Birds of Sunset Park: The party’s over … let’s go explore!

As I write this, it’s mid-May, spring migration is still in full swing, and last night almost one million birds flew over Brooklyn! But by the time many of you read it, it will be June and, with the exception of a few stragglers, the northbound songbirds will have left and migration will be over. It’s quite an adjustment, from the trees being full of birds and the air rich with song, to things being, well, pretty quiet.

For die-hard birders like me, spring means being out of the house by dawn many mornings in May, so June is the time to catch up on sleep and kick back for a bit. However, that doesn’t mean I stop birding … it just means the adventures have a different vibe.

In May, scores of species are passing through New York City, avidly feeding and singing before they head north. By June, the number of species in the five boroughs is much more limited, but those birds are not going anywhere, as they spend the summer months here raising young. When they have babies in the nest, some birds can be a little more secretive and silent than usual, so patience and keen eyes are real assets for summer birding.

When I first got hooked on birding five years ago, it was during those down days of summer, but I loved the slow pace of birding, the fact that I could haplessly look for, say, a singing Northern House Wren and eventually track it down deep in a thicket! I fell in love with birds through seeing Yellow Warblers and Gray Catbirds, Indigo Buntings and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, Cedar Waxwings and Song Sparrows as they continued their lineage within the city that never sleeps.

I saw those birds when I’d ride out to Pelham Bay Park up in the northeastern corner of the Bronx or, closer to home, Marine Park Salt Marsh Nature Center in South Brooklyn. It was at the start of the vaccine rollout in 2021, and I wanted to be outside, but not necessarily around people, so I went to remote places in nature where I didn’t need to worry about masking or social distancing. Once I was in those remote places in nature, I quickly discovered that looking at birds gave me a deep sense of peace I hadn’t even realized I was looking for.

At Marine Park, it was magical to see stunningly colored Ring-necked Pheasants furtively appearing for an instant before disappearing back into the brush, Eastern Warbling Vireos singing endlessly on their breeding grounds, Yellow-crowned Night Herons just feet away from me with Fiddler Crabs in their mouths, and Forster’s Terns enthusiastically plunge-diving for their next meal.

One of the many wonderful things about New York City is how many green spaces there are, and June is a great time to begin a period of summer exploration within the city. I love to seek out places that feel wild, but are just a subway and/or a bus ride away. In Brooklyn, in addition to Marine Park, that means places like Plumb Beach, Floyd Bennett Field or McGuire Fields, but pretty much all of the boroughs except Manhattan have an abundance of great woods, grassland, beaches, marshes and more to visit. The Bronx’s most obvious crown jewels are Pelham Bay Park and Van Cortlandt Park, Queens has Jamaica Bay and Alley Pond Park, and if you don’t mind buses or ferries, Staten Island has way more amazing natural spaces than anywhere else in the boroughs and is ripe for endless wilderness adventures!