*The Great Cormorant Calls
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
Published: February 24, 2006
*
The handy water taxi service that laces the five boroughs is offering
wintry trips for bird watchers. Experts from New York City Audubon are
in the cockpit, looking for feathered sights among harbor flows and
bridge pilings. The trips summon visions of urban birders leaping aboard
with New York-minute metabolism: Take me to the horned grebe, driver,
and step on it.
Not so. Audubon watchers report that the water birders aren't impatient
at all. A score of birders aboard a water taxi enjoyed an urban rarity
the other day: a great cormorant preening along the Gowanus Canal.
As special as the cormorant was, the more exotic sightings, at least by
the standards of some cooped-up city dwellers, have been of harbor
seals. The curious, sweet-faced creatures poked up from the inky waters
as suddenly as a J train on the Williamsburg Bridge.
"The idea is to get people out of their apartments and see what's out
there," explains Yigal Gelb, N.Y.C. Audubon's program director. There's
a wide range of ecological trips newly arranged by the society
(www.nycaudubon.org) as cures for Gotham cabin fever, including trips to
eagle and owl territory up the Hudson and to the seal stopover haunts of
Sandy Hook, N.J.
The Audubon message is that New York may not be Alaska, but Big Apple
waters still support wildlife. Currently the city is a temperate oasis
for birds from the far north, a teeming place to dive for food and not
hit solid ice. The water birders relish the mergansers, brants and
bufflehead ducks that nest in shoreline trees, soar across the
skyscraper horizon and crash spectacularly into the waters, looking for
prey.
After N.Y.C. Audubon and the water taxis (www.nywatertaxi.com) teamed up
last year, all the summer outings quickly sold out. Small wonder: it's
hard to resist balmy sunset voyages, replete with wine, to the harbor
heron islands in sight of La Guardia Airport. In contrast, the wintry
90-minute trips, at $25 per adult, continental breakfast included,
attract smaller, hardier groups. There's room aboard on these cold
Saturdays. Be the first to spot the peregrine falcon swooping from his
nest on the Brooklyn Bridge. Or the first to linger inside the cabin for
another mug of hot chocolate until a duck version of Pale Male looms in
the headlines.
FRANCIS X. CLINES
--
Robert Gosford
M Phil Candidate
CRES
Australian National University
Email:
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Web: http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/ethnoornithology/
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