Relative to countries like Ecuador or Colombia – heck, even relative to the state of New York – Chile doesn’t have a lot of birds. Paradoxically, that makes it a great birding destination. Think about it: a lavishly illustrated field guide to the birds of the country can include a bonus section on the identification of eggs (!!!) and full-page photographs of the authors’ favorite species, and still slip easily into your handbag. Studying up on the birds you’re likely to see is relatively easy. Do you find hummingbirds frustrating, but love distinctive gulls and weird ducks? Do wren-like birds with long, spiky tails appeal to you? You’ve come to the right place!
But where Chile really stands out is the omnipresence of birds on the walls of its cities. As readers of this blog surely know by now, I love street art almost as much as I love birds. And Chilean street artists seem to have a strong ornithological bent. The walls of Santiago and other cities were practically a gallery of the birds of Chile; I could stroll neighborhoods and sharpen my identification skills at the same time.
Birds were the best thing about this past year. That’s generally true if you’re as bird-obsessed as I am, but it was particularly so in 2023. So much so, in light of the ongoing slaughter, destruction and privation in Gaza and the West Bank, that I’m forced to wonder: is it trivial to think of this bloody year in birds? Offensive, even? Should I set my binoculars aside in mourning, or at least have the decency to stop yammering about rarities and lifers?
Even if I should, I can’t. Birds have been, and still are, a source of joy for me and many others. They are beautiful; they ignore borders and fly over walls; they are fragile, and yet they endure in the most unlikely places.
And If I didn’t have them in my life, I’d be even more nuts than I am.
I spent much of January in Ecuador, mostly on a pair of birding trips organized by Brooklyn naturalist, artist and general bon vivant Gabriel Willow, but with some time on my own as well. In Qiuto, I stayed in the neighborhood of La Floresta, drawn by the food – from street vendor tripe in Parque Navarro to the ultra-high end tasting menu at URKO – and also by the street art. As you can see by the mural above this post, the latter was pretty spectacular.
It’s awkward, even intimidating, to restart this blog after one of its periods of quiescence – especially one as long as this. Let’s see, my last post was in . . . January? Gulp.
It’s not as though there was anything particularly dramatic about this Brooklyn Sunday. The suffocating heat has loosened its grip ever so slightly, but by the time I’d run and biked my way from Park Slope to Prospect Heights, I was soaked in sweat. I had let the availability of CitiBike “Bike Angel” points determine my route. For the uninitiated, the corporate parent of New York City’s bike share program is Lyft, a company that knows a thing or two about motivating non-employees, and I’ve allowed myself to be sucked into their Bike Angel program, whereby riders earn credits, membership extensions and cold hard cash by shuffling bikes from overstocked stations to ones where bikes are in short supply. It’s manipulative as hell, and a source of cheap labor, of course, but it also gives me a couple of hundred dollars a month, and meshes nicely with my much-reduced running program. I trot along, picking up and delivering bikes along the way, and call it a workout.
So it was the prospect of a 12-point (triple bonus points, baby!) drop-off that took me to the corner of Underhill and St. Johns Place, where a seemingly eternal construction fence around a ruined building has been a magnet for street art for years – long enough to earn a listing on Google Maps. It’s the “Underhill Walls,” evidently.
March’s sisters trip to Florida yielded this Tri-colored (but uni-legged) Heron
After 2021’s kinda big Brooklyn year, I relaxed in 2022. The birds helped me. There were no redpolls picking their way through the sweetgum trees in Green-Wood last year, no siskins turning up in random places, no scoter trifectas at Coney Island. Clearly, this was not meant to be a year for the record books.
So I chased less, although I of course made exceptions for lifers. I also worked on my patience, on paying more attention to gulls, and generally being a better and more helpful birder.
And guess what? I had a lot of fun, and I saw a lot of great birds. As always, looking back at the year in birds is also about remembering the year in full, a way to mark the passage of time.
Because of other things going on in my life right now, both good and bad (good: I finished writing this post on the plane to Ecuador), I’m dividing the recap into two parts.
January I had never seen a Purple Sandpiper before I moved to Park Slope, took up birding again, and began to venture outside my Prospect Park comfort zone to the wilds of south Brooklyn. They’re not rare; neither, more disappointingly, are they purple. At best, their grayish plumage is washed with the faintest of violet sheens . . . and that’s if the light is just right and you squint a little.
What makes these birds so cool – and what keeps many birders from seeing them, including, until recently, myself – isn’t their color. It’s their habitat preferences. In the winter, Purple Sandpipers hang out on rocks and jetties, the more surf-pounded, the better. These are not wimpy shorebirds, scurrying away from incoming waves like Sanderlings or, for that matter, yours truly (“Ayeeeeeeeeee, it’s COOOOOOOOLD!”). No, these birds don’t flinch when January waves come crashing down. They just shake themselves off and continue eating.
Knowing where to find Purple Sandpipers in Brooklyn is one of those bits of local knowledge that makes one feel like a real birder. And so, in the helpful spirit I cultivated in 2022, I’ll share some pointers with any readers who want to freeze their asses off looking for plump, non-purple birds with orange legs, droopy bills, and a weird indifference to getting doused with cold water.
Still with me? Great! Your two best bets are the rocks that line the breakwall along the Shore Promenade in Bay Ridge and the far western end of Coney Island, where a jetty juts out into the ocean between the public beach and the private Sea Gate enclave,
Time to catch up with the folks who skipped ahead.
Last weekend, the National Audubon Society teamed up with the group Runstreet to host a running tour of the Audubon Murals in Upper Manhattan. Let’s see . . . an event that combines running, birds and street art? Sign me up!
And so, only slightly challenged by weekend train schedules, I headed across the East River and up, up, uptown to the Harlem Public at Broadway and W. 149th. A small crowd of participants had already gathered – easily recognized, first, by the fact that they were milling around outside a closed bar at 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning, and second, by their mix of running and bird-themed apparel. As we arrived, a preternaturally cheerful organizer checked us off from her list of registrants. New arrivals continued to trickle in, muttering about “trains” (the all-purpose NYC excuse for tardiness), until someone decided that it was time to get started.
First, though, some background on the Audubon Mural Project, echoing the introduction provided to us by Avi Gitler, a local gallery owner and project coordinator. The ambitious goal is to depict all of the more than 300 North American birds threatened with extinction because of climate change. Eight years into the effort, the count has reached 138, spread across 100 murals, mostly in Upper Manhattan – where John James Audubon was once a major landowner, and where he is buried in the cemetery of Trinity Church.
I ran to and around Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood twice last week: once on a long-shot quest for Snowy Owls (they’ve been showing up in all kinds of unlikely places this year, so why not a warehouse roof somewhere in Red Hook?), once to get sandwiches from Defonte’s. It was on the first run, which meandered through likely unlikely Snowy Owl habitat and yielded no owls, but an inordinate number of Fish Crows, that I saw these cool examples of poster art.
The amorous skeletons at the top of this post were pasted on an expanse of brick wall on one of the quiet streets leading west from Van Brunt toward the waterfront – Van Dyke, maybe? (I made a mental note to remember the location, then promptly forgot it.) They shared the wall with this tagged-over jaguar by the same artist(s) . . .
. . . and this delicate plant, in a very different style.
And finally, not art, but a reminder of how long it had been since my last Red Hook run . . . and how fast the neighborhood is changing; I’m pretty sure this Potemkin building had four walls the last time I was on Coffey St.
It’s time – past time, honestly, but who among us isn’t mired in the deep lethargy of another pandemic winter? – for a look back at the last year in birds. It was a great year for them. Northern finches descended on Brooklyn in abundance, for reasons I won’t go into here, but which folks who study such things will cheerfully explain if you’re at all interested, or even if you aren’t. So, for reasons no one has been able to explain to me, did seagoing ducks. Plus the usual suspects, and a few breathtakingly unusual ones. Above all, with human time either frozen or stuck on repeat, the progress of the avian calendar – migration, courtship, babies, migration again – was reassuringly normal. It’s OK, the birds seemed to be saying. You’ll get through this.
Burros – along with their diminutive (at least in name) cousins, burritos – have always struck me as problematic. They’re invariably overstuffed, often grotesquely so. When they’re not dry, they’re drowning in goopy sauce and (horrors) cheese. Worst of all is the dreaded burrito fold, confronting the eater with double or triple or quadruple layers of gummy flour tortilla.
But Eric and I are in Tucson this week, and Tucson is the land of flour tortillas, where chimichangas were born and burros reign supreme. As the saying goes: when in Rome, do as the Sonorenses do.
It started with a quest to see a bird; it ended with a search for a different bird, and a takeout container of tacos on the F train.
But I’m getting ahead of the story. When I left the apartment early this morning, headed for the R train, I had visions of glory. That Sandhill Crane that’s been reported several times at the Dyker Beach Golf Course, always vanishing before others could lay eyes on it? I would find it. Maybe I’d even manage to document it with my handy iPhone camera.
Ha! You know who gets up even earlier than birders (or at least this birder)? Golfers, that’s who. By the time I had surfaced at 86th St and jogged west to the golf course, multiple foursomes were already well into their games. The idea that a freakishly large, long-legged bird would still be out there grazing in the short grass began to seem a bit farfetched.
Not another Brooklyn blog 