Birding in the Park

So here we are, back in business, after our trip to New York, of which more later.  Here, first of all, is the latest of my 'Nature Notes' columns, which derives from that visit :-

Parks are often good places to watch birds;  they are leafy oases in urban areas, and often there’s a good range of plant species and therefore food supplies, kind human beings who deliberately or accidentally feed the birds, and who of course also persuade the birds to be a little less timid than they might be in other places.

But Central Park, New York is an urban park on a different scale.  It’s vast!  And although it’s very full of people (in the early morning it’s like a sort of M25 for joggers), it’s also full of interesting habitats and varied wildlife.  Some of New York’s birds are very familiar, partly because we introduced them - Central Park has more than its share of house sparrows and starlings - while other birds like ravens and herring gulls just happen to be American as well as British.

But of course when you’re a new British arrival armed with field glasses everything is interesting!  A local birdwatcher identified a Wilson’s Warbler for us - a migrant species not all that common in New York, being a western American species; but we were just as interested in birds like Grackles, Robins (the American Robin is actually much more closely related to our Blackbird) and Blue Jays, which he probably never even noticed any more, since they’re so common.  There were a number of quite interesting warblers, and they seemed to be what the local birders were concentrating on most.

I’m sure that most of the birds we saw were common enough - Mockingbirds, Black-and-White Warblers, House Wrens, Mourning Doves, Chickadees - but they were all pretty special to us.  We saw other creatures too - some splendid butterflies, including that master migrant of the butterfly world, the Monarch, dragonflies, grasshoppers;  both grey and black squirrels, terrapins (there are several large pools) and, a couple of times, rats (well, they are everywhere, aren’t they?).

Two rather good sightings I had in the park were of a Red-Tailed Hawk (actually a close relative of our Buzzard and therefore a pretty big bird), which sailed across a clearing in front of me to escape a mobbing party of Blue Jays, to perch hardly more than twelve feet away from where I was standing;  and a splendid woodpecker which again crossed close in front of me to land on the trunk of a nearby mature tree.  I’m pretty sure this was a bird called the Northern Flicker.  I watched several flycatchers without being sure of the species, but I must mention the lovely bright red Cardinal that Ann and I both saw . . . “a common back-yard species” my book says - well, I wish we had them here.

Elsewhere we saw egrets, cormorants, a variety of hawks, vultures, various small sparrows and finches;  but two other delightful sightings to mention before closing were three Mockingbirds playing on the illuminated letters above the main doors of our hotel in Alexandria, Virginia;  and, best of all, the pair of Bald Eagles we glimpsed from our coach between Baltimore and Washington.  “Not many people see them,” commented Larry, our guide, who knew about them, when we told him later - and we felt pretty good.