Last chance to see these birds...

Though we expect them to return someday, Inwood's bald eagles are due to leave New York City any day now.

In the meantime, they're becoming excellent flyers and are really fun to watch. The Rangers, including yours truly, are putting on daily eagle programs at 2 pm, and sometimes at 11 am as well. The birds are easy to find, so we can almost guarantee that participants will be able to see a bald eagle. In New York City.

Click here for directions to Inwood Hill Park and the nature center.

What's in the water

We received this message from the Parks' Natural Resources Group late last week:

"We had a bona fide manatee sighting in the Hudson River heading North. This particular animal has been making his way north up the coastline with sightings reported first at 23rd Street and then later at 125th (40.81826 N - 73.96201 W). On both occasions it was observed at the surface adjacent to the bulkhead and appeared to be heading further north up the river. As you can imagine, we are very anxious about hearing about our wayward visitor... The animal has been described as approx. 10 feet in length and has barnacles on its dorsal surface. If you could both spread the word to anyone who may be in the vicinity to keep their eyes open. We are looking for photo-documentation of the animal and wish to be advised of any sightings immediately."

Since manatees' range is usually limited to peninsular Florida, and occasionally as far north as Virginia, this particular animal is either: a) a psychopathic vagrant (use caution) or b) a manatee real-estate agent, getting in early on the New York waterfront's global-warming transformation into a sub-tropical mangrove swamp.

Heat island

Streetsblog posted this satellite image of NYC earlier today (courtesy of NASA's Earth Observatory). They remarked on the obvious difference in temperatures between parks and urbanized areas. I'd also like to point out the streets (like 125th St. in Harlem and Flatbush in Brooklyn) that show up clearly as white-hot lines through neighborhoods. Thank internal combustion engines for that phenomenon: cars, trucks, and buses can heat up the air immediately around them by dozens of degrees on a hot day if they're idling in traffic with the a/c on.

I rode my bike to work in Central Park on Wednesday, day one of the recent heat wave. Busy streets full of traffic, like Park Avenue in Midtown, were substantially warmer than adjacent streets with less traffic, and Belvedere Castle in Central Park was the least hot of all (the weather station there still reported 101 degrees of Fahrenheit yesterday).

Air conditioning hurts the situation as much as it feels good, since a/c units blast waste heat outside in order to make a building or a vehicle cooler. I was therefore not overjoyed when I rode past a large department store whose open doors were refrigerating an entire city block on my way home that afternoon. I'm pretty sure you can make out that building's HVAC unit as the bright-white pixel west of Roosevelt Island on the map above.

The Central Park S'more Inferno

This past weekend, a few of us Urban Park Rangers helped out at a Backpacker magazine campout on Central Park's Great Lawn. The campers, mostly 30-something adults with a few young families, hiked to the 120-foot summit of the Great Hill from various subway-station trailheads in the northern end of the park. Once there, they received freebie sleeping bags and other prizes from the magazine and its sponsors, as well as a catered dinner, before a ranger-led night hike.

As one of the participants put it, "it wouldn't be a camping trip if something didn't go wrong." But the immaculately landscaped setting of Central Park, where every last rock was placed by the well-laid plans of Olmstead and Vaux, and every plant is planted and pruned by an army of gardeners, there seemed to be little room for the unexpected. We (the rangers) would stay up in shifts to guard the campsite against roaming vagrants, bathrooms nearby would be open all night, and the freshly-mown lawn that lay under our tents is a barren wasteland for roaming critters. It was slightly warm for outdoor sleeping, but that can hardly be termed as something going wrong. But if it were, then we discovered a solution at 2 am.

That's when the goddamn lawn sprinklers went off. One of them emerged from the ground beneath my tent, which made for a damp and loud wake-up call. In the next hour, as soon as one sprinkler went dry, another sprung up elsewhere. Eventually, every tent on the hill was either awake, wet, or relocated.

Luckily, most people seemed amused by the ordeal. Or so it seemed to me as I wandered around in early-morning stupor, trying and mostly failing to redirect the jets of water away from the tents. A real camping experience? In Central Park, it was.

Bizarre flying cubes in Prospect Park

Under the ruse of a movie shoot, a mysterious and well-organized cabal released these luminous cubes into the air above Prospect Park a few weeks ago. Vaguely evocative of the park's blinking fireflies, the cubes produced a pleasantly alluring psychological effect to attract dozens of curious bystanders.




The cubes began to advance northward, towards downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan beyond. But to what diabolical purpose? Perhaps they are behind the inexplicable fad of bottled water from Fiji.





In this last photograph (completely undoctored), a cube glows brightly as it prepares to suck in a cyclist. I made haste to arrange my own escape before I could document or witness the gruesome outcome.

What New York can learn from Houston

For most of last year, I lived in Houston, Texas, a city famous for instructive examples of what not to do in the realms of urban planning and conservation.

But Houston, which has endured a comeuppance of regular floods for decades, is finally doing something innovative to improve the water quality of its bayous, reduce the risk of flooding, and provide new parks and trails for its residents - all in one project.

Project Brays is a venture of the Harris County Flood Control District and the Army Corps of Engineers. Brays Bayou traverses the southern edge of central Houston, from the Third Ward to Tom Delay's hometown of Sugar Land. For much of its length, the bayou is paved under concrete, (a la the Los Angeles River), because the Corps of Engineers once believed that the best way to deal with floodwaters was to carry them as quickly as possible to the ocean.

Unfortunately, paved surfaces are more a part of the problem than a part of the solution. Before Houston overwhelmed them, the prairies and riparian forests that once thrived in the bayou's watershed absorbed and slowly released stormwaters into the waterway. But paved surfaces sent rainwater straight to the bayou, which overflowed more and more frequently as the city grew. When the bayou itself was paved, the watershed lost its last vestiges of natural vegetation and absorption capacity. Needless to say, the Corps has been forced to acknowledge and correct its mistakes.

Now, Harris County and the Corps are taking a more holistic view of flood control. Project Brays is acquiring the most flood-prone private property and linking together a string of new green spaces along the bayou that will double as cachement basins during storms. A vegetation management program will re-introduce riparian plants and trees to intercept and absorb stormwater, mitigate Houston's intense heat island, and provide new wildlife habitat. And the new retention basins will double as parks with recreational facilities for surrounding neighborhoods.

These projects will also improve water quality in the region's waterways, since the stormwaters will have more chances to filter through the ground before they drain into the bayou and Galveston Bay.

New York's watersheds and stormwater systems (see my previous post) are very different from Houston's. But there are plenty of similarities, too, and the elegant solution of Project Brays is certainly worth admiring.

New York's regimented bureaucracy seems often to obstruct interdisciplinary problem-solving like this, but maybe the shame of being showed up by Houston (and Dallas, and Los Angeles, and others) will spur this city to action.

Other watershed restoration and flood control projects:

• Los Angeles River Project
  
• Willamette River (Portland, OR) Renaissance
  
• Trinity River (Dallas) Corridor Project
  

The new watersheds

Every day that I ride my bike to work from Brooklyn, the Hudson River greenway bike path takes me past the huge North River sewage treatment plant in Harlem. There's a number of interesting things about this place - the state park on its roof, for instance, with picnic areas, playing fields and swimming pools - but today I fancied to think of it as the mouth of New York City's man-made wastewater river. Or one of the mouths, anyhow.

A little bit of background - we've been doing a lot of bald eagle programs at Inwood now that the birds are flying around the park, and I've been asking participants for ways they might be able to help these new New Yorkers. I try to get them to name ways they can improve water quality, since the eagles rely on healthy fish for food, and the Hudson River's pollution was the main factor that drove the bald eagles away from the city a hundred years ago. But it's been surprising how little people know about where their water goes beyond the drain or the gutter.

Eventually, it all goes into the river. But first, wastewater from Inwood, Washington Heights, and the rest of the western half of Manhattan above Greenwich Village drains to the treatment plant beneath Riverbank State Park. During dry weather, the plant treats 125 million gallons of wastewater a day, and the plant is designed to handle up to 340 million gallons during storms, according to the DEP. New York City's entire system of treatment plants are designed to handle 1.8 billion gallons of wastewater a day from the five boroughs. To put that into context, the Delaware River carries about 5.3 billion gallons of water past Trenton, New Jersey on a typical June day. So New York's sewers are a respectably-sized watershed, with a delta of fourteen mouths spread out across the harbor, and millions of tributaries in households, streets, and businesses all over the city.

Unfortunately, this is a very polluted watershed, and it floods into the rivers and bays of the region with alarming frequency. Because stormwater from the streets mixes with sewage from homes and businesses, every big rainstorm strains the city's treatment capacity. An inch of rain falling on the city's 120,000 acres produces 3.14 billion gallons of water. Some of that gets absorbed into the ground (the rain that falls on parks and street trees, for instance), but much of it ends up going down gutters and into the sewers. Thus, all the nasty stuff on the city's streets, from gasoline to household chemicals to dog crap, washes away with every storm, mixes with our raw sewage, overwhelms treatment plants, and ends up untreated in the region's waterways. Riverkeeper estimates that an average of half a billion gallons of sewage get discharged from overflowing sewers every week.

Everyone who sends water down a drain is culpable, to some degree, for creating wastewater. Individuals can make a huge difference by minimizing water use during storms and by being vigilant against dumping nasty stuff on the streets and down the gutters. For information on what the city government might do to fix this problem, take a look at Riverkeeper's website.

The "salt marsh"

One of my favorite areas of the park is what we call the "salt marsh" - though it's really just a tidal mud flat with a few marsh grasses around its riprapped edges. The nature center's porch overlooks the marsh and offers good birding. We have an egret that hunts for fiddler crabs during low tides, an occasional green-backed heron or cormorant, and views of the bald eagles' hack platform.

The "marsh" is actually a silted-up old course of the first United States Ship Canal (see previous post), but still, it gives an idea of what the edges of Manhattan used to be like. The mats of reeds typical of most marshes are restricted to only a few spots along the edge of Inwood's marsh, thanks to big boulders placed as riprap around the edges of the water. This is too bad - those grasses do a great deal in other marshes to filter out all sorts of pollution. All too often, fast-food litter and dog sewage from the park's fields wash away unimpeded into the marsh and the river beyond.

Still, the mud flats provide a good enough refuge not only for birds, but also for bird food like perch, crabs, oysters, and smaller fish called mummichogs.

The eagles, by the way, are just starting to fly off the platform and around the park. I spotted one last Friday gliding above the soccer field by Shorakapok rock.