You don’t have to trek out to Jamaica Bay for quality urban birding. There’s good spying to be done right in the heart of the city — most notably in Central Park.
“The birding there can be spectacular,” says Peter Dorosh of the Brooklyn Bird Club. “People come from all over, sometimes planning vacations for springtime birding in the park.”
The same goes for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, says Dorosh, who works in the park doing landscape management. On a good day, a birder might spot 100 different species there, from Yellow-throated Warblers to Red-tailed Hawks to Great Blue Herons. (Dorosh’s most notable sighting: a Painted Bunting, in 1991.)
The city is loaded with other good birding spots, from Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx to Forest Park in Queens and Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
It’s the very scarcity of green space in New York that makes its parks such magnets for passing birds, notes Queens birder Corey Finger; the resulting concentration of species in a relatively small space is what makes them so special for birders. Even somewhere like the relatively tiny Bryant Park, he says, “there can be moments that are absolutely breathtaking.”