SMRA

A thrill like this happens only once on a walk, even if you’re lucky. So I was surprised to feel a similar exhilaration an hour or so later, as I prepared to leave the park.

This time, though, my feelings had nothing to do with birds. While I hadn’t been paying attention, the parking lot had filled with cars and vans. People were carrying foil-wrapped trays, plastic containers, and coolers to the picnic tables and barbecue grills that dot a big riverside field.

I knew that the rest of the day there would be filled with feasts whose enticing aromas would drift across the park. Hot dogs and burgers, of course, but also food from nearly every culture I could imagine. (I get hungry just thinking about it.)

On this day, the parking lot was also a staging area for some kind of Labor Day celebration. It was filled with young people dressed in snappy yellow or red marching-band uniforms and carrying trumpets, trombones, snare drums.

I wasn’t able to stay to watch the bands perform. But I left marveling at the way this one park can fulfill so many different—and seemingly contradictory—needs. I think of it mainly as a refuge for birds, a haven of peace and quiet. On that day, though, I was vividly reminded that others see Croton Point as a place where people from all different backgrounds and cultures can gather to simply to enjoy themselves outdoors. To picnic and play ball under a big, clear sky, sun themselves on a swimming beach, or just hang out together on a beautiful day.

Thinking about this, I realized that the two groups who love the park are like the sun and moon. Every day we share the same course, yet we never quite meet. In fact, too often it seems that we’re in conflict.

And plenty do make it, if life at Croton Point these days is any evidence. To me, it felt as if that baby Baltimore Oriole served as a harbinger of the flood of new life that has filled the park these past few weeks. Everywhere, it seems, are recently fledged American Robins with no tails and speckled breasts; scruffy young European Starlings squalling as they pursue their harassed parents across the lawns; and baby Northern Cardinals who haven’t quite grown into their crests.

What I find most heartening about this season is how many less familiar birds, ones that are threatened by habitat loss, climate change, and other challenges, also manage to breed successfully here. Bobolinks, for example, can nest only in grasslands (a vanishing habitat) like those that cover the park’s central hill. Every year, this precious, restored habitat hosts a healthy crop of young Bobolinks, their yellow-brown plumage blending perfectly with the tall midsummer grasses.

And just today, in a tall maple tree, I saw an adult Eastern Kingbird, nattily dressed in black and white, jam a bright green katydid into the gaping mouth of the young one sitting beside it. Kingbird populations, like those of many songbird species, are gradually declining, making the trees—and katydids—of parks like Croton Point ever more important.

Nor is it only small songbirds that depend on local wild spaces and the food and shelter they bring. Though the male of the park’s resident Red-tailed Hawk pair died this spring (likely after being struck by a car), the female—a true superhero—succeeded in raising two nestlings on her own.

Given the size and angle of the hole and the birds’ behavior, my best guess was that the cause of all the ruckus was a snake. Snakes don’t fully hibernate during the winter. They brumate, a shallower sleep that allows them to rouse themselves on warmer days, emerge from their dens, and soak up some sun. Somehow this snake had caught the attention of the park’s Blue Jays, who were letting everyone within earshot know what they’d found.

Other times, the alarm had nothing to do with the calls I heard. A pair of Great Horned Owls raise their young in the park every year, laying their eggs in February. (Owl eggs can survive frigid temperatures and even being temporarily covered in snow!) Their hooting, alternating between lower and higher pitches, was a duet between the male and female of the resident pair.

Scientists think that these duets serve two purposes. One is to let any nearby owls know, “We’re here and we’re nesting, so keep out!” Also, Great Horned Owls mate for life, and by calling back and forth (sometimes while looking into each other’s eyes), the owls reaffirm their commitment to each other.

Our local roost had seemed almost deserted for a week or more, so the Chimney Swifts we saw from the middle of our street were likely migrants from further north. Like the nighthawks, they winter in South America (largely in the Amazon basin), a distance that can exceed 3,500 miles. It’s quite the trek for a bird that weighs less than an ounce!

We weren’t sure which of New York’s nine species of bats we were seeing, only three of which migrate for the winter. (The other six hibernate closer to home.) It was fascinating to watch the bats effortlessly shift their speed and direction as they foraged for insects we couldn’t see in the dusk. When I was a child, I could hear the high-pitched chitter of the bats’ sonar as they homed in on their prey. But now I had to be content with admiring their remarkable hunting technique in silence.

The most unexpected participants in the evening feast were the large dragonflies, which stayed lower than the other three. (Perhaps because Common Nighthawks and some bats eat dragonflies!) The ones we saw were almost certainly Common Green Darners, among only a few dragonfly species that migrate, often in impressive swarms.

That’s where the parent birds come in. Most of us have seen patchy young birds sitting on the ground or a branch, begging to be fed. Just as they did in the nest, they’ll call pathetically, flap their threadbare wings, and even chase their harried-looking parents around until the adult gives in and deposits a bug or seed into their gaping maws.

But even as they beg, teenage birds are also observing. Researchers studying Blue Jays, for example, have found that young birds carefully watch as their parents and other flock mates hunt for caterpillars, which to a jay can be either delicious and nutritious or prickly and toxic. Only by paying attention can the youngsters learn to avoid eating the wrong caterpillar and suffering unpleasant—and possibly dangerous—after-effects.

Young birds learning what to eat from their elders is a well-known behavior. Twice at Croton Point in recent weeks, though, I’ve witnessed something that seems much less thoroughly studied: Parent birds teaching their offspring how not to be eaten.