How did the small luck of the urban middle class become birdwatching

On August 1, 2015, to coincide with the broadcast of the documentary Racing Extinction, images of 160 endangered species were projected on the façade of the Empire State Building in New York. /TheBetterVacation.com

Helen MacDonald, known as "an expert in falconry, 'Gothic amateur naturalist', former researcher in the history of science, and writer of nature literature," says she writes about love, "especially the glorious world around which non-human life is made up."

In her new book, Vesper Flights, she writes that for many people, nature is always present on television and video, but not a living reality, as if it were not related to us, "something we revere and watch from a distance."

But in fact, in a megacity like New York, if you pay attention, you will find that in addition to humans, there are many creatures that coexist with us, such as birds. Known as the "birdman" (bird-man) city, New York is home to more than 300 species of birds. They have adapted to urban life: red-tailed eagles make their home in apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, while peregrine falcons nest on bridges and towers.

Of course, urban environments are still dangerous for birds. Glass curtain walls like high-rise buildings and night light shows are the main causes of the "bird strike" phenomenon. Data shows that about 1 billion birds die from "bird strikes" in the United States every year. There are experts who suggest that architects and developers can reduce harm to birds by reducing reflective windows and unnecessary lighting.

Look upwards and you will find a different world. In major cities around the world, more and more people have begun to observe and appreciate birds in cities, and birds have become an important indicator of whether cities are livable. The book's author, Helen MacDonald, chronicles an experience of observing a seasonal night voyage of migratory birds on the top floor of the Empire State Building. She noted that understanding the atmosphere and airspace as habitats was a new concept in recent years.

"Living in a high-rise apartment blocks certain channels of interaction with the natural world. You can't place a bird feeder in the garden or watch the thrushes and, but you can be in another part of the regular world of tall buildings – a night scene of ice crystals, clouds, wind and darkness. High-rise apartments are a symbol of supremacy over nature, but they can also be bridges, connecting the sky and earth, nature and the city, leading us to a more comprehensive understanding of the natural world. ”

This article is excerpted from the book "Taking Off at Dusk", originally titled "High in the Sky".

(The subtitle in the text is added by the editor).

✎ Author | Helen MacDonald

✎ Edit | Tan Shan Mountain

"Taking Off at Dusk"

By Helen MacDonald, translated by Zhou Wei

Century Wenjing∣Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2023-6

On this cold evening in early May, twilight shrouded Midtown Manhattan. I had been googling the weather forecast all day, and as I walked down Fifth Avenue, I pulled out my phone and looked it up again. Turn north to east wind, sunny. Very good.

At the Empire State Building, a long line winds down the street, and I was the only one in the crowd with a telescope around my neck, feeling a little embarrassed. For the next hour, I moved inch by inch, up the escalator, through the marble hall, past the walls covered with light gold wallpaper, and finally squeezed into a stuffed elevator on the 86th floor. At a height of more than a thousand feet above the city, the wind blows, and the grand lights pour down like an ocean.

Tourists clinging to the security fence, a man standing behind them, against the wall. I couldn't see his face clearly in the night, but I knew this was the person I was going to see, because he was holding a telescope that seemed to be much more advanced than mine, facing the sky on his back. There was a sense of nervousness in his stance, reminding me of seeing people shooting two-way UFOs waiting for the target thrower to launch the next target. He was nervously expecting something.

He is Andrew Farnsworth, a researcher at Cornell University's Ornithological Laboratory and speaks softly. I met with him here to witness the almost unnoticed wildlife phenomenon that crosses the city twice a year: the seasonal night voyages of migratory birds.

Treating this as a place for nature observation tours is absurd. With the usual exceptions of pigeons, rats, mice, and sparrows, we tend to think that wild animals inhabit places far from city boundaries, and nature and cities are opposites.

The reason is obvious. From this height, the only natural thing is the faint stars scattered in the sky, and the Hudson River is like a cyan bruise that passes through the mixed light below. The rest is our world: flashes of airplanes, bright screens of smartphones, grids of windows and streets lit up.

At the top of the Empire State Building, get a bird's eye view of New York. /Wikimedia Commons

The sky is a vast habitat full of life

Night is the perfect moment for skyscrapers, where the dream of modernity in full play erases nature and replaces it with a new man-made landscape: maps of steel, glass and light. But people live in tall buildings for the same reason they do for their wild trips – to escape the city.

The tallest building lifts you away from the chaos of the street and lifts you into another realm. The sky may seem empty, just as we thought the deep sea was also an empty void without life. But like the ocean, the sky is a vast habitat full of life, with bats and birds, flying insects, spiders, windswept seeds, microorganisms, scattered spores.

As I gazed at the city, my gaze over miles of dusty and light-lit air, I felt more and more like these super-skyscrapers like deep-sea submersibles, transporting us to otherwise unexplored, inaccessible territories. The air inside the building is smooth, clean and gentle, while the outside is a world of turbulent airflow, active with a large number of unexpected creatures, and we are also in the middle of this moment.

Above us, the LED lights around the spiral tower cast a soft halo in the darkness, and a blurry white light jumped on the halo, and through the telescope, the thing appeared as a night moth, flapping its wings and flying straight towards the tower.

No one fully understands how these moths navigate when migrating, and there is a hypothesis that they navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. The night moth is flying high in search of the right air flow to fly to its long-distance destination.

Aerial view of New York, the square green area in the picture is New York's Central Park.

Wind migration is a particular skill of arthropods, allowing aphids, wasps, grassflies, beetles, moths and tiny spiders suspended from static silk to fly distances ranging from tens to hundreds of miles. These wandering creatures are colonists and pioneers looking for new realms to survive and settle in.

Try planting a tree in the open air in a dry environment on a high-rise balcony, and soon the juice-sucking aphids that come from the wind gather on the stems, and then the tiny wasps that parasitize the aphids also come.

Above our heads, the number of insects traveling long distances is staggering. Jason Chapman, a scientist at the British Research Institute, uses an air-to-air radar system to study the high-altitude movement of insects, and in just one month, more than 7.5 billion insects fly over a square mile of British farms, about 5500 pounds of biomass.

Chapman thinks the number of insects flying over New York City is even higher because it's the gateway to a continent, not an island surrounded by icy oceans, and summers are usually hotter as well. After jumping 650 feet, he says, you ascend into a realm where the distinction between urban and rural areas is almost meaningless.

During the day, chimney swifts feast on this huge number of floating life; At night, bats that live and migrate in the city, as well as American nighthawks with white stripes on their wings, also feast on them. Birds, bats and migrating dragonflies feed on these large congregations of insects on days when the northwest winds blow in late summer and early autumn, a phenomenon caused by huge downdrafts and whirlpools around urban high-rise complexes, like schools of fish in the ocean swimming to the current where plankton gathers.

New York, statues and birds. /Unsplash

"So many birds, so many"

It's not just insects in the air. These towering structures, such as the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center and other new skyscrapers, pierce into the space that birds have used for thousands of years. New York City is on the Atlantic Migration Route, a route where hundreds of millions of migratory birds fly north to their breeding grounds each spring and back in the fall.

Most small songbirds usually fly at altitudes of three or four thousand feet above the ground, but adjust their altitude according to weather changes. Larger birds fly higher, and some shorebirds fly high over cities from 1-12,000 feet in the air. On the roof of this building, we will see only a small part of the creatures flying overhead, and even the tallest building has just touched the shallow sky.

While migrating birds of prey can also be seen soaring well over eight hundred feet above the city during the day, most diurnal bird species migrate after twilight because they are safer, cooler and have fewer predators nearby, just less, not for nothing. Just before I arrived, Farnsworth saw a peregrine falcon hovering over the building.

Peregrine falcons often hunt at night in the city. They perch on lookouts high in the air and then plunge into the darkness to catch birds and bats. In a more natural habitat, falcons would hide killed bird carcasses in crevices in cliff walls. And here the falcons will stuff their prey into the ledges of tall buildings, including the Empire State Building.

For a falcon, a skyscraper is a cliff that brings the same expectations, the same high air currents, and the same opportunities for a takeout meal.

Birds walking among New York skyscrapers. /Unsplash

We gaze into the dark air, hoping for living things to appear in our vision. After a few minutes, Farnsworth pointed, "There! "Very high overhead, right at the boundary of the transition from the sky in the field of vision to gray chaos, something is moving. I held up my telescope in front of me, and three pairs of flapping white wings flew north-northeast in a dense formation. Night heron.

I had only seen them hunched over branches or necked by lakes and ponds, but now I was amazed to see them far removed from their usual background. I wonder how high they fly.

"These are big enough," Farnsworth said, "and if you look up where there is light, everything appears bigger than it is and closer than it really is." He estimated that the night herons were about three hundred feet above our heads and about fifteen hundred feet above the ground. We watched them disappear in the darkness.

At the moment I feel less like a naturalist and more like an amateur astronomer waiting for a meteor shower, squinting his eyes and looking into the darkness with great anticipation. I tried a new trick of pointing the telescope at infinity and lifting it straight up. In the lens, birds that are invisible to the naked eye slide into view, and there are birds above them, as well as higher positions. I was amazed by so many birds. It's a terrible lot.

For every larger bird seen, thirty or more songbirds flew by, they were so small that watching their flight paths was almost unbearable. Like stars, amber, tracer bullets slowly burning fire.

Although the songbirds in the higher sky are only some ghostly glimpses as seen through the telescope, I know that their loosely held paws are tucked up in their chests, their eyes are bright, their bones are light, and their will to fly north drives them night after night. Most spent yesterday in central or southern New Jersey and then took off into the darkness.

Birdwatcher D. Bruce Yolton photographs a peregrine falcon near 86th Street in New York. /Urban Hawks

Larger birds will continue to fly until dawn, and warblers usually land earlier and land like small rocks in patches farther north to rest and feed the next day. For example, the yellow-rumped forest warbler travels long distances from the southeastern states, while the rose-breasted white-spotted finches travel all the way north from Central America.

My heart throbbed. I will never see any of these birds again. If it weren't for this high position, if it weren't for this building that rose rapidly during the Great Depression to celebrate secular power and the assertiveness of capital, and its pillars of light that did not briefly illuminate these birds, I would never have seen them.

The emergence of aviation ecology

Farnsworth pulled out a smartphone. Unlike others holding up their phones here, he's looking at radar images coming from Fort Dix, New Jersey, part of a national weather radar network that monitors near-continuous coverage of continental U.S. airspace.

"Tonight is indeed a massive migration," he explains, "and if you look at the patterns in the radar image, especially the green parts, that means there are probably a thousand to two thousand birds per cubic mile, which is almost the densest degree." So it's an important night. ”

For birds flying north, the past few days have been bad weather, low clouds, and the wrong wind direction, which has led to a bottleneck period for migration, and now the sky is densely packed with birds. I stared at the pixel pattern on the radar dynamic map, a blue-green dendritic flower surging across the East Coast. "This air is full of living things," Farnsworth said, pointing his finger at the screen, "It's all living things." ”

Meteorologists have known for a long time that animal life can be observed by radar. Shortly after World War II, British radar scientists and RAF engineers were puzzled by the mysterious clump pattern that appeared on the screen. They knew they weren't airplanes and named them "angels" until they finally concluded they were flocks of birds.

Flocks of birds form patterns. / Unsplash

"Birds pollute their airspace, don't they?" Farnsworth said of radar meteorologists: "They just want to filter everything out. But now biologists are going to do the opposite. ”

Farnsworth is a leader in an emerging interdisciplinary discipline known as aviation ecology, at a time when weather radar was sensitive enough to spot a bumblebee thirty miles away. Sophisticated remote sensing techniques, such as radar, acoustics and tracking devices, are used to study ecological patterns and relationships in the sky.

"The concept of understanding the atmosphere and airspace as habitat has only entered the collective consciousness in recent years," Farnsworth said. This new science is helping us understand how climate change, skyscrapers, wind turbines, light pollution, and aviation affect these creatures that live and move in the air.

Birds attracted by city lights

At ten o'clock, the cirrus clouds flying overhead were like oil poured on the surface of the water. Ten minutes later, the sky cleared again and the birds were still flying. We walked to the east side of the observatory and a saxophonist began to play. With this subtle sound, we found that the birds were much closer than before.

One was exceptionally close, and although it was overexposed in the lights, we found a touch of black on its chest and a distinctive pattern on its tail feathers, the male yellow-rumped forest warbler. It flashed and disappeared around the corner of the building. After a short while, we saw another one flying in the same direction, followed by another.

We realized that it was the same bird spinning. Another yellow-rumped forest warbler followed, but both were hopelessly attracted by the light, as if tied to an invisible rope, circling around the spiral tower crown.

Seeing them flying like this, we couldn't help but feel down when we were originally happy. Tonight marks the 85th anniversary of the Empire State Building, and the spiral tower crown is lit by leaping and jumping colored lights like a candle.

The birds are attracted by the lights and deviate from their usual course, and the overly bright lights disrupt the precise navigation mechanism, overwhelming them and putting them in great danger. Some birds are so hypnotized that they are able to pull out and continue their journey. Some birds can't.

New York is one of the brightest cities in the world, second only to Las Vegas. It's just a point on the artificially lit ribbon that runs from Boston through Washington. We love the city at night, but the migrating songbirds are devastated.

All over the United States, you can see dead or exhausted birds at the foot of skyscrapers. The reflections of the lights and the glass curtain disturbed the direction, and they crashed into the window and spiraled to the ground. New York City alone kills more than 100,000 birds each year.

The Field Museum specimens birds that died hitting windows. / Ben Marks/Field Museum

Thomas King, who works at M&M Pest Control in New York, received calls from residents of high-rise buildings asking for a solution to the problem of birds hitting glass during the migratory season. He said there was no way, but residents could ask the manager of the 39-story building to turn off the night lights.

It worked. The "New York Lights Off" project advocated by the Audubon Ornithological Society in New York City has also encouraged many New Yorkers to follow suit, saving energy and protecting bird life.

Each year, to commemorate the lives killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, two blue pillars of light from the Light of Remembrance ceremony illuminate Manhattan, shining up to four miles above and 60 miles beyond the city center. At the height of the night migration, songbirds swirl down towards pillars of light, chirping and descending from the air, and many birds circle in the light, like twinkling pieces of paper swirling in a strong wind.

One night last year, too many songbirds were trapped in a beam of light, and a few pixels on the radar map representing the "Light of Remembrance" site were unusually bright. Farnsworth and Audubon Ornithological Society personnel were on site, intermittently turning off the lights to avoid bird casualties.

That night they extinguished the "light of remembrance" eight times, each for about twenty minutes, so that the birds could get out of trouble and return to their course. Every time the lights come back on, a new wave of birds is drawn to it.

Every year on 9/11, the Empire State Building lights up blue. /Secret NYC

Round after round, these winged travelers visited the ghostly light emanating from the ruins of the Twin Towers, which intermittently released into the darkness, and then flew in a group to take their place.

Farnsworth is the chief scientist of the Birdcast project, which integrates weather information, flight calls, radar, and ground-based observers to predict migratory bird movements over the continental United States, as well as nighttime migration peaks to determine whether emergency lights-out measures are needed.

The stream of birds over the lookout continues, and it is deep overnight. After saying goodbye, I took the elevator downstairs and walked uphill back to my apartment. Even though it was past midnight, I was still awake.

One of the aims of designing tall buildings is to change the way we see: to bring different views of the world to the eye, to the horizon that is closely linked to success and power, to make the invisible visible.

Most of the birds I see are indistinguishable rays of light, like tiny retinal scratches or splashes of bright paint on a dark background. Looking up at the sky from the position of the street, the sky above with nothing becomes so different, a deep place, in which life flows.

A family of Osprey. /Unsplash

· END ·

Author丨Helen MacDonald

Editor丨Tan Shan Shan