yes, birds, and consults for manufacturers of bird feeders and bird-attraction products. Stiteler also maintains bird feeders for friends on the
side. “One of them was having a horrible time with something attacking their feeders at night, so I installed a night camera. We found out
we had had a bear coming. It was eating the bird food and destroying
the feeder!” she recalls.
Of course, city birders don’t need night-vision cameras or mini
telescopes to be successful. “Hundreds of people will go by in a day,
and the birds are oblivious to them. Typically, I don’t need binoculars
because the birds are just eight feet away, in a little planting of flowers
or something,” says Karl Overman, a field-trip leader for the Detroit
Audubon Society and assistant attorney for the U.S. Department of
Justice in Michigan. Like Links, Overman squeezes birding in during his
lunch break. He’s been hooked since junior high, but he began to look
for birds in urban settings about four years ago and has noticed more
and more of them passing through the city.
In part it’s those plantings—whether in city parks, on courthouse
lawns, or even school playgrounds—which have helped make the
pursuit so fruitful. That’s because well-planned green spaces in urban
areas translate to more stopover points for migrating birds that become
hungry or exhausted during each leg of the journey. “Birds are flying
over in huge numbers, and they fly over at night. What happens is the
sun comes up, and they’ve got to plop down somewhere,” Links says.
If they’ve been flying over a large urban area, that “somewhere” can
be tricky to find. Peter Dorosh, president of New York’s Brooklyn Bird
Club, imagines green spaces must stand out from a bird’s eye view:
“They see city parks and preserves as dark spots within the ‘neon empire.’ They know if it’s dark it must be good landing.” If it sounds like
Dorosh has learned how to think and see like a bird, it’s because he has.
Other urban birders rely on their ability to detect specific calls to uncover the unexpected Blackpoll Warbler or other surprise songbirds, but
for the 45-year-old Dorosh, who has been hearing-impaired since birth,
urban birding remains a purely visual and intuitive experience. “I’m well
acclimated and experienced in spotting birds with my very good vision
and knowledge. I often rely on my instincts,” he says. Dorosh’s understanding of different habitat preferences, coupled with his exceptional vision, make it possible for him to spot even the most minute movements
of songbirds who have landed under brush or among dense foliage.
As it happens, New York City has plenty of good landing spots for
the hundreds of millions of migrating songbirds traveling the Atlantic
Flyway overhead, and when even a small percentage of those migrants
decides to drop in to rest, Big Apple birders get to see high concentrations of many diverse species. Dorosh knows a birder who lives in
Staten Island, where the landscape is fairly suburban, who heads over to
Prospect Park—in comparatively urban Brooklyn—each day during the
migration seasons for that very reason. “He comes because he can see
more birds—especially warblers—in shorter time and with less ground
to cover in the very diverse habitats in Prospect Park. On very good
“YOU START POINTING AND
LOOKING UP AND EVERYONE
AROUND YOU STARTS
LOOKING UP TOO. BEFORE
YOU KNOW IT YOU’RE DOING
AN IMPROMPTU LESSON ON
NIGHT HAWK MIGRATION!”
days, more than 20 species of warblers can be found,” Dorosh says.
Now, thanks in part to the “heat island” effect of some large cities,
Dorosh and other urban birders may have a little longer to look for
their favorite fall migrants. “There are several species of birds that stay
longer downtown than they do elsewhere. Yellow-bellied Sapsucker,
Ovenbird, Lincoln Sparrow. Those are birds that, if you go out on
November first, let’s say, the chances of you finding them in most parts
of Michigan are, like, nil. But the chances of finding them in downtown Detroit are very good. The theory goes that it’s because there’s
just enough heat to make these