When the Woods Get Quiet
Spring Migration is in full swing for New York City— and for the next three weeks, our parks will be full of color and songs. Even small parks, like J. Hood Wright Park in northern Manhattan, or the long, thin, winding arboretum of the Highline will see tiny visitors from South America. I actually saw my first ever Scarlet Tanager while working on the Highline, but more on that later.
Once you’ve experienced your first spring migration, I promise you’ll be hooked.
“That little bird flew HOW far?”
“I never know a bird could be so BLUE.”
“What have you seen today?”
These are all sentiments share with me by perfect strangers— tourists & lifelong New Yorkers alike who wonder what some long-haired weirdo is doing with a 12 in camera lens around his neck. I’ve lived in New York City for nearly 13 years, but it wasn’t until COVID-19 slowed everything down that I, too, started to pay attention to what’s around me. In this world on concrete and steel and hustle and grind and noise, it’s hard to imagine my life without wildlife in it.
But what if there wasn’t? Every year in the United States, between 500 million and a billion birds die from human-related causes. That phrase covers a wide swath of maladies: habitat losses, window strike, feral cats, wind turbines, pesticides, and powerlines. Each day, seemingly each hour, we encroach further into natural areas or throw up greater roadblocks to migration. With every season,, the crippling effects of climate changed become more and more undeniable. All this, and we’ve elected a federal administration and a Congress that only views our public lands and natural areas in terms of dollars and cents. Listen closely— you’ll hear the creaking strain of the natural world as it threatens to buckle.
Earth was around a long time before humans evolved. Although Nuclear War could turn it into an abiotic husk, the odds are pretty decent that both the planet and the biome will outlast us. But can we survive the changes that are coming? For my entire life, I’ve watched our ability to forecast and pre-empt natural disasters grow. Through a combination of modeling, education, and determination, we developed a system so robust that your phone could give you a fairly accurate seven day forecast. That’s all about to go out the window— not just thanks to climate change, but because the Trump Administration is gutting NOAA and the public funding for weather research. When you can no longer prepare, the only inevitability becomes uncertainty. We’re not ready for it. How could we be?
I got a taste of that this week. Blackpoll Warblers, the bird picture with this post, are meant to herald the end of Spring Migration. Some of the last birds to arrive, they fly up to 1,800 miles non-stop over the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. Their incredible journey can take them over 12,000 miles round-trip. But on Saturday, May 3rd, there were scores inside of Central Park, 2-3 weeks earlier than expected. It could be a fluke, it could be an irruption year, it could be any number of things. But I’m not the only bird watcher who noticed, and certainly not the only one who found it odd. Is it just a coincidence and an aberration, or is it a herald of things to come? I hope by the time we find out, it isn’t too late.
