Wild in Manhattan: It’s Spring
Wild squirrel chows down in Riverside Park
Spring is officially upon us… to welcome the season, My Upper West is happy to have guest blogger Melissa from Out Walking the Dog (encounters with NYC wildlife and not-so-wild life in Riverside Park) give us a taste of spring on the Upper West Side.
Green shoots push through the earth. Flowers open. Turtles bask on rocks in the ponds of Central Park. In Riverside Park and over at Saint John the Divine, red-tailed hawks are already nesting, while a pair of kestrels prepares a home in a building near Zabar’s. A sparrow gathers bits of string and fluff caught in a subway grating, and squirrels, their mouths full of leaves, scurry into dens hidden in the great retaining wall of Riverside Park.
After a snowy winter, nature is in motion. The birds and animals are getting the nurseries ready, painting Mother Goose borders on the walls, and buying rockers, cribs and changing tables. In a scant month or two, the parks will be full of babies. In short, it’s spring.
Four hundred years ago, Dutch settlers found “great quantities of hart and hinds, foxes in abundance, multitudes of wolves, wild cats, squirrels – black as pitch, and gray, also flying squirrels, beavers in great numbers, minks, otters, polecats, bears, and many kinds of fur-bearing animals, which I cannot name or think of.” They complained that “birds fill the woods so that men can scarcely go through them for the whistling, the noise and the chattering” and “tree frogs are so loud it is difficult for a man to make himself heard.”
Today it’s easy to forget that the wild still lives alongside us, even in the heart of our built-up, paved-over island. The city is no less a habitat than the forest or marsh, and some animals have figured out how to thrive here. Raccoons and gray squirrels have always lived here, while pigeons, starlings and Norway rats are European immigrants. Bald eagles and peregrine falcons are returning from near extinction. Coyotes, including the current Central Park resident, are would-be colonists from the Great Plains.
Spring insists that nature and the wild surround us. Take a walk in Riverside Park’s Forever Wild Bird Sanctuary or Central Park’s Ramble.
Forever wild dog poses at entrance to Riverside Park Bird Sanctuary
Listen! Here that? Look. Over there.
Keep your eyes open. This is New York, after all. You never know what you might encounter.
Lost world surfaces in Riverside Park
Filed under: Upper West Side, Upper West Side Blog No Comments »
Tags: Melissa Cooper, Out Walking the Dog
