Birds of Sunset Park: “Weird Duck Time” at Bush Terminal

Except for a lucky few, birding is a hobby rather than a job. As a result, birders are always looking to get the most out of their free time, to read the conditions on a given day and how they could help them see new or exciting birds. They look at migratory patterns and tidal movements, and analyze shifts in temperature, precipitation and wind direction. It’s nerdy stuff, but it pays off!

For a birder like myself who lives in Sunset Park, the park itself is my “patch,” the place I visit on an almost daily basis for much of the year. But the neighborhood has an even better birding hotspot, which in the winter is a potential goldmine for great birds: Bush Terminal Park. Especially in the winter months, when things are much quieter in a normally leafy park like Sunset Park (that suddenly has no leaves!), Bush really is the place to go.

One of the strengths of Bush Terminal Park is that, despite its modest size, it has a nice mix of habitats: a little bit of woodland, some scrub, a salt marsh and a few grassy areas. However, its main appeal to birds in winter is that it has water, plus secluded areas next to those bodies of water where they can congregate without disturbance. Between December and March, the combination of the two results in a glorious array of ducks, as well as geese, gulls, cormorants and a smattering of other water birds.

Right now, we’re in the midst of “weird duck time,” the period in the birding calendar when funky-looking ducks are abundant in New York City. Over the past few years, I have personally seen a whopping 24 different species of duck at Bush. Year-round, you’ll see “dabbling” ducks like Mallards and American Black Ducks, which favor shallow water and feed by simply sticking their head under water. However, the majority of the incoming duck species at Bush over the winter are diving ducks, such as Buffleheads, Red-breasted Mergansers and Lesser or Greater Scaup, which need deeper water and fully submerge themselves to go in search of food. Trying to get an accurate count of a large flock of diving ducks is always very challenging, as a significant number of them are always under the water. It’s like watching a waterfowl version of Whac-A-Mole, where some unseen presence is bopping the ducks, making them endlessly disappear and then resurface.

One of the pleasures of going to Bush Terminal Park is that on any given day, you might be surprised by what you see. Last January, I took part in the New York State Ornithological Association Waterfowl Count, logging numbers of ducks, geese and more at Bush. The temperatures were in the 20s, but a ferocious wind made it feel much colder. My eyes were streaming, my hands were shaking so much it was hard to hold my binoculars steady enough to identify or count birds with any confidence, and I had to keep my gloves on at all times to avoid losing sensation in my fingers. But the intense cold had also forced some birds to seek the warmer, more sheltered waters of New York Harbor, allowing me to see three species of duck I’d never seen at Bush before: Green-winged Teal, Long-tailed Duck and Surf Scoter. The moral of the story is that if a birder is foolish enough to go out in weather like that, odds on, they may very well be rewarded!