Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York

The Futures of New York

The Futures of New York Anne Matthews Taking New Jersey Transit from Princeton Junction to New York’s Penn Station means a fifty-eight-minute trek (off-peak, one way) through a profoundly disturbed landscape of chemical mudflats and industrial slurb. Yet crossing the Meadowlands one bleak February morning , I saw from my commuter-train window a dozen egrets, flying fast and low, an arrow of white headed straight for midtown. What are they doing here? I wondered, horrified, amazed. How do they live? Nature knew what I did not: that over thirty years of environmental cleanup have brought egret and bittern, glossy ibis and yellow-crowned night heron back to city waters. In the shallows of Jamaica Bay, on uninhabited islands in the waters off the Bronx and Queens, hundreds of wading birds now breed. To find these other New Yorkers, you may need to crawl ashore through great tangles of poison ivy, past rusted Chevys, then hold up a truck mirror to observe the secret rookeries—but they’re there, and flourishing. I had no idea. It was a figure-ground problem. For years, I had looked at Greater New York and seen only what I expected to see: a profoundly unnatural landscape; a competitive maze; a wonder of money and art that seemed a thrilling human triumph some days, and on others a declensionist disaster . New York City attracts jeremiads. Emerson called it a sucked orange. Fitzgerald pronounced its grimy suburban sprawl ‘‘the ugliest country in the world.’’ Vonnegut saw Manhattan as our skyscraper national park. Yet above, around, behind, below, I began to discover another city, suppressed and segregated during daylight, exceedingly lively from twilight PAGE 101 101 ................. 18313$ CH10 09-07-12 13:55:28 PS 102 Anne Matthews to dawn. And I began to wonder what the future might hold, for both New Yorks, since so many environments collide in the five boroughs— northern and southern climate zones overlapping, salt water mixing with fresh, land melting into ocean—and yet, of all U.S. cities, nature and culture here seem most spectacularly, insistently estranged. The key word here is seem. The city is strikingly wilder today than in 1900, or 1950, or even 1980. The Bronx has a healthy coyote population now, urban pioneers from Westchester. Porpoises play again in the Hudson . Wild turkeys are colonizing not only Riverside Park but Central Park; apparently they fly down Broadway late at night, then take a left at Lincoln Center. The blue crab and fiddler crab populations are up, way up, scuttling in their millions along the silty floor of a re-oyxgenating harbor and estuary. Deer have come back to upper Manhattan, making late-night forays along the Amtrak trestle. And black bear have been exploring the Palisades Parkway, and Chappaqua, and the dumpster behind the White Plains Bloomingdale’s. To the familiar calendar of New York events, from Opening Day to Marathon to Tree Lighting, we should, perhaps, add other mileposts. Like mid-April, when peregrine chicks hatch atop the Throgs Neck and Brooklyn bridges, joining the world’s largest urban falcon population. Or the full-moon nights of June, when thousands of horseshoe crabs come back from the Atlantic deeps to mate along the Brooklyn shore, as they have done since dinosaurs roamed New Jersey. August is, reliably, monarch time in the city, when clouds of butterflies commute to Mexico by way of Fifth Avenue; September , in this other New York, is moving season. Fifty-pound striped bass return to the Hudson from a summer in the Hamptons; urban rat packs migrate from Central Park to the Upper East Side. And even in December, you can sometimes stand on Wall Street in the small hours and hear birdsong, faint and high; migrating birds pass over the city nearly every night of the year. Wildlife biologists make it clear that the resurgence of nature in and around New York City is no anomaly. Clean air and clean water legislation from the Nixon administration on, intensified wildlife-restoration programs, and assorted hunting and fishing bans have all helped U.S. animal populations soar just as a matching development boom, over the last ten years especially, has brought an extreme expansion of the built environment: 80 percent of all structures in the U.S. today were built since 1950. Forcing Colorado condos deep into elk country, planting Los Angeles neighborhoods in traditional mountain-lion terrain, dropping New Jersey exurbs into deer lands, shoving Florida golf courses...