeon. Most people actually do see these birds first, and they may never start birding, but that doesn’t mean that they have less of an interest or care for the birds of the city. 

When you point people to starlings that have never seen them before, they’re really taken by how beautiful they can look. Some of the ways that people thought these birds were detrimental to native species a while ago, I don’t really think that’s the case anymore. Their numbers are just not as great. They have enough buildings to nest in and enough of these liminal spaces to occupy that native birds aren’t going to occupy anyway. 

Starlings were my spark bird as well, so I owe them that. 

When we think about birds in the city, we often think about how we can stop the city from killing birds, from flying into windows, from destroying habitat, and be the bare minimum as a stopover point during migration. But in your book, you talk about some formerly threatened birds like Peregrine Falcons and Grasshopper Sparrows that are actually thriving in New York City, maybe better than anywhere else in the region or even the country. How is it that New York City is providing a uniquely valuable habitat? 

The Peregrine Falcon has been a winner here. And that is because the built environment of New York mimics the habitat that they would be looking for in the wild. Skyscrapers and bridges are tall perches from which they can command the landscape, and peregrines have an instinctual need to look out over everything that allows them to hunt over open water and open ground. 

Peregrines were reintroduced after they were wiped out completely by DDT from the eastern US. They were reintroduced to New York in the early 80s by the Peregrine Fund. The peregrines that are nesting here, they’re just pure, urban creatures. They’ve never seen a cliff in their life. The introduction of these non-native birds like starlings and pigeons has also provided them with an abundance of prey. Peregrine falcons in New York are almost exclusively hunting pigeons. These decisions that we make on the landscape, around the city, how we build the environment has allowed this symbol of wilderness to thrive in the most urban places. 

The Grasshopper Sparrow is so interesting because it is nesting in really dense numbers at what was once the largest landfill in the country, Fresh Kills in Staten Island. They’re nesting in what is now a tall grass prairie on top of 150 million tons of capped trash. Fresh Kills was a landfill, but before that it was a tidal marsh. This new iteration of it has no precedent for that area. This place now has seen essentially three drastically different ecosystems in 70 years, from tidal wetlands to trash dump to now, a tall grass prairie. And now that it’s been built, the birds are finding it. Birds will fill the spaces that we’ve created for them, and do so really quickly.

I really appreciate that you capture the city’s dynamism, that in the last 70 years, the city’s experienced a lot of dramatic ecological changes, with new wetlands being created, rivers being polluted and cleaned up. Could you talk about how bird life has changed since then? 

The biggest change has been with the wading birds that have moved into these islands of wilderness within New York Harbor. In the last 150 years, wading birds went from being hunted almost to extinction for women’s hats and the fashion trade in the late 1800s, to then being protected and saved from the brink. But it wasn’t for another 50 years or so until they started returning to New York City.

And it also coincides with the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act in the early 70s. The biggest change has been that Great Egrets started nesting on these islands within the still very polluted New York Harbor. And speaking of dynamism, a lot of the islands were actually artificial. They were created to house quarantine hospitals for millions of immigrants coming to New York in the early 1900s. 

And so in the crumbling ruins of hospitals on other structures on these islands, these birds moved in. New York City Bird Alliance has been monitoring the population through their Harbor Herons Program, and they say this is like the largest colony of nesting birds anywhere in the Northeast, including ten different species of wading birds. But those numbers are actually now declining again because of sea level rise, because of predators like raccoons moving on to the islands. A few birds like Black Crown Night Herons and Glossy Ibises are actually having really drastic declines in their numbers. It just goes to show how quickly things change. 

There are other wading birds from the south that are coming north because of climate change. For several years now, there’s been sightings of Anhingas and Wood Storks in New York City, and it probably won’t be long before those harbor heron colonies will be joined by new southern species.

You have trends on one hand, like sea level rise, global warming, range expansion, while also kind of balancing the very specific needs of particular species. 

I feel like the speed with which even threatened birds like Grasshopper Sparrows have moved into habitats here is just an expression of how badly they need these areas, and how just with a little bit of willpower and investment, you can create it for them. 

There’s been a lot of investment in Fresh Kills. This is a multi-decade process to cap that landfill. But green roofs can also be a really important migratory stopover. Some of the smallest parks in New York are migrant traps. So I do feel like there’s so much more we can do in the city. It takes a real shift in mentality, though, to see all the concrete as an opportunity for planting pollinator gardens. I feel like New York really lags in that sense.

I spent time in Montreal this summer, and there were wildflowers everywhere in people’s front yards, there were hardly any lawns. There were just wildflowers everywhere, native plants in people’s yards, on the sidewalks, every curb cut seemed to be an opportunity for some type of rain garden, and a place for native plants. New York can do so much more of that. So when I look around, I think there’s so many more opportunities to create more habitat in the city.

Could you talk about more of the changes that you’d like to see to make the city more bird friendly? 

I’d love to see the city invest more in the parks department as the keeper of so many of these really important natural spaces. The parks department is funded at 0.5% of the budget, which is rock bottom, and it pales in comparison to other cities that spend sometimes upward of two or three percent of their overall budget on parks. None of these spaces are really natural anymore. All these refuges, they have to be managed. Birds are not going to drop into a place that is crowded out with invasive plants.

I would love to see more education around the importance of the city’s parks as migratory stopovers for birds. That Prospect Park and Central Park aren’t just our backyard, they are really life and death places, they truly are places of survival for these birds that are crossing continents. I would love to see more messaging and education letting people know that there’s this incredible natural phenomenon that’s taking place like all around us. 

A lot of the reporting in your book is about the boots on the ground, the volunteers and employees that are doing what is sometimes backbreaking work, like tearing out invasive plants, planting natives, monitoring collisions with glass windows. Can you talk about the difference those people make? 

These are people that care so much about safeguarding birds that they’re willing to get up in the dark to go monitor collisions. In the book I talk about Melissa Breyer, who’s been monitoring collisions at the World Trade Center since 2020, and has witnessed mass collision events there. She’s getting out there in the dark and just doing round after round. And that work matters. 

Like it really matters, the stuff Melissa and other volunteers for Project Safe Flight have found, have been able to make enough news that a law was passed in 2020 to require bird-safe materials on all new buildings in New York. That is the result of Project Safe Flight. It’s the result of volunteers doing the heartbreaking work of finding dead and injured birds, and sending letters and calling their elected officials that led up to the passage of that law. 

This is the reason that we have all these great places to go birding in New York. Somebody else I talked about in the book, Peter Dorosh, has been doing the backbreaking work to improve the habitat in Prospect Park. We get to enjoy the fruits of his labor, which are areas that are planted with native trees that provide food to the birds, while he’s doing that labor to make it so others can enjoy it. 

Since COVID, there’s obviously been a huge increase in interest in birding. But I have this idea that the hobby hasn’t connected fully to activism to create a movement around bird conservation, that there isn’t a political constituency that’s proportional to the number of people who bird as a hobby. What do you think it would take to turn all of the casual birders into activists? 

I think one thing that might work is for people to join clubs or organizations that do that work. I’m a member of the Brooklyn Bird Club. It’s an all-volunteer organization. We’ve been around a long time, and the club has done a lot around conservation, just by writing letters and joining up with other groups.

One example of that is Ridgewood Reservoir, which is on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. For about 10 years the city was threatening to bulldoze it to turn into athletic fields. And it was a collection of birders, local community activists, and environmentalists that fought the city to preserve it, because within that reservoir is this incredible swamp forest that had grown in the basins once they were drained. And they won! 

Channeling birders into existing organizations that are doing great conservation work like New York City Bird Alliance, the Linnaean Society, every borough has a group. There’s a lot of conservation groups, at least in New York City. Having the backing of a group that’s been around a while and has the ear of elected officials really helps. 

Local Law 15 [requiring bird-safe glass] was an example of that as well. What changed for that law to pass was probably that all of a sudden there were hundreds of new birders that were now sending letters and contacting their elected officials to build support for that bill. 

One of my favorite lines I’ve found is about the founding of the Brooklyn Bird Club in 1909. Somebody writing about it a few years later said, “a small but earnest group of bird-students had ridden their hobby in Prospect Park. They did not know one another, but the field-glasses carried were ‘open sesame’ to acquaintanceship.”¹ What has this looked like for you? 

I joined the Brooklyn Bird Club in 2016, and the club opened its doors to me on the first walks I went on. I loved being able to join a group that has this type of long history, knowing that I was joining this urban naturalist tradition that until that point I didn’t even know existed. Being able to see myself not as just some individual doing this, but as part of a tradition of birding in New York. And to feel like I could also contribute in my own way.

So many of my friends are birders now. I think of all the people I’ve met and become friends with that I would have just never met in any other walk of life. That may apply to any hobby, but I do think birding attracts people from a broad range of interests and backgrounds and professions and age. And that’s a wonderful aspect to it. 

And I feel like birding kept me living in New York, which seems like such a weird thing to say. You’d be like “oh, I’m into nature and the outdoors so I’m gonna leave New York and move to somewhere with lots of hiking trails out my door.” But actually birding in New York kept me here. It’s because you can see so much of migration here and it’s pretty spectacular. 

But it’s also because of the community. And I think that’s grown with the pandemic. The Brooklyn Bird Club’s membership has more than doubled. And the walks that the club puts on—and I lead some of those walks—we get like 30, 40 people sometimes. And the beginner walks that the club puts on now sometimes attract 70 or 80 people. Why are people doing this? I think it’s just genuinely that people want not only to connect with nature but maybe connect with other people who are interested in something similar. People are yearning to get off their devices and see what’s alive around them. 

Through writing this book, how has your relationship with birds in New York City changed? 

While I was writing the book I became so fascinated by this concept of morning flight, this phenomenon of birds, after they’ve landed in the morning reorienting around the landscape and finding places where you can see large numbers taking off again as they move around the city. I recently did that from the roof of my office building in Gowanus and it was incredible—standing up there on a cold October morning and seeing hundreds of yellow-rumped warblers and dozens of flickers flying over this total concrete landscape heading north into the wind with the Smith and 9th Street subway bridge behind them. I love going to experience morning flight even though I’m still learning how to identify birds in flight. I look for those opportunities to actually see active migration in the city. The people who showed it to me over the course of this book… it gets under your skin to be able to actually see birds moving around the city like that. To see them actually migrating is really stirring.

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You can buy Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds here. And be sure to subscribe to his substack!

1. “Clubs Affiliated with the National Association: Bird-Lovers’ Club of Brooklyn.” Bird Lore. United States: Macmillan Company, 1915. ↩︎