Saying Hello to New Arrivals and Goodbye to a Friend
Debbie Becker leads a free bird walk at the Garden every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., beginning at the Reflecting Pool in the Leon Levy Visitor Center.
Spring has sprung at NYBG. The phoebe, spring’s harbinger, has arrived. A beautiful phoebe was spotted down by Twin Lakes bobbing its tail and calling. Ruby-crowned kinglets, brown creepers, and a juvenile eastern kingbird were also spotted on last Saturday’s walk.
Perhaps the best indication of spring is seeing the mating rituals that some of the birds perform. The male mockingbird does a dance on the lawn by extending his wings and flashing his white stripes. The female, who looks exactly like the male, is an onlooker who watches from afar. She may judge him on his display or wait further to hear the kaleidoscope of songs that emanate from his vocal cords when he is high atop a tree. Many mockingbirds mock sounds they hear in their vicinity. NYBG mockers often imitate the other birds at NYBG along with alarm systems from cars and sometimes screeching—like the sounds a child might make. The female only mocks in the fall, leaving the spring air open for her suitor’s song.
Read more about birds at the Garden and check out all of this weekend’s programming after the jump.
Debbie Becker leads a free bird walk at the Garden every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., beginning at the Reflecting Pool in the Leon Levy Visitor Center. Join her tomorrow, December 13, for the 2008 New York Botanical Garden Bird Count.
Every year at this time, birders flock to the parks and woods across the country and beyond for National Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count. From dawn’s early light until dusk birders count all the birds they can find using a specific method and within precise geographic areas. At the end of the day the counts are tallied and compared to numbers from previous years. The information is used to determine if a bird species is in trouble or declining. Past revelations included lower than usual numbers of house finches, most likely due to conjunctivitis, and decimated crow numbers, presumably due to West Nile Virus. Occasionally, a rarity will pop up on the count as birders scour the shorelines, forests, and meadows looking for elusive visitors to their areas. Past special sightings at the Botanical Garden, which is part of Audubon’s 84-year-old Bronx-Westchester count, include common redpolls, chipping sparrows, pine warblers, Baltimore orioles, and a merlin.
Twenty years ago I started the Garden’s own unofficial bird count, a low-keyed version that is fun and educational. Instead of gathering at 5 a.m., we meet at 11 a.m. and set out to count the birds at NYBG. I keep a list of the most common New York City birds and put strokes near their names as we spot them flying by. The two decades of data from our informal count confirms the trends found in the Audubon count.
Read about the birds likely to be found on the count and of a special sighting last year after the jump.
UPDATE 12/18/08: Bird walk results
Count day was sunny and cold, with temperatures in the 20s. Nineteen people participated; the count lasted three hours and turned up 24 species and 105 birds overall. Highlights of the day included a northern shoveler at Twin Lakes, both the female and male great horned owls in the Forest, and a goshawk, for the second year in a row, by the Prop Range. A flock of house finches, a brown creeper, and a house wren also were good finds. The full list is noted here.
House finch: 12; House sparrow: 3; White-throated sparrow: 5; Black-capped chickadee: 8; Dark-eyed junco: 15; House wren: 1; American crow: 1; Blue jay: 2; Northern cardinal: 2; Mourning dove: 9; American robin: 3; Red-bellied woodpecker: 1; Downy woodpecker: 1; Tufted titmouse: 3; White-breasted nuthatch: 1; Brown creeper: 1; Northern mockingbird: 3; Hermit thrush: 2; Great horned owl: 2; Red-tailed hawk: 2; Northern goshawk: 1; Northern shoveler: 1; Mallard: 23; Hooded merganser: 3; (Last week, 30 wood ducks were counted.)
Patricia Gonzalez is an NYBG Visitor Services Attendant and avid wildlife photographer.
In 2017, we marked the occasion of two young Great-horned Owls fledging after having quite a few adventures during their stay in the Mertz Library nest. This was the same nest built by a pair of Red-tailed Hawks back in 2009, which also happened to be the last year that Red-tails nested at NYBG—until now.
I’m happy to report that there are now three fledgling hawks getting to know their way around our 250 acres. Special thanks to Debbie Becker, our eagle-eyed wildlife expert, for the news! Back in April, she spotted both parents flying overhead. They soon landed in a tree in a heavily wooded section of the Garden, which became their nest. The rest, as they say, is history!
I’ve been lucky enough to follow two of the fledglings around with my camera shortly after they left the nest. It’s fascinating to watch them explore the Garden, and I look forward to watching them grow into effective hunters like their parents.
Patricia Gonzalez is an NYBG Visitor Services Attendant and avid wildlife photographer.
This past weekend, for the fourth consecutive year, The New York Botanical Garden had a live birds of prey demonstration as part of its ongoing Fall Forest Weekends programming. Returning for their second year was the Quogue Wildlife Refuge, a non-profit organization based in Long Island. In addition to 305 stunning acres of protected land, they also serve as a permanent home to wildlife that can no longer be released.
For this year’s presentation, they brought along a great-horned owl, two screech owls, a snowy owl, and a red-tailed hawk. Garden visitors were given a wonderful photo opportunity as the presenters walked through the aisles while explaining the stories of each bird of prey. During their talk they briefly touched on the fact that many resident and migrant raptors call NYBG their home. And just like last year, Hooter the great-horned owl stole the show!
Patricia Gonzalez is an NYBG Visitor Services Attendant and avid wildlife photographer.
On Tuesday, March 22, I was in the Forest hoping to spot one of the Great-horned Owls that call it home. After searching and finding nothing, I was turning to leave when a beautiful mourning cloak butterfly landed on the forest floor. It stayed long enough to let me shoot about a dozen images before flying off. I then began thinking of the warmer months when the Home Gardening Center will be a thriving hub of swallowtails, monarchs, and hummingbird moths.
No owl photos this time—instead, the anticipation of things to come. And that is a beautiful thing!
Mourning cloak butterfly (Nymphalis antiopa) in the Thain Family Forest – Photo by Patricia Gonzalez
Big, small, fierce, or cute, the birds of prey that live out their lives in the northeast are an uncommon cadre of sharp-eyed hunters, though seldom seen by your average park wanderer. Here in the New York Botanical Garden, our most popular visitors are definitely the Red-tailed Hawks that patrol the skies around our grounds, as well as the occasional Great-horned Owl, but the many local species that you might not always see are equally fascinating! And I admit they’re also pretty adorable if you’re not a squirrel or a chipmunk.
As part of our Fall Forest Weekends events and activities, which kicked off this past weekend and run through the next, our friends from the Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary & Audubon Center stopped off at the Garden with a few clever companions in tow, among them an American Kestrel, an Eastern Screech Owl, and a Barred Owl—some of which you can see hunting around our grounds if you’re lucky. Many of the birds in the Audubon Center’s care are rescues, brought in to be rehabilitated after sustaining injuries that won’t allow them to survive back in the wild. But they do plenty of good in their downtime, educating people about the importance of raptors for a healthy, diverse ecosystem.
Pat Gonzalez is back this week with a fresh highlight feel from her adventures in the Garden, something I always eat up. As both a guest and a Visitor Services Attendant with the NYBG, Pat has spent the past five years documenting the lives of our raptor residents through the lens of her camera, creating a timeline of activity among the Great-horned Owls, Red-tailed Hawks, Cooper’s Hawks, Kestrels, and other winged wildlife that crosses her path. While I’m sure she’ll laugh off the comparison, I like to think of her as our very own Jane Goodall of the bird world.
Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” is a nice touch, I think, that highlights the streamlined elegance of these birds. Though a brief look back into Pat’s Plant Talk postings will show you just how well it belies their hilarious clumsiness at times. There’s something about seeing a young hawk divebomb a park bench in its efforts to figure out hunting that I can’t help but laugh over.
For the birders and animal lovers out there, Debbie Becker’s long-running Bird Walk returns from its summer hiatus on Saturday, September 7, giving you ample time to prep your notebooks, binoculars, and cameras for some time wandering the Garden. It’ll go a long way toward helping you understand the joy that Pat feels each time she happens across one of her feathered friends.
Sure, the first things you think of when hawks come to mind are probably hooked talons, beaks, and stealthy swoops on unsuspecting (and occasionally adorable) rodents. But beneath their noble profiles and well-earned heritage as the monarchs of the sky (sorry, butterflies), even our Red-tailed Hawks have moments of awkward indignation that border on the cute and fluffy. Bath time in particular—with all its flopping and splashing about—is usually cause for giggles. And lucky for us, this often takes place in the Fountain of Life just outside our offices in the Library Building.
Our resident hawk aficionado and Visitor Services Attendant, Pat Gonzalez, happened to be outside filming one of the local hawks as it fed, dodged resentful bluejays, and washed off the day’s exertions. I’ve bumped the video forward to the most comical bit, but you can catch the rest by dragging the cursor to the beginning.
It’s like we blinked and suddenly: fall color! For now, the effect is subtle. You might find a few more leaves than average blowing along the grass under the tulip trees. Make your way into the 50-acre Forest and you’ll see familiar reds, oranges, and yellows lighting up the trees here and there. We’re not complaining about the chill in the air, either. But whether the calendar confirms it or not, autumn is dancing its way into New York City, and the NYBG is the place to be.
This weekend is the perfect time to escape into nature and soak up what feels like a second spring. Saturday’s Bird Walk starts you off with a jaunt around the Garden, binoculars in hand, spotting creatures of every sort with our reigning birdwatcher extraordinaire, Debbie Becker. After that, I can’t talk up the Rose Garden Tour enough, especially now that the fall bloom is underway. We’ve had visitors from the four corners talking up the collection on Twitter, and their awe is not misplaced; it’s one of our most popular autumn displays.
We’ll also be joining Sonia Uyterhoeven on Saturday and Sunday for a wrap-up of water lily season. She’s an expert on the planting and care of aquatic plants, so home growers won’t want to miss these open demonstrations around the Conservatory water lily pool. And I should mention Saturday’s Season in Poetry session in the Perennial Garden, for those of you touched with an appreciation for the lyrical. But whatever you choose to do, think about making an entire day of it. No point in squandering this weather with the cold close on its tail!
Walking by the NYBGLibrary Building yesterday, we spotted a huge Red-tailed Hawk as it swooped across the trees and sailed to the top of a giant oak. During the daytime, these hawks are the top avian predators in our area and very impressive to behold (at night, the Great-horned Owls reign supreme). A group of bird watchers on the path gazed upward with large binoculars and telescopes.
Maybe this bird is a distant cousin of Pale Male, the famous Red-tailed Hawk who settled in Manhattan in the 1990s, defying hazardous urban living conditions and continuing to produce young hawks to this day. Or it could be a cousin of last year’s celebrity Red-tailed Hawk, Violet, who enchanted the residents of Washington Square Park in Manhattan before succumbing to a heart condition. Or perhaps it is one of the Garden’s own celebrity hawks, Rose and Vince, or one of their many, many offspring.
Spring has sprung at NYBG. The phoebe, spring’s harbinger, has arrived. A beautiful phoebe was spotted down by Twin Lakes bobbing its tail and calling. Ruby-crowned kinglets, brown creepers, and a juvenile eastern kingbird were also spotted on last Saturday’s walk.
