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9 U r b a n F l y w a y New York City is along the migratory corridor of Neotropical birds, and Central Park is one of their prime havens. From a birds-eye view, the park must appear like a green oasis in a concrete desert, drawing down thousands of birds to rest and feed before continuing on their long journeys during spring and fall migrations. They are accompanied by hordes of birders hoping for what is known as a “fallout” of warblers, especially in spring, when the birds are in their colorful breeding plumage. Conditions have to be just right: a stiff southwest wind carries birds north, and rain or low cloud cover pushes them down to the ground. During the first and second weeks of May, it’s possible for a dawn-to-dusk birder to see as many as twenty-five warbler species and a hundred bird species in a single day, mostly concentrated on the Point, a wooded spit of land that juts into Central Park’s Rowboat Lake.1 One Saturday morning in May 2002, I joined a group of birders from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden led by my husband, Joe Giunta, in search of spring migrants. The day started out drizzly, following days of rainy weather and southwest winds—a perfect setup for a fallout. We were not to be disappointed. We gathered beneath an overpass off West Seventy-second Street by Strawberry Fields, waiting for the rain to let up. As soon as it cleared, we headed for the Ramble. We were hardly the only group in the park. Hundreds of people were pouring in—tourists, bikers, joggers, walkers, and birders—all out to enjoy a lovely spring day. Sunlight sparkled on wet leaves and birds stirred to life. Their songs brightened the air and their colors flashed in the trees. A Canada warbler displayed his distinctive black necklace set against bright yellow plumage; a red and black American redstart opened and closed his tail like a Japanese fan; a Blackburnian warbler swelled his flame-orange throat as he sang; a yellow Wilson’s warbler donned his black cap; a blackand -white warbler crept along tree trunks and branches; a blue and gold northern parula flitted among the tree tops; a black-throated blue warbler sported his signature white “handkerchief”—and lucky for us that day, a gray and gold prothonotary warbler, a southern bird, made a rare regional appearance . What we could not see in the dense canopy, we heard: the “sweet, sweet, sweet” song of the yellow warbler; the ascending trill of the prairie warbler; the measured question-and-answer phrases of the red-eyed vireo; the rich, warbling notes of Baltimore orioles and scarlet tanagers. It was a feast for the eyes and a symphony for the ears, imprinted in our memories for life. Most of all, it was a rare privilege to witness the Neotropicals’ spring rites of passage, winging their way to their northern breeding grounds as they had every spring for millennia. When humans first entered our region around eleven thousand years ago as the last glacier retreated northward, they found an abundance of bird species common to forest, plains, and wetlands. Archaeological sites from the early Holocene (around ten thousand years ago) have unearthed bones of loon, grebe, heron, crane, rail, passenger pigeon, turkey, grouse, quail, and woodcock. Birds were hunted for food, their bones shaped into tools and flutes, and feathers worn as ornaments.2 Birds have always played an important role in the ritual and mythology of the American Indians. A great blue heron, for example, was found buried with an Iroquois woman at a prehistoric burial ground along the Genesee River near Avon in upstate New York. Archaeological sites in the Northeast have yielded polished, bird-shaped objects called birdstones, which may have been worn as ornaments or used as weights on hunting spears.3 One Iroquois myth relates the tale of a hunter who would kill a deer in order to lure an eagle to the kill, shoot it, and take its feathers. As retribution, the Mother of all Eagles seized the hunter and took him to her eyrie. When Mother Eagle left her nest to find food, the hunter managed to tie up the beaks of her eaglets with a leather thong. Upon seeing her eaglets’ predicament , and unable to free them herself, she made a pact with the hunter: she would free him if he would untie...

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