Bird Migration Up Close: Manhattan

For most people, the word “Manhattan” doesn’t conjure thoughts of bird migration or stopover habitat. But every spring and fall for the past 10 years, since I moved back there, I am reminded constantly that it’s a prime (and cool!) location to experience birds migrating. The passage that occurs here, by day and by night, can be spectacular!

One brief example: the third week of October in 2005. From our apartment on 63rd Street, I spent each morning scanning down the East River and across Queens as a stream of birds poured into Manhattan. The spectacle cannot be described simply by numbers. Tens of thousands of birds passed by in tens, fifties, hundreds, across from Long Island into Manhattan. Flocks of White-throated Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos intermingling with American Robins, Eastern Bluebirds, Red-winged Blackbirds, Purple Finches, American Goldfinches, interspersed with kinglets and nuthatches here and there; Rusty Blackbirds and a real surprise—a Red-headed Woodpecker! Yellow-rumped Warblers streamed past the United Nations and Trump Towers, with the occasional American Redstart, Palm Warbler, Common Yellowthroat. Northern Flickers everywhere! Even Brown Creepers.

Empire State Building
by Rob Jamieson

By late morning, every patch of trees found thousands of these birds stopping over, refueling, resting, taking shelter. On the lawn at Rockefeller University, I counted almost 500 Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned kinglets in a single, one-square-block area.

And this says nothing of the raptor and waterfowl passages that followed.

A nighttime visit to the Empire State Building is the right way to top off these migration days, not for sightseeing or a panorama of the city, but for the avian spectacle. All those migrants that filled the city parks lift off in a spectacular exodus and continue southward. Birds stream past the observation deck, occasionally circling the tower, occasionally fighting cross winds. Birders aren’t the only ones watching for them. Peregrine Falcons frequent the Empire State Building, taking advantage of lighting to grab nighttime snacks.

—Andrew Farnsworth, postdoctoral research associate, Conservation Science

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu