NYC Audubon Birdwatching Cruise to North and South Brother Islands

A New York City Audubon Sunset EcoCruise was a great opportunity to get a closer-than-usual look at North and South Brother Islands in the upper reaches of the East River. Located between The Bronx, Rikers Island, and Queens, both are now bird and wildlife sanctuaries under the jurisdiction of the Parks Department.

Setting out from South Street Seaport in a New York Water Taxi boat, we motored north, under the Brooklyn Bridge (pictured below), the Manhattan Bridge, and the Williamsburg Bridge.

We got a good look at the new high-rises in Long Island City, Queens. The Pepsi-Cola sign on the far left was just landmarked by the city after years of whining. It's right by Gantry Plaza State Park.

The first island we passed was tiny U Thant Island (officially Belmont Island), named after the former United Nations Secretary General. This artificial island made of landfill from an early subway tunnel is home this summer to gaggles of birds, mostly cormorants but also some great black-backed gulls.

The real excitement was in the air. According to our guide, New York City has 16 pairs of peregrine falcons, more than any other place in the world. When diving for prey, they're the fastest animal in the world. I think this is a family of them:

Also in the sky: the Roosevelt Island tram.

Mill Rock was a perch for lots more cormorants. We also saw two kinds of egrets: great egrets and snowy egrets. This, I think, is a great egret.

I lost track of all the species we saw – at least a dozen. They included fish crows, grackles, and ospreys.

I don't recall what our guide identified these as:

The sun was truly setting as we approached North and South Brother Islands.

North Brother Island is best known as the location of the old Riverside Hospital. Smallpox victims and others, most famously Typhoid Mary (who wasn't sick, just a carrier, but refused to believe it and behave appropriately), were quarantined on the island for many years. The buildings are now in ruins, the island off-limits to human visitors.

On one of the ruins, our guide was very excited to spot a previously unknown osprey nest.

The osprey family, two adults and a juvenile, were flying about very fast. This was the only shot I was able to get of one of them. A peregrine falcon was buzzing about, too, harassing the larger ospreys. Apparently birds of prey of different species don't really get along.

You can also find listings for the Audubon EcoCruises at the New York Water Taxi website. But since New York Water Taxi failed in its bid to run the new ferry service Mayor DiBlasio recently announced, the service's future in the city seems uncertain. Here's hoping it stays in business here and keeps making its boats available to Audubon – or failing that, that someone else steps in.

All photos © Jon Sobel, Critical Lens Media

Swinburne Island

While not parks per se, Swinburne Island and Hoffman Island, east of Staten Island's South Beach and west of Brooklyn's Sea Gate and Coney Island, are managed by the National Park Service, mainly for the benefit of birds. But in recent years the smaller of these two former quarantine islands has become an important home to New York City's newly thriving population of harbor seals. Last weekend New York City Audubon sponsored a Winter Eco-Cruise via New York Water Taxi to observe the seals at Swinburne.

It was a frigid February day with a freakish amount of ice floating in Buttermilk Channel and other parts of the harbor. I felt like I was on an ice-cutter in the Arctic. I don't know much about boats, so it was interesting (and gratifying) to see that New York Water Taxi's yellow boats were equipped to push through fields of floating ice.

The bitter-cold wind kept us in the boat's warm interior for much of the trip, and the spray on the windows often froze into a temporary glaze. Still we had plenty of opportunity to observe the many species of birds the Audubon guide pointed out – cormorants, merganser ducks, hawks, grebes, and brants to name just a few. And when we arrived at Swinburne the crowd of gulls was a sight to behold.

Though long since abandoned, some of the four-acre island's buildings had stood until Hurricane Sandy flattened them in 2012. Created out of landfill in the 1870s, the islands were used to quarantine immigrants with contagious diseases, and victims of the cholera epidemic of 1910-11. According to Untapped Cities, which has some warm-weather photos of the islands and more details on their history, "Swinburne Island housed a hospital dedicated to cholera and yellow fever cases, a crematory, and a mortuary. Here, patients were fumigated with sulfur, and those who passed away on the island went to either the mortuary or crematory, depending on the season as well as the preferences of their relatives or friends."

Hoffman Island was later used as a military training facility.

As for Swinburne Island's 21st-century seals, we saw not a one, though the guide did profess to spot a seal poking its head up from the water for a breath of air. It may be that the rocks of the island were too icy for the pinnipeds to get comfortable perches. Whatever the cause, our band of 40 or so hardy human souls saw no seals that shivery day.

Oil tanker near the Verrazano Bridge