Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American science quickly. I’m Rachel Feldman. I love spending time in nature, but that can feel really hard to do when you live in a city, even out in the suburbs. It’s tough to feel like you’re really outside when you’re outside, but if you start thinking like an urban naturalist, you can find wildlife to appreciate everywhere you go.
My guest today is Ryan Mandelbaum. They’re a science writer, naturalist and educator based in New York City. Their new book, Wild NYC, is a guide to exploring the natural wonders of the big Apple. But they’ve also got tons of great tips on how to find wildlife in any built environment, because if you can find nature in New York City, you really can find it anywhere.
Earlier this month, we took a walk through New York City’s Prospect Park with Ryan to learn how to approach urban and suburban environments like a naturalist. Bear in mind that we recorded this while walking around outside, so it’s gonna sound pretty different from our usual in studio episodes. But you can also check out a video version with lots of cool plants and animals to look at over on our YouTube channel.
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Feltman: Hey, y’all, we are here in Prospect Park with Ryan Mandelbaum, the author of a book called Wild NYC that’s all about finding wildlife even in urban spaces. Ryan, tell us a little bit about the book and what we’re gonna do here today.
Ryan Mandelbaum: Yeah, so Wild NYC is part natural history, part field guide, part trip planner about New York City. There’s a lot of really interesting things to see but [also] a lot of really interesting things to talk about, so we’re gonna experience some of that here in Prospect Park.
Prospect Park is Brooklyn’s backyard. It also has the biggest forest in Brooklyn, and it’s the place where I probably spend most of my time as a naturalist. So there’s interesting plants, animals, interactions between us and those plants and animals, so I’m really excited to show you all what we have here.
Feltman: Cool, let’s get started.
Mandelbaum: The one thing I’m always doing as a naturalist is trying my best not to be completely distracted by all of the things that are happening at once. So even right now there’s probably, like, five or 10 bird species that I’m experiencing and a lot of plants. The birds I’m looking at are a common grackle—that little man running around on the ground.
A lot of the birds that we see here are ones that are more commonly associated with people. So common grackle are often seen in areas that are kind of cleared open: farms or just places where we’ve altered. And the other bird that’s running around on the ground here is a European starling. They are an introduced species. The legend is that somebody wanted all of the birds of Shakespeare …
Feltman: Mm.
Mandelbaum: To be in the United States, and so they introduced them all, and starlings were the one that stuck. The actual story is, like, so much worse than that, which is that there were entire societies devoted to making the United States look like Europe, and as part of that they introduced starlings, like, multiple times, and so now we have just, like, millions of starlings. They’re very, very common in Europe, and so now they’re very, very common here.
It’s interesting because as a naturalist a lot of what I’m thinking about isn’t just, like, the stories of these species but how they interact with the world at large. And so you can’t really hate starlings because they’re really cute [laughs] and have a lot of personality. I have one who’ll, like, perch on my air conditioner and sing a bunch of weird noises—they’re mimics, so they can sing other bird songs really well. But then they also are cavity nesters, and so they’ll take cavities from our native birds that use cavities like bluebirds and redheaded woodpeckers. The animal itself is not good or bad; the animal itself is a doofy little guy that runs around on the ground. But, you know, it can do good or bad things, usually based on us.
Feltman: What are some other animals that people in urban areas might be particularly likely to find?
Mandelbaum: I think American robins are pretty common, like, first birds you notice because they’re often present in backyards. American robin is a native bird to the United States, as is the common grackle. They like sort of big open areas. They love plucking for worms in the dirt. There they are [laughs].
An interesting thing about the city is that there’s a huge combination of both native plants and invasive plants and introduced plants. People like to put value on everything, like, “Oh, is this one introduced? Oh, it’s bad. This one is native. It’s good.” Good and bad are kind of, like, our value judgments, so there’s a lot more to it than that. Something can be introduced and not necessarily bad, and then something can be, like, “native,” but then because of our doing suddenly it’s—gets to the wrong place and takes over and it’s bad, so …
Feltman: Yeah.
Mandelbaum: We’re standing under what I assume is an eastern white pine. Eastern white pine, you can tell by the number of needles.
Feltman: Oh, yeah, I see five.
Mandelbaum: It’s an eastern white pine—looky, looky. Most of the eastern white pines here are planted; they’re more common, like, north of here. But they’re a good tree. They go real big [laughs]. Their pine cones are real big. You can tell it’s an eastern white pine when the needles are long and floppy and they’re kind of soft. I just like ’em. I like conifer trees ’cause they got green on ’em all year long, so even in the winter they’re exciting and green.
Feltman: So how did you get interested in, you know, being a naturalist as a born and bred New Yorker?
Mandelbaum: I’m not from New York City proper; I’m from, like, a town that touches New York City. So I always have to clarify that ’cause then real New Yorkers get mad at me. But I’ve always liked walking around in the city and exploring places I hadn’t been before. And then while I was in grad school I was writing about herons because I found out that New York City Bird Alliance was, like, painting lawn flamingos to look like herons and egrets to try and, like, coax them back onto one of the marsh islands. And that was, like, the exact kind of wacky, silly story that made me like, “Huh, tell me about [laughs] why they’re painting lawn flamingos.”
And so I went on this, like, excursion to Staten Island to try and find my own great blue heron. And then it, like, turns out that they’re just in the parks [laughs]. Like, you can often just see them, like, in Central Park, Prospect Park. And I think since then it’s, like, really warped the way I think about New York City as, like, not just a place that I’m eating dinner in and going to shows in but, like, a place that has its own natural history and really exciting interactions between humans and animals that I just found fascinating.
First, you get hit with the birder bug, where you’re like, “Oh, my God, I need to see every single bird.” And then you get hit with the everything bug, where you’re like, “Oh, my God, I need to see everything.” [Laughs] And that, that would be how I got here.
Feltman: So what are the kinds of things that, you know, your book helps people look out for? I know there are birds, there’s some plants.
Mandelbaum: I mean, what I really want people to do is walk around the city and understand, like, appreciate what it is now and the amount of diversity that’s here, both in terms of, like, what people have done to it and how animals are adapting to it, but also understand just how biodiverse it’s always been.
New York City is kind of at the confluence of a lot of different eco areas—so there’s ocean and land; there’s north and south; there’s, you know, humid and dry; there’s all sorts of, you might say, like, transitional areas here in the city. And so it’s always, for all of history, attracted, like, a ton of biodiversity. You know, there’s been human habitation here for millennia, and so just getting people to understand New York as more than just this concrete jungle but actually, like, a really amazing, biodiverse place, even today, is what I’m excited about.
That is a red-bellied woodpecker that just flew up there. Can you see it? Try to look at it without binoculars first. That’s my tip …
Feltman: Yeah.
Mandelbaum: With binoculars. There it is …
Feltman: Oh, yeah.
Mandelbaum: It’s coming up, yeah. There it is. You see it’s got the little red head, grayish belly, black back with white stripes.
They’re probably one of our most common woodpeckers we regularly see. But that wouldn’t have been the case, like, a hundred years ago; they’re very much a product of human altering the habitat and climate change. So they would have been, like, a more of a southern woodpecker, but then they respond well to human alterations of habitats, kinda like the robins and grackles and them. You see them commonly in suburbs, and they’re really sensitive to cold temperature.
Feltman: Mm.
Mandelbaum: So as the climate changed and things warmed up they started moving north, and we’re still starting—they’re still moving north today; like, areas in the northern United States and Canada that wouldn’t have seen them before starting to get them.
They’re also an example of how ornithologists are really bad at naming birds. Like, look at that bird. What would you call it if you didn’t know what it was called?
Feltman: Like, a, a red, redheaded …
Mandelbaum: Like, a redheaded woodpecker.
Feltman: Something. Yeah.
Mandelbaum: Yeah, I would call it that, too. There’s already a redheaded woodpecker, and it’s not that one.
Feltman: [Laughs] Oh, dang.
Mandelbaum: I know. And so it’s called the red belly woodpecker because [laughs] often what would happen is, like, an 1800s ornithologist would, like, shoot a bunch of birds at random and then bring ’em back to their house and look at them and be like, “Oh, this one seems to have a little pink wash on its belly that you can only see if you’re, like, looking at a dead one like this.” So they got “red-bellied woodpecker.”
I would’ve called it, yeah, like, you know …
Feltman: Red, red-capped woodpecker.
Mandelbaum: Red-capped, black-striped awesome [laughs] little guy.
Feltman: [Laughs]I feel like so much of what our idea of doing nature and being a naturalist is comes from, you know, that era of very, very rich people shooting birds [laughs] and writing stuff down about them. How would you like to, to change people’s conceptions of, of what it is to enjoy the outdoors?
Mandelbaum: I think the thing we’re doing right now is a good way to change the perception of the outdoors. Going on your own sort of discovery missions or experiencing nature yourself and building your own personal connection to it is really important. If you really wanna, like, discover new stuff, you could look at anything. I look at birds ’cause they’re easy to look at and there’s a lot of infrastructure for looking at birds. People who look at mushrooms and fungus here in New York City are, like, really interesting.
The city, if—I treat it as [as] interesting a place ecologically as the forest surrounding it, and in many cases the biodiversity is actually higher here because [of] the amount of things we bring here and, again, because New York is already a pretty rich place ecologically. So just get started looking at stuff, walk slowly, experience the smells and sounds.
Feltman: And what about for folks who are like, “Yeah, of course, New York City has these giant parks that are, like, full of wildlife, but what about me in, you know, (insert smaller city), where we don’t have a giant green space?” Like, what advice do you have for people in other urban areas?
Mandelbaum: Well, first come to New York City [laughs]. No, I think that’s what I’m really excited about about my book is that, of course, it’s about New York City, but it’s really about the interactions between what happens when humans enter a natural place—just really considering that humans are part of nature and when we change it it’s because we’re a species that lives there. So you, too, can go out in any place where you are and look at what’s around.
There’s plenty of really awesome resources that allow you to look more locally. I use iNaturalist. It’s an app that uses the help of both AI and a community of naturalists to help you identify things. And this book happens to be of a series of Wild (Enter Your City Name Here) books, so I think my publisher would probably tell you to buy the book for your city [laughs].
Estuaries, which are places where the freshwater rivers meet saltwater oceans, often are some of the most biodiverse places in the world, and many of the world’s largest cities are on estuaries. So generally your city probably will have quite a lot of really interesting things to look at, regardless of where you live.
Onward and upward. This tree here, what a tree this is [laughs]. So London plane is a hybrid of two sycamore species, one from our continent and one from East Asia. London plane was Robert Moses’s favorite tree because it can grow really well everywhere. It likes—it doesn’t care about the sidewalk, doesn’t care about anything …
Feltman: Wow, like Robert Moses.
Mandelbaum: Like Robert Moses [laughs]. It’s like Robert Moses if he was a tree. So we see quite a lot of them. It is—supposedly the leaf of the London plane is the logo of the Parks Department here in New York City. The London plane is not a very good tree for insects, so it’s therefore not a really good tree for wildlife.
Feltman: Mm.
Mandelbaum: But there is some random moth that we see on it a lot that’s native that was just like, “Okay, I’ll deal with that.” [Laughs] And it’s a really pretty one.
All right, let’s keep going. There’s a lawn. Lawns usually are, like, monocultures designed for use by people only, and as much as they look big and green, and people are like, “Go touch grass,” they actually are not quite as good for nature as everywhere else. You’re much better off planting, like, a native flower garden or letting the lawn even just grow rather than using all of this water and mowing resources to make a big lawn. I know that this is controversial, but lawns are, like, they’re fine [laughs]. I get it—I like sitting. You know, sitting’s great.
Here’s a hawk. There it is. Way far away, up in the sky, over that plane.
Feltman: Oh, wow.
Mandelbaum: It’s probably our—I would say it’s a red-tailed hawk, but I ha—it’s really backlit and far away.
They are similarly a hawk that’s okay with humans altering the habitat. So often what the red-tailed hawks will do is nest over on the—like, in these pine trees over here. Here’s another one. There’s two of ’em. They don’t mind the lawns. They are, like, eating squirrels and other little things. I just got a look at the other one; it is also a red-tailed hawk. Red-tailed hawks, the females are bigger than the males, so the big one was the female, and the smaller one is the male.
Like, as a birder, what I wanna see when I’m on the lawn is, like, eastern bluebirds, eastern meadowlarks. There’s, like, these—New York doesn’t have, like, a ton of big grasslands, especially not in, like, the middle of the boroughs, so I’m not usually expecting to see any of those birds here in the park except on migration on this lawn.
There’s some birds—robins. Oh, a flicker way out there. You may think of woodpeckers as tree birds, but one of our species of woodpecker, while it does like trees, it also loves the dirt. The ones that are sort of bigger and hunched over and have red on only the back of their heads are flickers. So yeah, it’s a woodpecker that likes the dirt. My spouse calls them “dirtpeckers” ’cause they hang out on the ground and eat—feed like the robins.
Feltman: Are there particularly good times of year to go looking for wildlife in urban areas?
Mandelbaum: Yes, it actually depends on what you wanna see. So right now, early April, is probably—we’re just getting started with bird migration so our early species like the flickers migrate around now, so we’re starting to see a lot of them. Some of the sparrow species are starting to migrate. It’s not the peak yet. But if you want something to look at that’s special in April, the salamanders are moving right now.
Feltman: Oh, wow.
Mandelbaum: And I just went on a really fun tour of New York City’s Alley Pond Park, where you can find a couple species of native salamander—most common is red-backed salamander and spotted salamander—and we found them. It was awesome.
Feltman: [Laughs] I feel like salamanders are a thing that a lot of people don’t realize are in their cities.
Mandelbaum: Oh, yeah. At least here in the eastern United States, I think that the animal that [with], like, the highest amount of biomass in the eastern forest is the red-backed salamander.
Feltman: Wow.
Mandelbaum: Salamanders are sensitive, though, to, like, pollution and habitat fragmentation, so they’re actually not especially common in the core of the boroughs. The only place that you can see red-backed salamanders reliably in Brooklyn is, like, one pond in Green-Wood Cemetery. Outside the outskirts of the city—so Staten Island, the Bronx, parts of Queens, especially northeastern Queens—there are places where you can see multiple species of salamander.
And this is also one thing I try and touch on in the book is that at the edges of the boroughs, there are places where you can see, really, this kind of transition and interaction between humans and the natural world at its strongest because there are these places where it’s, like, mostly really pristine eastern forest but then a lot of introduced stuff kind of creeping in, and so you can kind of see those two things interact, like trees surrounded by invasive vines or fights between native animals and introduced animals for nest space. You can still kind of capture that amazing biodiversity of New York City while also seeing some of the human influence there.
There’s a chipping sparrow. That’s what this little guy right here is. Chipping sparrows are pretty common. In an unaltered world they would probably be our most common sparrow in North America.
Welcome to the woods. The wooded area here is nice because it features what I’m pretty sure is a stream that’s fed by, like, New York City water supply that ends up becoming two ponds and then a river through the woods back there. So for us this is kind of one of the better places to experience nature in the city because there’s quite a lot of different plants and animals.
What I’m usually looking for here is migratory birds, who might come down to take a bath in some of these streams over here, and then some of our native plants, which there’s some nice flowering plants that you might, might catch one if it’s around.
It’s you. So it’s just starting to flower. Smell, smell that right there.
Feltman: Oh, wow.
Mandelbaum: Oh, yeah. This is spicebush. So spicebush is a native plant to our area. It flowers really early, so you can see it’s just starting to flower. It flowers in early April. A lot of plants will flower early on just because that way they can take advantage of the sun when the canopy isn’t all leafed out.
Spicebush is, like, amazing. First, first of all, you can’t see it, but it smells really good [laughs]. Its bark would’ve been used extensively by Indigenous people here. And then in the fall it creates these, like, beautiful red berries, which are edible. But what you would do with them if you wanted to use them was dry ’em out and use ’em as spice, and they have a flavor that’s kind of like allspice, cinnamon and black pepper all wrapped in one.
Feltman: Mmm.
Mandelbaum: It’s the best.
You wanna look at the wood ducks? Wood ducks are really good ducks. There’s also a ring-necked duck over there, which is pretty uncommon for Prospect Park.
Feltman: Beautiful.
Mandelbaum: Beautiful. They’re really common in the rest of the areas, but here in New York City, we don’t see them that often, so that ring-necked duck is a special site for birders. This is around the time of year that we see them on migration. Usually there’s a couple that roll through all the parks every year.
That’s a yellow-bellied sapsucker that is calling above us. It is a woodpecker. I often interact with other human beings when I’m birding because I look weird [laughs]. And so a guy’ll come along—and I don’t know why old-timey New Yorkers have, like, figured this one out—but they’ll go up, and they’ll be, “Ay, you see any yellow-bellied sapsuckers?” And I’d be like, “I know you’re making fun of me, but yeah [laughs], there’s one right here.”
Feltman: [Laughs]
Mandelbaum: Imagine this: It’s all of time and you’re a bird. You migrate up, and you end up in this verdant, beautiful New York City ecosystem. You stop by just to refuel. Then you go to your, you know, breeding area north of here. We come in, we replace it all with concrete. We leave, like, four green spaces [laughs]. Birds still have to migrate through, and so they get concentrated into our parks. So in May, September the parks are just loaded with, you know, these birds that have come all the way up from the equatorial regions, the tropics, migrating to these boreal habitats or the tundra or the northern woods, and they stop here, and so you can see, like, 120 species of bird in a day here in, in May. It’s, it’s just an incredible phenomenon: there’s birds singing and flying around, and they’re all crazy colors. That’s the best.
Feltman: What would you say are kind of big pitfalls to avoid as a person trying to appreciate wildlife? What things should we try not to do so that we don’t cause harm?
Mandelbaum: Leaving things the way you found it is, in the broadest sense, is a really good one. If you flip a log to see if there’s, like, a lizard underneath it, flip it back. Don’t pick wild flowers. Just general “be nice to nature and nature will be nice to you back.” This is more for your own safety, but definitely just follow the rules of the park and obey the law. One thing that I found [laughs] is really nice in New York City is that when you do this enough, you eventually get to know a lot of the folks who work in conservation and for the city and, you know, a lot of the folks who are around, and being friends with them opens up more opportunities to look for nature and wildlife.
There’s a lot of really cool nature groups. Most cities have at least some birding clubs. Some of them have groups that are specific—if, you know, you are queer or a person of color, you might be able to find a community of folks who are going out every day looking at, you know, birds and wildlife and plants and things like that. And for me the community has been probably my favorite part of it. Just—I’ve made so many friends simply by going outside all the time and looking at interesting things, and I would encourage other folks to, you know, open up their hearts and minds to all the other weirdos out here looking at the world.
Feltman: So we’ve talked about, you know, how interesting it is that there’s so much diversity here, including stuff we’ve introduced. What about things we’ve introduced that are not so good?
Mandelbaum: Humans have the ability to alter ecosystems in a way that most other animals can’t, and with us we will sometimes move things around the world that can cause outsized negative impacts. The place where some of these invasive insect infestations started, some of them started in New York City because of the amount of shipping that happens here. Some of the most aggressive invasive plants—the bittersweet, for example, the Asiatic bittersweet, started because it was a pretty plant sold at a, a nursery here in New York City.
We see the effects of climate change here on a daily basis. A lot of the plants and animals that we see in New York City would not have been able to survive here about 100 years ago and are responding to a combination of warming temperatures and human-altered—habitat alteration. You know, while here in cities we have a lot of biodiversity that’s not what people, like, implicitly want. Like, a lot of what they’re trying to do is, like, create these vast lawn monocultures. And so in a lot of places the presence of humans will actually reduce biodiversity. It’s our duty and our responsibility that we use our ability to alter habitats to conserve them and make sure we’re living in concert with the world, and, you know, good nature is good for everybody.
Feltman: Yeah, well, Ryan, thank you so much for chatting with us about your book and for showing us all around your home park. Would you remind our listeners and viewers what your book is called?
Mandelbaum: Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me. I am the author of Wild NYC. You can purchase it wherever books are sold or, of course, Bookshop.org to support local booksellers. So yeah, Wild NYC, and thank you so much again.
That’s all for today’s episode. You can learn more about exploring urban environments in Ryan’s book, wild NYC, and don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel and don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel to see all of the cool stuff Ryan and I saw during the chat you just heard.
We will be back on Monday. We’re taking a break from our usual news roundup format while I’m out of the office, but we’ve got a special dip into the SciAm archives for you to enjoy. Spoiler alert, it features a super scientific hunt for psychics. I definitely recommend checking it out.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feldman, along Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura, Shayna Possess and Aaron Shattuck fact check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news for Scientific American.
This is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend.