The Other New York
Reading Marie Winn’s Red Tails In Love or watching the last episode of Richard Attenborough’s “Planet Earth” documentary reminds us that, as urban dwellers, we are constantly surrounded by the natural world. As we city folk go about our busy daily lives, an entire ecosystem runs parallel, often unseen by those of us staring at the sidewalk or speeding by Lyft through town. Adaptation has made many wild creatures denizens of urban environments. These environments are the latest natural habitat, even as wild habitats are shrinking throughout the world.
A copious food supply, more than anything else, draws wild animals into our midst. Peregrine falcons, which inhabit our NYC bridges and skyscrapers maintain in greater numbers than in any other location on earth, have a never ending supply of pigeons to fill them up; the rather slow moving birds are easy prey for the peregrines, which can dive at 200 miles per hour. Red tailed hawks, which Marie Winn chronicles so engagingly in her book, also count on pigeons for sustenance, in addition to the rats and squirrels which populate Central and Prospect Parks.
Raccoons, those brilliant and inveterately curious omnivores, sift through garbage in addition to eating the small mammals, insects, and aquatic creatures in our parks and ponds as well as on our streets. The Attenborough documentary informs us that the world’s highest concentration of wild leopards lives, not in some remote corner of pristine jungle, but in Mumbai! Foxes abound in London; my wife and I have glimpsed them there late at night more than once. And everyone knows the danger of leaving your little dog or cat unwatched in the hills of Los Angeles: if the coyotes don’t get them, the mountain lions will.
Most of us go through our daily lives paying no attention to this world which thrives around us. We don’t see the black crowned night herons in summer or harbor seals in winter on the islands out past the Brooklyn Bridge, or the egrets in the Turtle Pond every spring, or the flocks of songbirds alighting in Central Park and Prospect Park on their spring and fall migrations. But there is an enormous soul-nourishing benefit to noticing these events. It requires moving on foot through our parks, or by boat through our waterways. And it requires attention. Among the great benefits of life in the city, along with theater, opera, dance, sporting events and academic opportunities, are these surprising and often mysterious encounters with the wildlife and birdlife with whom we share our home. But they elude us if we are always in a hurry, or in a cab, or in the gym. To encounter them requires that most precious of all New York commodities: time.
As I grow older, I consciously try to slow myself down. I want literally to smell the flowers in the Shakespeare and Conservatory gardens, to watch the way the snow skitters across the ice on the Boat Pond, or find the little unfrozen inlets which are crammed with ducks and geese all winter long. I want to ramble through the Ramble on an early spring morning when songbirds are thick in the trees, and wander down the long alley of cherry trees when they bloom in floating pink clouds in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. This beautiful world, in the words of T.S.Eliot “not known because not looked for but heard, half heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea,” exists every day on the periphery of our busy lives, ready to expand our experience if we will only let it in.