Central Park

This past Sunday my bestest birding buddy Laura and I headed into New York City.

Given the traffic heading out we half expected 

to have the place to ourselves. We didn't.

The quintessential NYC bird, the Pigeon

After enjoying a dirty water hotdog (umm ... hotdogs) and finding apparently the only Dunkin Donuts (for iced coffee, it was hot!) in Manhattan (Starbucks dominated) we hopped on the subway and headed uptown.

The extremely rare Mourning Dove
(for "rare" read "common")

Our destination was the Mecca of urban birding. That oasis of (pseudo) wilderness in the center of the city that never sleeps: Central Park.

While the city never sleeps, the park does, closing at 1:00 am.

Turtle
(Not a Bird)

There we were, in the hunting grounds of Pale Male, looking for good birds.

"Excuse me, which building is Pale Male's nest on."

"Well, it's on the other side of the park."

"How do we get there?"

"Without getting lost you mean?"

We never did get there.

Lonely Mallard

But as you can see from the images we saw plenty of great birds as we wandered about. Our day list included canada goose, starling, rock dove, mourning dove, northern cardinal, house sparrow, catbird, mallard, and the bird of the day, a hunting great egret!

Great Egret

I heartily recommend a visit to this premier birding destination in NYC.

And if you want to see good birds, then you'll probably 
want to arrive a bit earlier then three in the afternoon. 
And you'll probably want to time your trip during migration, 
not a couple of weeks after.


You may find binoculars useful as well (I doubt they would have helped us).

:-)

But if a trip to NYC is not on your upcoming travel schedule, you can visit vicariously through Marie Winn's Red-Tails in Love and Central Park in the Dark.

Have fun!

Northern Cardinal

We surely did.