A New Appreciation For The Birds

Bird watching cruises in the East River start tomorrow, just in time for the oystercatcher orgy:

The Audubon Society of New York, in partnership with New York Water Taxi, took visitors on a tour of the islands yesterday to showcase the bustling wildlife on display just a short boat ride away from asphalt, concrete and steel towers of Manhattan. Cormorants, egrets, herons and American oystercatchers are just some of the species not usually spotted in New York that have congregated on the islands, which include North and South Brother Islands, between Rikers Island and the Bronx, and Mill Rock, just north of Gracie Mansion.

The tour passes the mouth of Newtown Creek, a gritty industrial area along the Brooklyn-Queens border where the Rockefellers built their first Standard Oil refineries in the late 19th century and where an oil spill in 1950 larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster polluted the soil and waterways in Greenpoint. For the past two decades the Audubon Society has been working to help clean the waters around New York and bring birds back to the area.

That effort has been so successful that the organization now operates scheduled boat tours for close-up views of wild birds that have become hugely popular with birdwatchers. Yesterday’s trip, from South Street Seaport, was a preview. The summer tours begin tomorrow.

“Look! Oystercatchers,” said Gabriel Willow, a tour guide who works as a teacher and naturalist at the Audubon Center in Prospect Park, almost breathless as he interrupted his story about the history of South Brother Island, where Babe Ruth used to practice his batting, to point out the small birds flying just above the tree line. “There’s three of them. It’s an oystercatcher orgy!”

The birds, related to sandpipers, are brown and black with red beaks, and, Mr. Willow said their presence is a sign that the local waterways are cleaner.

“If there are oystercatchers, there’s probably oysters, and if there are oysters, water quality is improving,” he said.

. . .

North Brother Island, where egret and heron nests are concentrated, was home to Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary, from 1907 to 1938. After World War II, the military built homes there for returning veterans.

One of those veterans wrote a short story that was turned into the screenplay for the classic Hitchcock film, “The Birds.”

“He apparently was freaked out about the birds on the island,” Mr. Willow said. “Now we have a whole new appreciation for the birds.”