Birding and natural history classes, field reports, essays and tours around the Bay Area, California and the West with Ted Pierce.

Manhattan Walden

Some of my birding students, and even my friends, jokingly call me the "Birdman." After 15 years of teaching about birds you might expect this. I think it's kind of cool, since I admire birds a lot, so I go along with it. You could do worse, in my view. However, if truth be told, I would rather have people refer to me as a "naturalist." This is an old 18th century term that means a person who has a very broad interest in nature, in all its forms. It could be anything from horseshoe crabs and starfish to monarchs, elephants or mushrooms. And in fact, all of these are fascinating to me. The problem with "naturalist" is that it doesn't sound very cool, so nobody bothers to call me that.

Yet, as you may have noticed, my website is called "Birding with Ted." It's birding with a difference, however; I call it "holistic birding." The phrase is somewhat awkward, but the concept is simple. Basically it means on our outings we focus on birds, but stop to observe anything in nature of note. Traveling to Arizona, for example, in addition to flycatchers, nighthawks or hummingbirds, we might stop to admire lizards, cactus or cottonwoods. Overall, we might see fewer birds as a result, but the ones we do see will mean a lot more to us. The birds are a part of the nature of Arizona, and we appreciate them much better by observing as much of their surroundings as we can. It all comes back to what John Muir meant when he said, "the more we look, the more we see that everything in nature is connected." I agree: very little in nature can be understood -- or fully appreciated -- in isolation. How did I come by this point of view? A bit of personal history may clarify it somewhat.

Although I've lived in many places in my life, several decades ago I made perhaps my most important move: I settled in the northern-most neighborhood of Manhattan, called Inwood. The heart of a great city would seem to be a strange place to gain insights into nature, but that is a general law that leaves out Inwood Hill Park. It is a great exception.

The park was the main attraction of the area, and after a short stroll of half an hour, I went to the closest building and found an apartment. From then on, for 17 years, I lived across the street, and seldom regretted it. Each day as I left the house I stepped out into paradise, which is not a word usually associated with New York City. For those who have never seen the park, it is almost impossible to convey a sense of its grandeur or beauty. It would take the pen of Thoreau to describe its beauties, so I will only try to give a few facts about it and what it taught me. (The photo shows the lagoon at the north end of Inwood Hill Park with the Henry Hudson Bridge and the Palisades in the distance.)

It is (the park is still there) not large, no more than 100 acres, but within these small boundaries it packs quite a dramatic punch. First the grand setting: it is the northern-most tip of the island; the Harlem River separates it from the Bronx. Its western boundary is the mile-wide and majestic Hudson. The Jersey Palisades tower over the other side of the river, made up of basaltic, forested cliffs hundreds of feet high. These stretch for miles, all the way to the Tappan Zee. The park itself is skirted by ballfields, but its heart is made up of nearly vertical bluffs 200 feet high. These are heavily forested with thick green woodlands made up of oak, beech, hickory, ash, yellow popular and scores of other hardwoods. Seen from 207th street and Seaman Avenue, in one sweep of the eye, this grand architecture of the park takes your breath away. Even neighborhood residents, after many years, could hardly believe they were still in Manhattan.

Within its high-canopied forests, as you walk the paths, you feel you are very far from people and civilization. You are under the shade of trees eight to ten stories high; birds (jays, warblers, thrushes, sparrows, waxwings, chickadees, many others) call, sing or dart by from tree to tree. At eye level you are met with thickets of spicebush, wild cherry, black birch, sassafras, or a hundred other shrubs. On the hillsides at different times of year can be found day lilies, Japanese knotweed, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Indian pipes, Dutchman's breeches, trout lilies, Mayflower, bloodroot, asters, pokeweed, thistles, burdock, milkweed, touch-me-nots, goldenrod -- it's endless.

The northern border of the park (near where I lived) is the Harlem River. The river, together with a jetty of land, forms a beautiful 'lagoon' inhabited by herons, egrets, ducks and swans. It is surrounded by willows, and sparsely inhabited except on weekends. As you look west through the gap between the north end of the park and Riverdale (under the Henry Hudson bridge), you can see the Palisades in the distance. Daily I woke up to this scene, went out my door, and made the circuit, checking for new flowers, or new growth in the trees, or observed the birds.


Naturally such a remarkable place attracted a little band of conservationists, and they came together under the banner of the Friends of Inwood Hill Park. Slowly, over the years, I got to know them all, and most were amateur naturalists. With a little gentle prodding, they would tell you the history of every rock, tree, bird or flower in the park. Most had their own specialty, such as botany, birds, history or geology. However, each one was, in his or her own way, a walking encyclopedia of all things Inwood. Rosemary Vance, the leader of the group, seemed to know everything, but her principal interest seemed to be plants and birds. Bill Greiner, our professor of botany, would not only identify each plant and tell you its history, but have you smell, taste or eat it! With Bill, you not only observed the park, you literally ingested it. Each one of them was prickly, cranky, ornery, difficult, yes. But they loved the park with a fierce devotion, and through them I felt the soul of the park was communicated to me -- plant by plant, bird by bird, flower by flower, rock by rock. They gave me the faith and the knowledge that, if I desired to know all the wild inhabitants, that I could learn them. That they all had a name, habits, preferences, histories. From a dense green jungle of indeterminate form the woodland became a discrete set of living things, each with its own identity. It was a revelation to me; I had passed by many of these wild beings all my life, but they were strangers. Now I felt I knew them; they were strangers no more. This knowledge confirmed my feeling that the park was one living system, certainly more than the sum of its parts. Simply put, it was analogous to the way we think of people: we do not think of them as random collections of neurons, muscles or bones, but living, breathing people. I thought of the park in the same way.

As I became more and more attached to the park, I too felt very protective of it. As a result, I teamed up with other neighborhood residents and started a grass-roots non-profit, the Parks Alliance. To this group I gave four years of my life, and it was a great deal of work to involve the community, raise money, hire staff, create programs and make it successful. I gained a great deal by my work, however; I met many friends and met my future wife. She had a degree in botany, and we spent the next several years exploring the parks of the tri-state area -- field guides, binoculars, lenses in hand.

During the next few years we explored the nearby parks, forests and beaches in Westchester, Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Rockland. During this time I slowly became more and more interested in birds. I suppose it was because of my love of the outdoors, faith in my spotting skills and my wife's great teaching techniques that my ability to identify birds slowly evolved. But the growth was also spiritual: patience, faith and confidence that the process of observation and identification would clarify itself, like a windshield after the rain. There is no doubt that it appears impossible at first, so the search for knowledge must be borne lightly on the birder's shoulders. Warblers, thrushes, hawks, shorebirds, all the various families -- slowly, slowly my mind realized the qualities that composed their separate identities. It took years, but with a great deal of practice, many acquired a "local habitation and a name."

The great value in my time in Inwood was that I did not see or learn about birds as something separate from the rest of nature. I did not look past the trees to see the birds: I saw them, wherever they were, as part of the trees, the seashore, or the marshes. They became a passionate interest, my primary delight in natural science, but one wonder among many.

At first birds were an avocation, but they became a calling. For the past 25 years, the appeal has not diminished. I have traipsed through forests, waded in bogs, aimed my scope at shorebirds and searched the skies for birds in a majority of the 50 states. About 15 years years ago I began to share my love and knowledge of birds with others as a teacher of birding. I have taken people all over California on "holistic birding" tours and trips in the last decade, and in 2008 started birding tours of Texas and Arizona. Texas, Arizona and more are planned for 2010: New York, New England and Costa Rica.

For me teaching or leading birding trips and tours are a way to share my love in natural science with others. It is a way to give back the knowledge I was given by many friends and teachers over the years, and it is something I revel in. I look forward to having you join me in searching nature for more of its wonders, wherever it will take us.

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