About an hour’s train ride east of Manhattan is the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, a low-lying region of rehabilitated wetland right in the shadow of JFK airport. When they call it a ‘wildlife refuge’, they ain’t kidding:
We found this diamond terrapin turtle right in the middle of the gravel trail! A bird probably dropped it. He was alert and healthy, so we took it to the ranger station so they can return it to the turtle nesting area nearby. These are a common enough turtle on the east coast, but had all but disappeared from the New York City area until a rebound in population over the last 30 years.
This is a wren in a wren-box. All over the park are signposted nesting boxes for different bird species. There are bat boxes, owl boxes and others. How the birds can read which box belongs to them remains a mystery.
There are ponds and pools like this all over the park. The geese wander the trails between them like guests at a resort. Except prettier.
Swan. Lake.
OK, eyesight test. Can you find Bambi in this photo*?
What Joe Spivy suffered from.
*No? Good. ‘Cos you’d be hallucinating.
2 responses so far ↓
Meg // May 25, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Glad to know that I didn’t lose my bambi spotting skills — and that I’m not hallucinating.
jim // May 30, 2008 at 1:01 am
The bit about the turtles thriving near the airport is heartening. One underreported story of our time is the success we as a society have had at cleaning up the environment. It’s fashionable to focus only on the bad; but there’s plenty of good environmental news lately. For instance, bodies of water that were disasters just a generation ago are clean now, or well on their way. Examples include areas of the Great Lakes, the Chicago River, and our own Hudson estuary. In my volunteering for the South Street Seaport Museum I’ve read and heard from several sources that the Hudson is cleaner than it’s been in a couple of hundred years. Dunno if you’ll see anyone swimming in it soon — the concept that the Hudson and East Rivers are filthy has been imprinted on New Yorkers very deeply, and, in any case, the currents remain very dangerous — but, theoretically, you could swim in it. Also, the sailors who trawl the River for for educational purposes (catching fish and other animals for hands-on sessions with kids, then gently putting them back) report more and more varied life in their catches every year.