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NYTimes Article - birding on the Empire State Building/collisions

From:

Denise Ryan

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Maryland Birds & Birding

Date:

Thu, 7 Oct 2004 11:39:23 -0400

86 Floors Up, No Elevator Required

October 7, 2004
 By JAMES BARRON 

On the observation deck at the Empire State Building,
Robert DeCandido is hard to miss. As the crowds elbow by
just after sunset, he is the one who is looking not down,
but up. 

He is the one holding the counter with the thumb tab that
can be punched when he sees a bird flying by. Dr.
DeCandido, who has studied bird migrations in Nepal,
Thailand, Malaysia, Turkey, Spain and Israel, is counting
the birds that flap, float or flutter by his 86th-floor
perch between sunset and 11:45 p.m., when the observation
deck closes. 

His tally of birds heading south is the first ever
conducted at the Empire State Building and the first step
in a research project he hopes will lead to answers to at
least two basic questions: Are migrating birds attracted to
the bright lights of tall buildings at night? And, if so,
what keeps migrating the birds from slamming into the
buildings? 

After spending every night since Aug. 15 at the Empire
State Building, Dr. DeCandido, a researcher who is 45 and
was an urban park ranger with the Parks Department from
1991 to 2002, still does not have an answer. 

Some nights, his thumb gets a workout. One night in late
August, he found himself in "a whirling vortex of birds,"
so many that their chirping drowned out the hum of the city
and the chatter of the tourists. He counted 400 birds
between 10:30 p.m. and 11:45 p.m. 

Other nights, he sees fewer migrants than that - and a
peregrine falcon, which does not go as far as the smaller
birds, if it migrates at all. Usually, it arrives minutes
after the sun goes down, circling the illuminated tower
above the gift shop and landing on a ledge. But some nights
the falcon is as late as 10:20. "Does it wake up in the
middle of the night and decide, 'I'll go find a snack?' "
he asked on a night when it appeared early. 

Sometimes, two or three falcons appear. And one night
recently, he and Mark Kolakowski, another experienced
bird-watcher who sometimes joins him on the observation
deck, saw something they said was a first: an osprey
migrating over land. After doing some checking the next
morning, Dr. DeCandido said that the nocturnal migration of
ospreys had been documented only once before, in Malta in
the 1970's. 

And those were just the birds they could identify. There
were dozens that did not fly close enough to be recognized.


"Great blue herons, you can see," he said, looking through
his binoculars. "Cuckoos, you can identify because of the
spotting of their tails. Beyond that, it's size classes."
In other words, he will say he saw a bird "the size of a
warbler" - about 5 inches long at most, or smaller than a
thrush (8 to 10 inches) or a common nighthawk (12 to 14
inches). He can also identify birds by the speed and rhythm
of their wingbeats. 

"They're very aware of the building," he said. "They seem
to get attracted to the light. They'll circle once or
twice. They get tired of fighting the headwind on nights
when there is one." 

The birds followed a similar pattern last spring. In May,
he and other birders counted more than 3,000 migrating
birds in five weeks in late April and May. One night, he
said, more than 800 flew by in a little more than three
hours. 

Dr. DeCandido began his nightly count thinking that
migrating birds crashed into with the Empire State Building
every night. He and Deborah J. Allen, a photographer and
researcher with the Linnaean Society of New York who worked
on the spring count, worried that the lights of the Empire
State Building attracted birds that would then crash into
the building. Dr. DeCandido said he had seen birds die when
peregrine falcons swooped down and grabbed them in their
talons - nature at its rawest - but had not seen a single
bird hit the building. 

He and Ms. Allen traced the first newspaper report of birds
slamming into a tall structure to 1887, when the torch of
the year-old Statue of Liberty was the tallest landmark in
New York. "Almost as soon as the lights were kept on
overnight on Liberty's torch, birds began colliding with
it," Dr. DeCandido and Ms. Allen said in a research paper
that they wrote after their spring count and submitted to a
birders' journal. Birds that died at the statue were taken
to the American Museum of Natural History, where the
chairman of the ornithology department was an expert on
birds' flying into lighthouses. He had published a
scientific paper on it. 

That led to a forerunner of Dr. DeCandido's nighttime work.
A 19th-century Princeton professor, staring at the moon
through a telescope, noticed birds flying across his field
of vision. When the natural history museum heard about
that, a young museum employee, Frank M. Chapman, was
assigned to watch for birds at night. (He went on to found
what became Audubon magazine.) 

After their work in the spring, Dr. DeCandido and Ms. Allen
concluded that the Empire State Building is not a
significant hazard to migrating birds. Still, Dr. DeCandido
wonders what happens after the observation deck closes at
11:45 p.m. "Something qualitatively different happens later
on foggy nights," he said. 

That is a point echoed by Greg Butcher, the director of
bird conservation for the National Audubon Society. He has
not been involved with Dr. DeCandido's study. On foggy
nights, Mr. Butcher said, birds tend to become disoriented
and swirl around bright lights on tall buildings. Then, he
said, "they run into whatever obstacles are in the
neighborhood." 

As Dr. DeCandido discovered early in his research, five
hours a night on the observation deck requires a strong
neck. Looking up at the sky through binoculars can be
tiring, he said one night recently. 

Dr. DeCandido, who is allowed to take a limited number of
guests on his nightly excursions, has put out the word
through e-mail messages to bird-watchers to meet at a
McDonald's on Fifth Avenue. 

The Empire State Building allows the bird-watchers to enter
without paying the $12 admission fee, and building
employees wave when they arrive. One guard calls Dr.
DeCandido "Birdman." 

Before the peregrine falcon arrived, he and Mr. Kolakowski
talked about how they had both attended Regis High School
on the Upper East Side. "He was the biggest jock," Mr.
Kolakowski said. 

Dr. DeCandido said he hated science back then. Later, on a
cross-country trip, he discovered national parks. "I said,
'It would be wonderful to work in a place like this,' " he
recalled. 

That sparked an interest in bird-watching, he said as the
falcon sailed by. 

"That's him," Dr. DeCandido said. 

Carl Howard, a lawyer who had joined the group at
McDonald's, marveled at the falcon's grace. 

A few minutes later, something else flapped by. A bat, Dr.
DeCandido said. "It isn't known in the literature how high
they fly," Mr. Kolakowski said. 

No, Dr. DeCandido said. "They're mammals," he said. "I
don't know that much about mammals." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/07/nyregion/07birds.html?ex=1098163473&ei=1&en=c6ba603b79ba600c