That there are coyotes on Long Island now, where they haven’t been seen before (”Coyotes are firmly established throughout all New York counties except Long Island and New York City”), is freaky enough without seeing them within city limits:

Animal control officers set a trap at Rochdale Village after a coyote or similar creature was spotted prowling around a parking lot in the sprawling south Queens cooperative housing complex.

Bats, in the Bronx:

They began emerging from the darkest corners of Van Cortlandt Park a few weeks ago: dark, V-shaped, furry blurs, barely visible against the night sky. With a few effortless flaps of their wings, the creatures buzzed over Broadway at speeds faster than any local bird.

“What the heck was that?” David Moreno, 29, asked his girlfriend when he first saw the animals gliding high above the Parade Ground. Tracking their movements, he eventually realized what he was seeing. “Hon, I think those are bats. Could there be bats in the Bronx?”

The answer, city wildlife experts say, is yes. And now is the perfect time to glimpse the rarely seen, much mythologized creatures. Little brown bats — the most common type in the city — have been making daily flights above Broadway and the Van Cortlandt Mansion throughout July, freshly rested after a season of hibernation.

It’s not so much the fault of geese or even some turtles that will have their way with us but rather the worms, proving yet again that we need to stop the food chain in order to save ourselves:

Federal wildlife officials studying ways to prevent potentially fatal bird strikes, such as the one that forced a US Airways jet to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River in January, are focusing on mustard, which repels a favorite snack of birds — worms.

After it rains, earthworms crawl onto the runway at La Guardia and JFK airports, providing a smorgasbord for hungry birds, who can then get caught in plane engines, researchers said.

First birds, now turtles:

Port Authority workers rushed to the shell-covered runway about 8:30 a.m. and scooped up 78 diamondback terrapins that had left the waters of Jamaica Bay scouting a spot to breed, said Port Authority spokesman John Kelly.

Pilots from various airlines shared the news with stuck passengers who had to wait up to 90 minutes for their flights to take off so the turtles could land in a safe place.

Location Scout: JFK.

And now that Canadian Geese have attracted the attention of the Post editorial board, it’s a bad time to be one:

It’s time to kill the geese.

It’s especially time to kill those geese most likely to wreck another jet airliner, much as a gaggle of Canada geese seems to have brought down US Airways Flight 1549 Thursday.

This time, all 155 passengers and crew were lifted from the icy Hudson River — an extraordinarily exceptional outcome.

Next time? Who knows.

Canada geese are a serious threat to human life and property — not to mention a major pain to pedestrians, motorists and folks who just like to spread a picnic blanket in a park.

Obviously, the official cause of the crash won’t be declared for a while. But nobody doubts that it was what pilots call a “bird strike” — just as nobody doubts that the guilty birds were Canada geese.

That’s because Canada geese are everywhere — and they’re out of control.

. . .

Beyond airport vicinities, it’s even harder to tamper with geese (let alone kill them) — even as they coat parks and playgrounds everywhere in layers of disgusting goose poop.

This is unsightly, unsanitary — and totally unacceptable.

Something needs to be done.

No, seriously.

A civic-minded group starts the heavy lifting of eradicating vomitous female gingkos from the city:

Ten per cent of all trees in Manhattan are ginkgos, making it the borough’s third-most-common species. There is also the matter of its odor. Each fall, the mature female — as dioecious gymnosperms, ginkgos come in genders — produces ovules that, once fertilized, develop into bunches of seeds, each consisting of an inner kernel encased in a soft, fuzzy skin. The seeds look like green cherries and contain butyric acid, the smell of which has been variously described as “rancid butter,” “sour milk,” “sh*tberries,” and “dog crap.” The Anti-Ginkgo Tolerance Group put it this way, in a recent proposal:

We are here to solve the problem of the Ginkgo tree commonly known as vomit trees. . . . The Ginkgo tree is widely known by most people but not by name. Walking down the street on a beautiful October evening your moment of tranquility is rudely demolished by the smell of old cheese and vomit.

The members of the A.G.T.G. are few but spirited. The committee was formed in January, under the aegis of Teens Take the City, a Y.M.C.A. program designed to teach young people about local government, and one recent afternoon at the Grosvenor Neighborhood House, on the Upper West Side, its ranks numbered three: Tevin Perez, seventeen; Jackson Sansoucie, seventeen; and Daniel Maldonado, eighteen. The plan was to pass out pamphlets urging citizens to call 311 if they encountered the smelly seeds.

Perez, wearing a rumpled white button-down, khakis, and a puka-shell necklace, was the first to arrive. Seated at a table in a basement room with pocked blue walls, he and the group’s adviser, Stephen Lehtonen, said that, walking to a pizzeria one afternoon, the group had been inspired by a forty-foot ginkgo, on the front lawn of the nearby Frederick Douglass Houses, that particularly stunk. Perez likened its scent to “rotten eggs in a rare form.”

. . . after the resolution supporting a ban on the foie gras industry in New York state is being the keynote speaker at National Pigeon Day:

A group of pigeon-loving bird watchers wants New Yorkers to thank their feathered friends today for all the “charm” they drop on Gotham.

“National Pigeon Day” is set to be celebrated in Central Park this afternoon, with songs, prayers and speeches to honor this proud bird — not the “rats with wings” once decried by Woody Allen.

Organizers with the New York Bird Club insist that our feathered neighbors are completely misunderstood.

The pigeon proceedings get under wing 4 p.m. at Pilgrim Hill, near the park entrance at Fifth Avenue and East 72nd Street.

City Councilman Tony Avella (D-Queens) is set to be the event’s headline speaker, in a bid to strengthen his hold on the pigeon-loving electorate.

. . .

“The fact there is a National Pigeon Day shows pigeons have been of service to this country,” said Avella, and cited the pigeon’s roles in World Wars I and II as messengers.

“People have to remember that they are decent animals . . . and that they are part of the environment.”

. . .

“Pigeons give a city a wonderful flavor. They are part of the charm and they belong there,” organizers said.

“They are often a city child’s first contact with nature and an elderly person’s only friends.”

Annotation: Contrarianism is the defining feature of this decade, a scourge not easily abated, bring on the electrified subway trusses.

Because I assumed there was a small problem with the whole standing water thing:

The city is thinking outside the box — or, rather, inside the barrel — over water demand this summer.

A pilot program by the Department of Environmental Protection will hand out 250 rain barrels this month to Queens residents to collect storm water from rooftops for lawn-watering use.

The DEP estimates that up to 40 percent of some households’ summer water consumption goes to irrigation.

The barrels will be handed out in the lawn-heavy neighborhoods of Rosedale, St. Albans, New Hyde Park and Floral Park.

. . . but look on the bright side — maybe the noise will drown out that 3 a.m. car stereo, your upstairs neighbors’ reggaeton mixes or all those drunk bar patrons. And maybe a cottage industry of cicada white noise sleep aids will crop up, and we’ll never not have to hear their 100-decibel hum:

Cicadas are succumbing to the 17-year itch.

The last time the giant, but harmless, insects visited New York, David Dinkins was mayor and the subway fare was $1.15.

But after living six inches underground since 1991, millions are about to come to the surface across the Northeast: The males will sing their distinctive song, the females will swoon, and then they will mate and die.

Unlike some species of cicadas, which show up year after year, the periodic variety arrives in intervals of 13 or 17 years, numbers that have mystified entomologists for generations.

“When the Pilgrims came to the New World, they thought cicadas were a plague from God and mislabeled them locusts, even though they are only a distant relation,” said John Cooley, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut.

. . .

This particular brood stretches from Georgia to Massachusetts. Locally, they are concentrated on Long Island, although some might remain in Brooklyn and Queens. “Cicadas have survived millions of years, even through ice ages, so if they are moving toward extinction, that is a concern,” he said.

As temperatures reach the mid-60s, the cicadas prepare to rise to the surface and complete their development, growing to as long as two inches.

Known as the loudest insects in the world, the male’s song can exceed 100 decibels, louder than a subway train.
. . .

When the cicadas are silenced in a few weeks, this particular brood will not return until 2025, but cicada fans can take heart, another 17-year brood is due in 2010.

San Francisco has homeless people and New York gets bees:

Thousands of years of evolution and cultivation have led honeybees to seek certain qualities in a home — the ideal being something like a hollowed-out wooden tree limb.

A few hundred years of construction by humans in New York City, it turns out, have resulted in an abundance of structures that mimic the conditions bees like best — from the water towers that dot the rooftops to the cornices and overhangs that adorn the buildings.

And each year about this time, thousands of bees swarm to those sites in the city, setting up hives and causing a certain amount of apprehension among the people who spot them.

Many calls are made to the Police Department, and are directed to Officer Anthony Planakis, 46, a beekeeper in his free time and for the last 14 years the department’s in-house expert on the subject.

When Officer Planakis joined the department in 1994 he had to fill out a form listing his areas of interest and expertise, and he put beekeeping — a skill learned from his father — at the top of the list

“New York City provides endless places that make great hives,” he says.

On Tuesday, for the second time in two days, Officer Planakis was dispatched to an apartment building in the Bronx, on the corner of Crotona Avenue and 182nd Street, where a swarm of bees had congregated to build a hive.

On Monday, dressed in a protective suit and mask, he had sprayed sugar water to weigh down the bees clustered on a corner of the three-story brick building. He then brushed the queen bee and some 6,000 of her loyal protectors into a brown box and carted them off to his personal hives in Newtown, Conn.

. . .

The largest hive he was called to remove in New York was in a forested area off the Moshulu Parkway in the Bronx, where someone had been keeping bees illegally.

“There were 12 separate hives, each with at least 60,000 bees,” he said.

The keeper was never found.

Although raising bees in New York City has long been a violation of the city health code, the rooftops make an ideal place to keep honeybees and there is a thriving illegal bee scene.

The good news is you get a view from above right down the avenue. The bad news is you have to cut back all those damn trees:

Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit, said on Thursday that he is considering bringing the two-level buses back to Fifth Avenue.

Mr. Roberts said his interest was based on simple economics. Double-deckers can carry about as many people as the longer bus that the transit agency now uses, according to Joseph Smith, senior vice president for the agency’s bus operations. But they cost less to maintain because they lack the complicated connector and accordion apparatus that links the two portions of an articulated bus.

Those who rode the double-deckers in their heyday have fond memories.

“Back in the days when money was important, it was great to take a date out and you could have a nice ride up and a nice ride back on a summer evening,” said William J. Ronan, 95, who first rode the buses when he came to New York during his student days in the 1930s (three decades later, he became the first chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority).

“It was sort of a genteel way to travel and perfectly respectable,” he said. “Between that and the Staten Island Ferry you could have a wonderful date.”

Mr. Ronan said the seats in front on the upper deck were considered the best ones. “You tried to get up in the front seats, which were great because you had the view up the avenue,” he said.

. . .

Mr. Ronan tried to bring the double-decker buses back in 1976, when the transportation authority bought eight of them from a British company to be used in a pilot program. [Transit spokesman Charles F.] Seaton said the buses had mechanical problems and were off the road after about two years.

But there were other problems, including on the continuation of some Fifth Avenue routes where the buses travel along Riverside Drive.

“The problem then was all the trees along Riverside Drive had grown such that the branches were in the way of the bus,” said Robert A. Olmsted, who worked at the authority with Mr. Ronan. If the buses are brought back, he said, “they’d have to do some clearance runs and trim some trees, which may upset some people, too.”

It’s not the start of a joke. They swim:

Apparently, the deer population in Staten Island has been going up, and Friday, for the first time, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation will release its first ever count of deer in the borough.

And these clever creatures aren’t taking the ferry or Verrazano like the rest of us, they’re swimming over.

“We suspect that they they are swimming over from New Jersey, deer are strong swimmers and the Arthur Kill is a narrow body of water,” said Arturo Garcia-Costas, of the NYSDEC.

So at this rate, it will only take $545 million more to reach the lofty goal of 1 million new trees:

David Rockefeller and Mayor Michael Bloomberg — two of the city’s biggest philanthropists — spent yesterday afternoon in front of East Harlem’s Thomas Jefferson public housing complex, where they planted a rosebud tree. They hope it is just one of many.

Rockefeller gave $5 million to help fund the mayor’s initiative to plant 1 million trees as part of PlaNYC, his sustainability agenda for the city. Bloomberg matched Rockefeller’s gift with his own $5 million.

“We’re all in this together,” Bloomberg said. “We shouldn’t wait for others to do it.” Not only do the trees provide shade and clean the air, he said, they “also improve property values.”

The $10 million announced yesterday will cover the cost of 18,000 new trees, “nearly three-quarters of all the trees in Central Park,” Bloomberg said.

. . .

He expects to have 250,000 of the 1 million trees in the ground before he leaves office. But then what? The initiative is funded by charitable donations and has no legal mandate.

“They should plant jobs,” added Olga Bernabi, who works at the Jefferson Houses library. “I know a lot of people getting pink slips.”

Central Park has 26,000 trees in 840 acres (31 trees an acre). New York City (at 322 square miles) has 206,080 total acres — 1 million new trees means adding 4.8 trees to each acre of land in the city. A city block is 2.5 acres. That’s 12 new trees on each city block . . . in addition to the 592,130 street trees, which have stocked city streets to 73% capacity, with room for 220,000 more trees. So then there are 780,000 left to be accounted for . . . um, has anyone figured out where all the new trees will go? And don’t tell us that this will simply replace old trees because that’s just cooking the books . . .

How to change a lightbulb on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge:

. . . Two carry up a 50-pound red beacon light fixture, while the third distracts a peregrine falcon with a mean streak, lest it rip them all to pieces with its sharp talons.

By the way, all this requires sidestepping piles of pigeon heads, as the predatory falcons seem to have a habit of eating everything but.

. . .

The electricians usually make about 20 bulb-changing trips a year among the beacon lights, red “obstruction lights” on the cables and the bridge’s 340-plus decorative white “necklace lights.”

But burned-out bulbs have been a less-frequent occurrence these days, with the Verrazano the first MTA bridge to break in new ultra-efficient LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs.

With a life span of between five and 11 years, the new bulbs, which so far have replaced those in only the required red lights, already have decreased energy consumption by 90 percent, according to Maintenance Superintendent Charles Passarella.

With any luck, the new bulbs will mean fewer emergency trips to the top, and fewer dangerous run-ins with the falcon, which is particularly aggressive during mating season.

“Once they lay eggs around June, we can’t go up,” [MTA senior bridge and tunnel maintainer Kenny] Dybing said. “We don’t want to interfere with the process.”

Before the eggs hatch around early July, the male falcon is usually fairly well-mannered, but “the mother gets very protective,” Dybing said.

If a critical red light goes out during that window of time, the men go up with Chris Nadareski, a biologist and falcon expert from the city Department of Environmental Protection. Nadareski, who wears protective clothing, and is well-versed in falcon behavior, is able to distract the mother while the lights are changed, Dybing said.

“The same pair returns every year to breed,” Passarella said. The birds are banded so biologists can track their movements. Babies hatched on the Verrazano have been found far up the Hudson River.

Location Scout: Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

The Newtown Creek Nature Walk really will open at the end of the month:

It doesn’t look like much, but come next weekend, Greenpoint residents will be able to walk past a geologic marvel, down a concrete path, through a shiny metal gate and up some steps to find themselves at the very first greenway on Newtown Creek.

Years in the making, the nature walk was one of the community benefits that the Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee (NCMC), a group comprised of local residents that meets regularly with the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), was able to negotiate as part of the massive Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant expansion and upgrade.

Visitors will enter the park at the end of Paidge Avenue near the intersection of Provost Street. In addition to being an oasis on a creek that has for decades been an ecological whipping boy, the nature walk will also feature many activities for children that will teach them about the creek.

Staten Islanders worry about what everyone would think if they had to put up deer crossing warning signs, but it’s getting harder and harder to ignore:

Yesterday, cops were called to Bulls Head to subdue a frisky deer that had ventured in a backyard on Carreau Avenue, near Signs Road, at about 9:40 a.m.

Eight police officers, including a team of Emergency Service Unit (ESU) cops, tried to corral the deer, but for 20 minutes, the animal proved elusive, according to Advance photographer Hilton Flores, who captured the episode.

. . .

It’s believed that a herd of at least 40 lives in the vicinity of Clay Pit Ponds State Park.

In October 2004, a car smacked into a deer in Travis, killing it — the latest in a series of antler adventures on the borough’s West Shore.

That episode came six months after city officials passed the buck on a controversial traffic issue.

In April 2003, the city Department of Transportation chose not to erect “Deer Crossing” signs — despite increasing evidence a herd of does and bucks occasionally frolics around the Island.

Last January, the DOT said it might reconsider posting such signs on the West and South shores, where the animals have been most frequently seen and where a number of crashes have occurred.

The South Shore’s Community Board 3 advisory panel has also requested the signs. But the city determined the “confirmed sightings are isolated occurrences” and found no pattern of deer crossing Staten Island roads.

At the time, a city DOT spokesman said the agency checked with the state Department of Environmental Conservation and confirmed deer sightings along Arthur Kill Road, Richmond Avenue and the West Shore Expressway. But since the reports covered a wide geographic zone, signs were deemed “inappropriate.”

Over the years, witnesses have sworn they’ve watched deer swim to Staten Island across the Arthur Kill from New Jersey. Some naturalists have estimated that Staten Island is home to as many as 40 deer.

Authorities confirm that in three separate incidents yesterday, dumb old nature had to had its ass saved by man:

The collaring of a lamb that likely escaped from a Bronx slaughterhouse was one of the wildlife rescues undertaken by city agencies yesterday.

The female lamb was spotted strolling along 133rd Street in an industrial section of the South Bronx at about 11 a.m., police said.

An employee of a local moving company, Julio Rivera, said he cornered the lamb, which his colleagues nicknamed “Kimon” — after their boss — in a parking lot adjacent to the moving company. The lamb had tags attached to its neck and ears.

“She was marked for death,” Mr. Rivera said.

The lamb was rescued by police and handed over to the city’s Center for Animal Care and Control, which has already found it a home with an animal protection agency, Farm Sanctuary, a spokesman for the center, Elizabeth Keller, said. Employees there renamed the lamb “Lucky Lady,” Ms. Keller said.

. . .

In Manhattan, a falcon and a hawk were rescued in separate incidents, police said.

Park rangers at about 10 a.m. rescued a baby hawk that had been nesting on a building on West 55th Street, authorities said.

. . .

About an hour later, a local business owner came to the rescue of an injured falcon on Third Avenue, authorities said.

At about 11:20 a.m., a crowd of about 20 people gathered around the fallen falcon, which likely had collided with an HSBC Bank building, the owner of Baranzelli Silk Surplus, Ward Bitter, said. Concerned about the bird’s safety, Mr. Bitter said he brought the falcon into his store, wrapped it in soft cotton fabrics, and placed it in a box.

*Like many, we find it impossible to understand the behavior of animals without anthropomorphizing them.

But as for those pigeons and black birds, good riddance:

Four female Peregrine Falcon chicks have been found atop the Queens tower of the Throgs Neck Bridge, transit officials said yesterday.

Hatched about three weeks ago, the newborns are already feasting on pigeons, black birds, and blue jays about five times a day. Their talons have grown to nearly the size of a grown man’s hand.

An official with the Department of Environmental Protection yesterday climbed the 360-foot tower to tag the chicks.

Peregrine falcons, which are on the endangered list in New York, have made a comeback in recent years. About 32 now live in the city.

The falcons mimic their natural habitat of high cliffs by nesting atop bridges, church steeples, and high-rise buildings, wildlife experts said. The last falcons born on the Throgs Neck bridge hatched in the 1980s.

Location Scout: Throgs Neck Bridge.

Fuckin’ A, beavers are back! And at $15 million, Representative José E. Serrano gets naming rights:

A crudely fashioned lodge perched along the snow-covered banks of the Bronx River — no more than a mound of twigs and mud strewn together in the shadow of the Bronx Zoo — sits steps away from an empty parking lot and a busy intersection.

Scientists say that the discovery of this cone-shaped dwelling signifies something remarkable: For the first time in two centuries, the North American beaver, forced out of town by agricultural development and overeager fur traders, has returned to New York City.

The discovery of a beaver setting up camp in the Bronx is a testament to both the animal’s versatility and to an increasingly healthy Bronx River.

A few years ago the river was a dumping ground for abandoned cars and rubber tires, but it has been brought back to life recently through a big cleanup effort.

The biologists who discovered the beaver say they have nicknamed it José, after United States Representative José E. Serrano of the Bronx, who has directed $15 million in federal funds toward the river’s rebirth.

In an interview, Mr. Serrano said he had always envisioned the river getting cleaner, “but I don’t know to what extent I imagined things living in it again.”

A number of people reported seeing the beaver last fall, but biologists figured that the sightings were much more likely to have been of muskrats, which are somewhat common in the area.

But the biologists were intrigued enough to investigate, and after trudging the riverbanks, they spotted gnawed tree stumps and the 12-foot-wide lodge — evidence that pointed to beavers, which are rarely seen in the wild because they tend to work at night and avoid people.

Then on Wednesday, the biologists were able to videotape the animal on film, swimming up the river looking for more material to insulate its home. The animal is several feet long, two or three years old, and appeared to be a male in search of a mate, said one of the biologists, Patrick Thomas, the curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo, which is run by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The latest best guess about the Big Stink is completely unsatisfying:

Based on our familiarity with the local aquatic environment and regional meteorology, we believe that the odor was caused by gases released from saltwater marshes in the metropolitan area.

Let us explain. The intertidal sediments in this region are home to micro-organisms that produce sulfur compounds. When these sediments interact with saltwater that contains low levels of oxygen, gases are released. These gases include hydrogen sulfide and a variety of thiols (like the gas additives thiophane and mercaptan) — all of which have an odor similar to rotten eggs.

While the release of these gases from marsh sediments occurs more or less continually, we suggest that something out of the ordinary occurred on Jan. 8.

First, there was a low tide in the coastal marshes from roughly 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. Second, we experienced winds from the south and an atmospheric inversion, which created something like a low-lying bubble of air.

The result of the two factors? The low tide exposed the marsh sediments and hastened the release of sulfur gases into the atmosphere. The inversion trapped the odor close to the ground and the southerly winds then carried it to Lower Manhattan, where it remained until atmospheric conditions changed.

The borough of parks becomes the borough of wild game:

Wanna-be hunters have been spotted bringing rifles, guns and bows into Clay Pit Ponds State Park Preserve to hunt — illegally — for the deer that have in recent years established themselves in the Charleston park and elsewhere on the South and West shores.

“It’s chaotic,” said Cherryl Mitchell, who owns the Richer Farms horse stable on Sharrotts Road. Mrs. Mitchell said she has witnessed several people “trotting through the woods” with hunting equipment and lights and fears that one of her horses, or neighbors, will be shot by accident.

“They all think they’re great white hunters. You’re going to have one of these [expletive] put a bullet through one of our houses.”

Hunting is illegal within the five boroughs. Anyone caught by state Department of Environmental Conservation police faces a $2,000 fine and/or up to one year in jail, said DEC spokeswoman Lori O’Connell.

. . .

The recent surge in Staten Island’s deer population has some Staten Islanders, fascinated with the sport, opting to stay local.

Mrs. Mitchell is not amused.

Besides the danger to neighbors, she said, the borough should not be considered a hunting attraction.

“The point is, if you’re a hunter, what’s your great accomplishment hunting on Staten Island?” she said.

“Invasive clam species” just sounds terrifying:

An invasive clam species has been discovered near Brook’s Pond in Clove Lakes Park — the first documented spotting of the small Asian shellfish within the five boroughs.

About 40 golden-colored Corbicula fluminea — which eat the same plankton as native clams, small fish and baby turtles, potentially threatening their food supply — were found last month by College of Staten Island biology professor Dr. Albert Burchsted.

Because each clam is capable of breeding up to 400 clams per day when the water is warm, the population could quickly swell into the thousands this summer, he said.

“These clams suck all the nutritive organisms out of the water column,” Burchsted said, adding that it’s only a matter of time before the “explosive” breeders take over the pond — and likely show up in other ponds and lakes on Staten Island.

Burchsted said the clams — which according to the American Museum of Natural History has until now been found in this region only on Long Island, upstate and in the Raritan River in New Jersey — were likely transported here as they stuck to the feet of birds which had been to the bodies of water where the clams breed. They also could have been used as bait by fishermen, who disposed of them in the pond.

Varying from dime-size to the size of a silver dollar, the Asian clams were introduced into the Columbia River, near Knappton, Wash., in 1938, possibly as a food item, according to Museum of Natural History records. (The clams are commonly used as food in some Asian cultures). The Asian clam, which can now be found in nearly 40 states, likely reached New York state sometime before 1997, according to the museum.

. . .

The Parks Department is aware that the clam exists in Brook’s Pond; however, there are no plans to attempt to remove them. Eradicating the clam would involve dredging every square inch of silt in the pond, which would be impossible, Burchsted said.

But “wildlife” is obviously in the eye of the beholder:

David Casciello, 39, who has lived on Huntington Ave. in Schuylerville his whole life, has turned his narrow yard into an outdoor aviary, filling feeders that attract hundreds of pigeons, sparrows, finches and even monk parakeets.

“I’ve always had a life-long interest in wildlife and in birds,” Casciello, who cares for his elderly parents full-time, said as he tossed a peanut to a squirrel scurrying at his feet. “The sparrows are my favorite.”

But some neighbors see Casciello’s passion as a major nuisance and health hazard, and they are trying to enlist city officials to stop the feeding frenzy.

“This wacko is a pigeon freak,” grumbled Joe McDermott, 68. “He’s got to be told to take the pigeons to the park or someplace where they don’t do damage to anybody.”

McDermott said he had to close his swimming pool because of bird droppings. He blames his dog’s fleas on the birds.

Other neighbors say the avian visitors make their children sick. They also have to spend hours cleaning bird droppings off their cars and roofs.

Other neighbors seem to have an ulterior motive:

“You could probably eat these birds, that’s how clean they are,” said Alan Roman, 35, a general contractor. “It was sad to see these people gang up on him the way they are. The guy, all he does is care for his birds and make sure everything is clean.”

Poachers are stealing Brooklyn’s wild parrots:

Who is bird-napping Brooklyn’s wild monk parrots?

The many who dislike the colorful birds might not care — but Max Ovadia of Midwood does.

Ovadia believes parrot poachers have been loose in the Brooklyn wild late at night.

“We heard them squawking,” he said. “At night, that’s not normal.”

Around midnight one day last month, Ovadia said, he saw a man with a huge net on a 25-foot pole. Accompanied by two teenagers, the suspected poacher even had pole extensions to reach high nests, he said.

The trapping of wild animals, including monk parrots, is illegal without a license.

Ovadia said he scared off the poachers twice, but the nests the parrots called home are now empty. “Only sparrows are going in there,” he said.

. . .

The story of Brooklyn’s monk parrots has come full circle. Native to South America, the first birds were trapped to be brought north as pets.

But many of the original birds were either let loose by pet owners who no longer wanted them or, as legend has it, escaped from a broken container at Kennedy airport in the 1970s.

Large colonies of the birds now live on the walled Brooklyn College campus and Green-Wood Cemetery, where they are protected.

Not all borough residents are thrilled. Homeowners have complained the birds are loud and dirty.

The one-time official flower of the Bronx blooms in Brooklyn:

A bizarre, stomach-churning and, for some, unprecedented display is not the scene of a sensational crime, but far from it. The long, hot room at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, usually occupied by a stately bonsai museum, has been cleaned out for the macabre main event, a rare blooming of the Amorphophallus titanum.

The species last bloomed in New York in 1939 in the Bronx. The botanic garden has kept one behind closed doors for 10 years, until now, as the plant completes a remarkable growth spurt of seven inches a day and prepares to flower and unleash its pollen as early as tomorrow. And then the reason will become clear for its grim nickname: the corpse flower.

“People will say, ‘Do you have a dead animal in here?’” said Patrick J. Cullina, vice president of horticulture and facilities at the botanic garden, who has worked with similar plants of different species. The literature posted beside the harmless-looking plant describes what to expect, the “revolting smell of putrefying meat.”

There is no smell yet. A trickle of visitors gazed up yesterday at the cream-colored, rigid spathe, the fast-growing spike that has taken over the plant, resembling a giant squash and now bigger than a man’s leg. Days ago, it burst horror-movie style through the green leaves that wrapped it. More visitors are expected as the bloom approaches, and the flower’s progress, but not its smell, can be tracked from the garden’s Web site, www.bbg.org.

In 1937 and again in 1939, thousands turned out to watch bloomings in the Bronx. According to The New York Times, the odor “almost downed” newspaper reporters, and was described by an assistant curator at the botanical garden there as “a cross between ammonia fumes and hydrogen sulphide, suggestive of spoiled meat or rotting fish.” It became the official flower of the Bronx, until 2000, and it seems the bizarre specimen — why the heck does a flower smell like bad meat? — can still draw a crowd. More than 10,000 people visited a blooming corpse flower at the University of Connecticut in Storrs in 2004.

The flower was first discovered in Sumatra, its native terrain, in 1878 by Odoardo Beccari. It was an immediate sensation. An English artist assigned to illustrate the plant is said to have become ill from the odor, and governesses forbade young women from gazing upon its indelicate form. (Its formal name ends in “phallus” for good reason.)

Mermaids are to manatees as manatees are to fat logs:

Tom Earle and his son David have not seen it, but they have already named it — Tappie, for its choice of the Tappan Zee section of the Hudson River as a vacation destination.

John Vargo has not seen it, either, but he insists it “has found heaven” in the brackish, fertile section where the Croton River’s fresh water empties into the salty Hudson. Randy Shull, 37, from Ossining, says he swam with it last weekend but just missed taking a picture of it. And the Buck twins, Larry and Don, say they saw a large marine mammal break the surface of the river near the Croton Yacht Club, but was it really a manatee?

Well, was it?

. . .

Ian Heller, 15, and Jeff Samalot, 16, said they saw the manatee while in their 17-foot power boat heading from Haverstraw to the Shattemuc Yacht Club in Ossining, where they teach sailing.

“We were just off Croton Point and we saw what looked like a fat log in front of us, but then it rolled and swam away,” Ian said. “I’ve never seen a log do that.”

“It was too big to be a seal, and we kind of dismissed it until we heard later that there’s a manatee around,” Jeff added.

. . .

At the Croton Yacht Club a week ago Sunday, Joe Consula, 49, and the Buck twins, Larry and Don, 59, saw some kind of large mammal break the glassy surface of the river about 20 feet from shore and then submerge and continue quickly upriver. They don’t agree on what it was.

“I just don’t think it could be a manatee. If anything, I’d say it was a seal,” Larry Buck said.

“Well, it was blackish, grayish brown,” Mr. Consula countered. “It was too big to be a seal.”

“Well, it had to be,” Larry Buck said.

“Nah, I saw its face and it’s much bigger than that. I’m going with manatee,” Mr. Consula said.

“Well, I’m going with seal,” Larry Buck said. “Manatee’s too far-fetched for me.”

“Did I see it too, Larry?” asked Don Buck, who says he recently began losing his short-term memory.

“You did, Don, trust me,” his brother assured.

Don’t tell me there’s a manatee in the Hudson now:

Added to the chronicles of great beasts that have descended upon New York City in the year 2006 is one that is arguably the greatest of them all. A beast, upwards of 1,000 pounds and a cousin to the elephant, which dwarfs the coyote, the deer and the dolphin that preceded it. A beast that, at hundreds of miles north of its natural habitat, has most likely made the longest and most arduous journey among them. A beast, with a pudgy-nosed face and a sweet-potato-shaped body, that could even be considered cute: a manatee.

Over the past week, boaters and bloggers have been energetically tracking a manatee in its lumbering expedition along the Atlantic Coast and up the Hudson River.

John H. Vargo, the publisher of Boating on the Hudson magazine, put out an alert last week, much to the incredulity of some boaters.

“Some were laughing about it, because it couldn’t possibly be true,” Mr. Vargo said.

The manatee has been spotted at 23rd Street near Chelsea Piers, West 125th Street, and later in Westchester County. It appeared to be healthy.

Randy Shull, a boater from Ossining, spotted the manatee about 4:30 p.m. yesterday while his 21-foot boat was floating at Kingsland Point Park in Sleepy Hollow.

“It was gigantic,” Mr. Shull said. “When we saw it surface, its back was just mammoth.”

It is unusual, but not unprecedented for manatees to travel this far north — the seaweed-munching sea creatures are commonly associated with the warm waters of Florida.

Manatees have been reported along the shores of Long Island and even as far north as Rhode Island. It is unusual, however, for a manatee to be spotted inland in a river this far north.

A year after the superpredator snakehead fish was found in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the problem fish is still not entirely under control:

The “frankenfish” lives.

That’s the verdict of state wildlife officials, who continue to catch the northern snakehead — popularly known as “the frankenfish” for its voracious appetite, razor sharp teeth and ability to live out of water for hours — in Willow and Meadow lakes in Flushing Meadows Park.

A Queens College professor first spotted the alien invaders more than a year ago. After hunting the fish with weighted nets, trawling the waters with a boat fitted with small electric shockers and even flooding the lakes with seawater, state biologists have yet to eliminate the hardy predators.

Only last week, Jim Gilmore, natural resources supervisor with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, pulled three more out of the two lakes. He was quick to put the catch in perspective. “We’ve found quite a few animals, but we’ve yet to find any juveniles,” Gilmore said. “You’re not seeing hundreds of them.”

The snakehead is an invasive species that is illegal to import or release into the wild. Biologists suspect it was introduced into Willow and Meadow lakes as part of a Buddhist ritual, or in the hopes of stocking the lakes with the fish, a delicacy in Asian countries. The northern snakehead can grow up to 3 feet long, has a sleek, torpedo shaped body and mottled, snake like scales.

Having pledged to eradicate the snakeheads after their discovery last summer, the Parks Department and the Department of Environmental Conservation have been unable to wipe out the tenacious fish, but are hesitant to take more extreme measures.

“A drastic solution would be poisoning both lakes. That would be a severe thing, and we’re hopefully not going to do that,” Gilmore said.

The danger of the snakehead is its status as an “apex,” or top, predator. Once it secures a position in an ecosystem and begins reproducing, it can quickly take over the top of the food chain, breed prodigiously and eventually wipe out weaker native species.

According to Gilmore, the good news is that the failure to catch any juveniles suggest that the snakeheads are not breeding successfully. “I was more concerned last summer,” he added. “I don’t think they’re taking the lake over. I think we’re eventually going to get rid of them.”

Location scout: Meadow Lake.

Lola and Pale Male, feeling the heat from the Zahns, have relocated to the West Side. Just one bit of advice — repeat after me, “I love the hawks! I love the hawks!”:

The city’s most famous red-tail hawks, Pale Male and his main chick, Lola, have apparently left their upper East Side roost for a fancy new perch atop the Beresford on the upper West Side.

“I love the hawks!” Seinfeld told the Daily News yesterday as he left his Beresford co-op and got into his silver Mercedes-Benz M350. “I can’t get enough of the hawks.”

Pale Male and Lola could be seen yesterday flying to and from their new address overlooking Central Park in the 22-story building’s rococo southeast tower. One of the birds appeared to have twigs in its beak, leading observers to believe they are building a nest.

Actress Glenn Close, who lives in the tony building on Central Park West, was surprised to learn of her new neighbors upstairs.

“What hawks?” Close asked The [Daily] News. “I love hawks.”