Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds, by Ryan Goldberg
Algonquin Books, 2025
288 pages, hardcover
ABA Sales–Buteo Books 15540
For many urban birders there are two cities: (1) a metropolis filled with humans, buildings, and noise; (2) a scattered assortment of large and tiny parks, hidden marshes, jetties next to highways, and other odd places they only know about because they are birders. It’s like knowing a secret language. In Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds, Ryan Goldberg presents the surprising joys of birding in New York City. He casts an investigative reporter’s curious and analytic eye on the city birding experience and its birds—from introduced European Starlings to migrating warblers to nesting Piping Plovers to uncommon Common Nighthawks—and the underlying geological and social history that makes New York City birding unique. He also brings to the narrative his love of the city and his appreciation for the personalities that populate its birding world.
There have been many books written about New York City’s avian residents, and people can’t be blamed for believing that the city has hosted only three birds: a pale Red-tailed Hawk, a “hot” Mandarin Duck, and a charismatic Eurasian Eagle-Owl. Goldberg quickly establishes that the scope of his book goes far beyond celebrity birding. He starts with the personal—discovering the hidden birder view of the city during a waterfowl counter with Brooklyn birder Peter Dorosh—and effortlessly slides into much larger subjects: New York’s geographic position and its collision (sometimes literally) with bird migration and overall bird life; the role of introduced species (he even goes to the Museum of Natural History to examine the earliest European Starling skins); and the diverse organizational projects and people working to revive habitat, educate communities, and save birds, individually and as species.
The book is organized by season. To my delight, its 14 chapters cover all five boroughs, the political units of New York City. So often books about NYC, not only those on birding, are about Manhattan with a slice of Brooklyn on the side. Goldberg does have a Brooklyn bias, understandable since Brooklyn is where he lives and learned to bird and where he is an active member of the Brooklyn Bird Club. Many chapters touch base in Green-Wood Cemetery, his favorite patch, and a beautiful place to bird. Interestingly, the chapters that stand out for their uniqueness and depth are on the two boroughs underserved by the media: “Fresh Kills,” a visit with two urban ecologists to a Staten Island landfill that has become a tallgrass prairie hosting breeding Grasshopper Sparrows (a bird found there by Alexander Wilson but which has not nested in the city for decades), and “Bronx River,” a multi-layered story about the rehabilitation of the freshwater Bronx River that has its roots in centuries of industry, urban renewal neglect, and community revolt.
Other chapters talk about Goldberg’s joyous experience of morning flight with bird guide Doug Gochfeld; collecting fallen birds under the shadows of Wall Street skyscrapers with Melissa Breyer, a long time Project Safe Flight volunteer; being part of the cohort monitoring birds caught in the 9/11 Tribute in Light (his research partner at one point is actress Lili Taylor, who has also written about this difficult task); and observing nesting Piping Plovers at Rockaway Beach in the company of Chris Allieri, enthusiastic founder of the NYC Plover Project, a project that devotes as much time to community relations as it does to protecting the plovers on a busy city beach. The people are engaging and amazing, and they are the glue that holds the book together. There was one point where I thought the focus on personality bordered on overshadowing habitat and birds: the chapter on Don Riepe, longtime protector of Jamaica Bay. Then I remembered that Riepe has been a mentor for many local naturalists, and I understand how important it is to document the lives of our local heroes as well as the products of their work. Too many of them live only in our memories.
Goldberg is a science writer who has written about sports, crime, and the environment for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including Audubon, Texas Monthly, and The New York Times. He is also, as mentioned above, an enthusiastic birder. The two parts combine well—bird sightings translating into curiosity about the why and the where—and interviews morphing into surprise, concern, and even avian affection. It’s a tricky perspective, balancing the personal and journalistic neutrality, and Goldberg does it very well.
Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds is a great read. Don’t be fooled by the title. You don’t have to live in New York to empathize with the challenges of urban birding, and you certainly don’t need to ride the subway to rejoice in the wonders of experiencing bird life with smart, passionate people in unexpected places.
Donna L. Schulman is a retired labor relations librarian and New York City birder. She has reviewed over 240 books, initially labor and women's studies and now birds and nature, for the 10,000 Birds blog and other publications. Donna contributes to the "Best Bird Books of the Year" annual episode on The American Birding Podcast.
