Another gorgeous dawn in New York City marked my second full day of birding adventure in this dynamic metropolitan birding hotspot. My host Loyan Beausoleil and I alighted from her East Village apartment to the just-waking-up streets of the city at 6:30 am, to catch the ferry to Governor’s Island.
We jumped in a cab and zipped down FDR Drive past construction sites along the East River, observing the mitigation work being done against rising water levels. As we passed the sites, work for the day was not yet started and the current state of progress was hard to read for the promised raised berm that will hold a landscaped waterfront along 5 miles of lower Manhattan. Loyan pointed out sports fields that replaced what had once been trees along the waterfront, trees that were once bird habitat.
Thankfully we were headed to a place just across the East River that serves as an example of successful, biodversity-rich urban green space reclamation: Brooklyn Bridge Park. Maybe the East River Resiliency project will result in the same outcome, but in that moment, it looked like a construction zone.
The dreamy rooftop entrance to Loyan’s East Village apartment. Next door is a school where Chimney swifts roost en mass every summer. May 2025.
Brooklyn Bridge Park bound, yes, but first, Governor’s Island! We boarded a near-empty ferry (save for maintenance and construction workers also going to Governor’s Island) and chugged out of Lower Manhattan across the river to the former military property, now city park.
Overview of the birding route on Governors Island, with Brooklyn Bridge visible in the top right corner. On the right, a zoom in of the birding route at Brooklyn Bridge Park
Our birding amble in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Birding a deserted Governor’s Island at 7:30am with the Manhattan skyline ever-present. May 2025.
We walked the width of the island en route to the pedestrian-only ferry dock that would take us to Brooklyn, where we would meet our third birding companion for the day, Heather Wolf.
Loyan took us past meadows and mature trees in this expansive place smack dab in the middle of a huge city. The island hosts birds throughout the year, and on this quiet morning we hoped to see more birds like the day before in Central Park.
It was birds on the water surrounding the island, though, which were the highlight at this point of the morning: late-season brant, beautiful geese normally departed to the Arctic by this time of the year.
With Heather Wolf, about to start birding Brooklyn Bridge Park. She and I go back a few years, tho this was our first time meeting in person!
Next up, Brooklyn! We met Heather at her local park, Brooklyn Bridge Park. It’s such a familiar birding location to her, she’s written a book about it! Birding at the Bridge is her 2016 photo-filled narrative guide to the birds of Brooklyn’s waterfront. She’s since written a second book, Find More Birds, again filled with her photos and much of the content and resulting suggestions within it drawn from her many hours spent birding and photographing the avian activity at her park.
Brooklyn Bridge Park is small enough at 85 acres to run an ongoing bird census as Heather has done as one person putting in thousands of observations. The park is a reclamation of the local waterfront, a privately funded project completed in 2010. Its landscape is still maturing, there are not the 100 year old trees that you see in the parks in Manhattan just across the water.
But with 15 years of growth, the park is leafing out to host meaningful avian variety and abundance. Heather has observed over 130 species in and around the park, and on our 2 hour walk, we saw 40.
Heather observes the park management as pro-bird, too. She knows the gardening staff and they mention recent sightings to her when she arrives, or the latest news about a known nest. Birding is listed as one of the activity tiles on the park website. The landscape architecture is varied and the plantings diverse to host a range of species. And I noticed this below art installation was striped with collision abatement tape (for humans and birds, both? Maybe?).
Documenting the collision prevention strips on this mirrored art installation at Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Wider view of the mirrored installation.
Near the end of our walk we saw barn swallows collecting mud from the beach for nest building in the nearby pier structures, their iridescent plumage flashing close to the ground like moving jewels as they collected mud. We watched through binoculars as they appeared to gobble mud and retreat. I have seen birds collecting nesting material from sticks to spider webs but I had never seen swallows collecting mud before.
Heather writes about swallows doing just that in her Birding at the Bridge book, and includes a photo of one with mud in its bill. I was happy when I read this in her book later once I was home, and know that I had witnessed that myself with none other than the authoritative birder of the site and author of the book.
A photograph of a Common yellowthroat by Heather Wolf, a gift to me after our morning of birding together. It now hangs on my kitchen wall.
Our morning of birding came to a natural close around noon, as bird activity subsided and hunger pangs compelled us to venture a few blocks inland for a pizza lunch. We saw our first Downy woodpecker of the morning in an old street tree several streets up from the park. Not surprising given the age of the street tree over the young trees in the park, the Downy preferring the former.
Heather surprised Loyan and I with a copy of her latest book for Loyan and a print of a Common yellowthroat for me. Heather determined in advance that we would see one together at the park (and she was right!) and I would see one back home on the West Coast. It was a bird we could share, in more ways that one. I treasure it!
Thus concluded the week of birding adventure on the East Coast. You can read about the first part of the trip which took me to the Cape May Spring Birding Festival, and about the day of birding in Central Park with a group of creative New Yorker girlfriends as part one of my visit to NYC and environs.