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

Stuyvesant Oval and a Cormorant at Stuyvesant Cove

With apologies to the good people of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village on Manhattan's East Side, I here present to all and sundry your great pastoral oval. Your historic apartment complexes are on private grounds, I know. But since anyone can walk through any day, Stuyvesant Oval is fair game.

It would hardly be fair to keep one of New York City's finest fountains behind locked gates, anyway.

Seems whenever I get a good action shot in a city park, there's always a trash can photobombing me. The old lady in the first photo above, sitting peacefully reading a magazine, is undisturbed. But the guy below – well, I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about it. Good catch.

You call it an Oval. I call it a Park.

On the same walk we visited Stuyvesant Cove along the East River. I covered the Cove here back in 2010. How the years fly! But so do the birds. Ever since I saw a cormorant fishing that day off Stuyvesant Cove I always associate the Cove with those graceful black hunters. And on this day we had the extra treat of seeing one drying his or her wings.

There was plenty of East River seaplane activity too. Here's one just come in for a landing.

And then, I presume, back to the Hamptons with a new load of weekenders.

Springfield Park

If you've ever flown into or out of JFK International, you may have noticed green and watery areas right by the airport. I sure have. But I never knew what they were.

Our recent excursion to the eastern edge of southern Queens turned up not only a number of parks and natural areas but a really surprising variety of wildlife. Springfield Park was the first one we visited.

Along with play areas and sports facilities, the park has a big area surrounding a large pond, called, as I learned from Forgotten-NY, Cornell's Pond.

Cormorants are fairly common in New York City waters, but I still get a kick out of the way they dive underneath, swim a considerable way hunting prey, and resurface some distance away.

A different kind of bird flew overhead, one every few minutes, taking off from Kennedy Airport.

Back in the pond, a turtle perched. Or a tortoise. Anyway, somebody with a hard shell on his or her back.

Off the pond runs the only remaining surface stretch of Thurston Creek, where a man who was walking his dog told us he sometimes sees crabs.

Crabs we didn't see. Fish, yes. Is this prey too small to interest the cormorant?

After circumnavigating the pond we took one more look around and then headed for nearby Brookville Park – and some much more unexpected wildlife sightings. But we, along with probably many of locals, were glad to read that a 1970 proposal to convert Springfield Park into an industrial complex was nixed.