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.”

Bay Ridge Hummer May Be Toadfish

A new theory emerges in the continuing mystery of the Bay Ridge Hum — a spawning fish may cause it, the New York Sun reports:

HMMMM. This mysterious sound in the waters off Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, has baffled residents for months. A low pitched vibration known simply as the “Bay Ridge Hum” heard near the shore next to the Verrazano Bridge has left some locals not only scratching their heads in frustration but deprived of sleep, too.

While several hypotheses as to the cause — passing trains, treatment plants, even UFOs — have been floated, so to speak, one new hunch is that fish may cause it.

. . .

. . . In the early 1980s a mysterious humming noise kept residents of Sausalito, Calif., near the Golden Gate Bridge, hiding their heads under their pillows for sleepless nights during the summer.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a scientific investigation was begun, resulting in a search assisted by an acoustics consulting company. Hydrophonic recordings were taken and spectrum analysis eliminated machinery as the source of the humming.

Finally, in August 1985, fish biologists concluded the sound was coming from noisy humming male toadfish.

Could the toadfish also be humming in Bay Ridge? “It is possible that it could be this fish,” said a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, Andrew Bass. He said believes the sound could be coming from an east coast version of the underwater melody-maker called “Opsanus Tau,” the oyster toadfish.

The oyster toadfish has been described as “homely” for its large protruding eyes, broad mouth, and flesh-like whiskers surrounding a short snout. To attract a mate, it produces a vocalization — some call it a “foghorn” sound — to attract females during spawning.

Sausalito, Calif., and Bay Ridge are also both located near large bridges that some residents believe may further amplify the noise.

The toadfish’s spawning season extends from April to October, which corresponds to the time when residents in Bay Ridge have reported hearing the mysterious noise. The male locates a private nesting area often using old tin cans or decayed wood lying on the bay bottom and then calls out in his low, mournful “foghorn” to spawning females. A female swims into the nest and lays large, adhesive eggs upside-down in the nest, then swims away.

A few who have heard the so-called “Bay Ridge Hum” listened to a recording of the Oyster Toadfish prepared by Mr. Bass and said they believed it was the same noise.

Ms. [Concetta] Butera said, “Yes, I would say that this was the noise. I am hearing those fish. I am hearing thousands of them.”

Ms. [Anissa] Malloy listened to the recording and concurred, “I think the fish are making the noise.”

Ms. [Josephine] Beckmann said she also plans on notifying the DEP about the new theory. In the near future Mr. Bass plans on recording the sound himself and testing it for authenticity.

Parents, Hide Your Children — This Blob Has Absolutely No Socially Redeeming Value Whatsoever

You can thank our lack of Long Island Sound lobster to the sealife-devouring sea squirt, known simply as a “blob”:

A blob-like creature is invading Long Island Sound and posing a threat to its lobsters and other shellfish, University of Connecticut scientists say.

The researchers say they have found colonies of invasive sea squirts, blob-shaped animals that reproduce easily, on the floor of the Sound.

The scientists believe this variety of sea squirt, known as didemnum, arrived on the hulls of ships from Asia. They have no known predators.

“This thing has the potential for causing significant economic impact when it attaches to the floor of the Sound, where it blankets and suffocates shellfish and lobsters,” said Ivar Babb, director of the university’s Undersea Research Center at Avery Point in Groton.

The animals range in color from a creamy translucent pearl to olive or tan. In Japan, there are some red species.

“This thing is ugly,” Babb said. “It has no socially redeeming virtues.”

Bears, Moose And Harbor Seals, Oh My

Things you don’t want to hear include, bears and moose in urban areas constitute a “new definition” of “normal”:

And the great beasts came down from the mountains and crossed the seas and descended upon the cities — the hind and her fawn, leaping fences in the southeast Bronx; the black bear, stout but fleet of foot, stealing through the streets of Newark; the seals of the harbor sunning themselves by the score upon the hospital ruins of Staten Island.

And the coyote prowled the West Side and took up quarters in Central Park. And the dolphin beached itself on the Turuks’ sandy yard in Throgs Neck. And the she-moose, 21 hands high, strayed within 30 miles of the city gates.

And the wise men stroked their beards and scratched their heads, and they finally declared, “This is not normal.”

Bill Weber, a senior conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that the other day. He was talking about the bears that have lately taken to wandering New Jersey’s urban core.

But bears are just the beginning. In recent weeks, the three largest land mammals native to the Eastern United States, along with numerous runners-up, have visited New York City and its environs. A fair degree of chaos has ensued.

Big-city police officers idled by falling crime rates spend their days pursuing four-legged fugitives. The pit bulls and tomcats in the city pound in East Harlem have been forced to make room for white-tailed deer. This spring, the New York metropolitan area depicted on the evening news has come to resemble an episode of “Animal Precinct” filmed at a big-game preserve.

What in the world is going on?

There is no simple answer, the wise men say.

“You have this really neat pulse of things happening within a relatively short period,” Dr. Weber said from his office at the Bronx Zoo, “and as humans we like to make some sense of that and give some justification. But they all have their anomalous reasons.”

The factors include both environmental triumphs and travesties. Once-threatened species continue to recover because of conservation measures. Waterways are cleaner. Greenways are being built in and around cities. At the same time, development in the farthest exurbs chews up land and flushes animals from their usual homes. Mild winters, possibly man-made, are easier for many species to survive.

All of it adds up to a new definition of normal. (Or perhaps an old one. After all, the animals were here long before the people were.) Just as the suburbs have spent years negotiating conflicts with wild animals, it is now the cities’ turn.

“I think we’re just seeing the growing trend of population sizes with some of these animals, and the adaptation to survive and, or at least, venture into more progressively more urban areas,” said Gerry Barnhart, the wildlife director at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

“The Same Fish You’re Catching Off Jersey” Makes It Sound Appealing, But I’m Still Skeptical

Yes, you can fish in New York City:

You can pull in huge striped bass, bluefish, weakfish and fluke — the “Big Four” of the Northeast — everywhere from Great Kills on Staten Island to Jamaica Bay in Queens to just off the FDR in Manhattan. “A lot of people don’t know how good the fishing is,” says Gerry Bethge, executive editor at Salt Water Sportsman. “Some of them might be turned off by the idea of fishing in the East River, but it’s the same fish you’re catching off Jersey.”

Gone unaddressed in the piece is whether you can actually eat any of the fish . . .