[BCNnet] New York Times article on migration and collision monitoring from Empire State Building

[Jill Niland]

>From Jill Niland, Chicago

86 Floors Up, No Elevator Required
By JAMES BARRON

Published: October 7, 2004

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."








-- 
Jill Niland
cdicjill@onebox.com - email
(773) 880-1307 office   (773) 218-4153 cellular