Dan Ackman - NYC Water Birds

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Birds Flock to These = New York Islands

By DAN= ACKMAN
July 13, 2006; Page D10=

New Yor= k

Floating between the Bronx and Rikers = Island, just north of Hell Gate, is an island = that was once home to Typhoid Mary and is now a world-class breeding ground for egrets and herons.

Harbor herons nesting on tiny North Brother Island -- and Sou= th Brother, too -- are not news to ecologists, but now regular folks can spot the creatures on eco-tours offered by New York City Audubon. The tours --= via what is normally a commuters' ferry -- highlight both the bird colonies t= hat cohabit the city and the cleansing of Gotham's w= aters. Audubon's goal is to introduce New Yorkers to the wildlife in their urban midst and to spur the return of more fish and fowl, all while telling the compelling stories of New York's lesser islands.

The city's waters are a surprisingly rich habitat. While wading birds -- glossy ibis, great and snowy egrets, black crowned night herons, double crested cormorants and others -- have been seen there since the mid-1970s, their numbers grew mightily in the 1980s and early 1990s. = By the summer of 2004, an Audubon survey counted 1,700 pairs of wading birds= in seven colonies throughout New York Harbor<= /st1:place>, mostly in now-uninhabited islands, like North and South Brother, which are just a football field away from prisons, sewage treatment plants and oil refineries.

The birds' presence attests to the abundance of marine l= ife around the islands, and to the fact that pollutants and bacteria are generally (though not unequivocally) on the decline. A 2004 report by the Hudson River Foundation states that during the past 30 years, since the passage of the Clean Water Act, most contaminants have decreased 10-fold. Levels of mercury, however, while also down dramatically, are still too high.

The birds sit atop the food chain, and their survival go= es hand in hand with the presence of shad, flounder, perch, eels, blue crab = and New York's sig= nature fish, the striped bass. With fresh water from the Hudson River combining = with salt water from the Atlantic, the harb= or is "like a Grand Central Station for fish," says Gabriel Willow, o= ne of the Audubon Society guides. Though Mr. Willow himself shies away from eating them, many anglers do. In recent years, even oysters, once a mains= tay of New York's economy, have returned, notes Yigal Gelb, pro= gram director of New York City Audubon.

Opened to the public last year, the group's Saturday-at-= sunset tours to the Brother islands start at the South Street Seaport. (The group hosts occasional tours to other points as well.) But even well before the= New York Water Taxi ferry edges into the mouth of Long Island Sound, the possibility of spectacular bird sightings exists. On the western towe= r of the Brooklyn Bridge is the nest of a pair of peregrine falcons. As this nest is one of 15 or 16 in the five boroughs -- with buildings and bridges doing the work normally done by cliffs -- the = city boasts the world's highest concentration of these speedy raptors, Mr. Wil= low says. A few miles uptown is tiny U Thant Isla= nd, just opposite the United Nations, home to a score of cormorants as well as gulls.

While the city is an archipelago, its residents have lon= g been cut off from the water by shipyards, industry and highways. The Audubon t= ours are a reintroduction to the city's watery parts, and offer a history of t= he obscure islands, many used over the years for quarantine hospitals and me= ntal wards.

Less than a quarter mile long, North Brother Island had an esp= ecially grisly history before it was left to the birds. Its first use was as a smallpox hospital, and eventually came to house victims of other infectio= us diseases. Its most famous resident was Typhoid Mary, a cook who was healt= hy enough, but who carried the disease and spread it to those she fed. (In 1= 904, about a decade before Mary arrived, the island was the place where the General Slocum tried to dock while it was burning; 1,000 died from flames= or by drowning, the greatest nautical disaster in U.S. history.)<= /p>

The city used the island briefly to house drug addicts, = but humans abandoned North Brother by the mid-1960s. Now the hospital buildin= gs are overgrown by ivy and obscured by trees, all to the benefit of the har= bor herons, as the herons, egrets and ibises are collectively known, gulls and the odd crow.

As much as the birds have prospered, "The story of = the egret is not a totally happy one," Mr. Gelb says. Since the mid-'90s, the birds' numbers have actually fallen, though the hope is that the decl= ine is cyclical. Meanwhile, the city and its environs continue to lose wetlan= ds. It may also be that the wading birds have come to the protected and uninhabited New York islands because they have lost habitats elsewhere.

For now, though, the harbor seems healthier for birds an= d men, who would do well to get on the water, binoculars ready, and spy the wild= life next door.

Mr. Ackman is a writer based in J= ersey City, N.J.