Bird of the Year 2024
By Keith Michael
SAVE THE DATE. In celebration of National Bird Day, Keith Michael will do a live reading of the Bird of the Year Awards 2024 (with improvisations) in Hudson River Park, Sunday, January 5, 10:00 am at “Millie’s Bench,” the fifth pair of benches north of the West 11th Street entrance. Bring your own hot chocolate.
Thank you for donning thermal layers to join me here at “Millie’s Bench” in Hudson River Park for the 19th Annual West Village Bird of the Year Awards 2024: The Millies! Welcome to these fine-feathered festivities. The awards were dubbed “The Millies” in honor of my uncooperative birding accomplice in the West Village, a singular, red and white Pembroke Welsh Corgi. This is the fourth ceremony without Miss Millie’s unscripted interruptions. Everyone, please let out a resounding “Awooooo” in her memory and as thanks to The Village View for continuing to host this annual neighborhood celebration!
EXTRALIMITAL. This was one of Millie’s least favorite categories because, to her, Extralimital meant that She Wasn’t There. Since 2024 has been my first complete free-range year since voluntarily graduating from an academic schedule, opening up this category to new birds from forays to Maine, Illinois, California, The Netherlands, Argentina, and Antarctica makes this award both super-competitive and practically superfluous. I’ve confessed before that “I love the bird I’m with” so picking just one new favorite bird out of all of these new destinations seems unfair. However, even though she loathed this category, Millie’s specter from the great beyond is twisting my arm to decide. I’ll at least choose the winner from a little closer to home. Just after Thanksgiving, an improbable coloring box bird from Texas showed up on a fire escape feeder overlooking a decrepit cemetery in Jersey City: a rainbow-colored male Painted Bunting.
NOT A BIRD. There was an extravagant range of contenders, including local whales, seals, foxes, and Central Park coyotes. Many people considered it odd, but I traveled to Champaign, Illinois to be privy to the confluent emergence of the 13- and 17-year periodic cicada broods which hasn’t happened since 1803! Standing amidst trillions of thumb-sized bugs whizzing about and slamming into me with the shrill whine of a #6 Train pulling into the Union Square station was thrilling. Then there was a surprise blue-tailed Five-lined Skink—I’d never seen this eastern lizard—caught sunning itself on the rocks at State Line Lookout along the New Jersey Palisades while I was ogling the resident Peregrine Falcon pair. But I’m going to give the laudatory shoutout to an NYC resident: a cheeky Raccoon who photobombed a Great and Snowy Egrets rave at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Queens.
REALLY NOT A BIRD. As an addendum to the NOT A BIRD award, 2024 was notable for two once-in-a-lifetime celestial events: the great solar eclipse of April 8th reflected in Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio, and the once-in-80,000-years appearance of the Tsuchinshan-Atlas Comet, a smudge in the clear sky over Albany. Nevertheless, I will remember this year fervently for my first time seeing and photographing the Milky Way soaring over the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Maine.
CUTEST BIRD OF THE YEAR. The wings up winner of this year’s gold medal goes to the Atlantic Puffins of Machias Seal Island in Maine. With hundreds of these charismatic chonks pattering only feet in front of the viewing blind windows, tap dancing on the roof, or helicoptering by, I will be endeared to these northern orange-billed clowns forever.
JUST BECAUSE or I’M PRETTY AND I KNOW IT. I’ll just cut to the chase to name a handsome, single bird that I spent the most hours viewing over multiple afternoons this fall: a wayward American White Pelican who graced Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge’s East Pond.
FEMALE BIRD OF THE YEAR. The colorful plumage of many male birds inspires lavish attention but the soothing subtleties of the females’ attire deserve equal recognition. We should find these ladies as stunning as the male birds who woo them. The winning runway look goes to a Ms. Bobolink who walked the walk this fall on Governor’s Island.
TWO BY TWO. Equal contenders for the Owl of the Year award were a hide-and-seek pair of Long-eared Owls and the charming monkey faces of a Barn Owl pair. Owling protocol prohibits me from disclosing their NYC locations. However, this year’s citation goes to a mirror-image pair of American Avocets—long-legged, black, white and peachy beauties, who also plied Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge’s East Pond for several weeks.
OWL OF THE YEAR. It’s a Great Horned Owl with two cuddle-toy owlets who out-owled any competitors. Again, viewed responsibly at an undisclosed location.
MILLIE’S (NEARLY) WEST VILLAGE NEW BIRD OF THE YEAR. “Nearly” making it to the West Village was a handsome Blue Grosbeak adorning a scroungy corner plot off of East 3rd Street and First Avenue, an always-elegant Lincoln’s Sparrow who spent several weeks foraging a stone’s-throw from Fifth Avenue on LaGuardia Place, and a coterie of Purple Sandpipers that spent the winter gorging on the low-tide barnacles of Hudson River Park’s Piers 25 and 26.
NEW NYC BIRD OF THE YEAR. Four new birds were seen within New York City. All four of these were “birders’ birds” where one sees a Rare Bird Alert, researches how to get there, goes there, and there’s the bird. These runners-up were a long-necked Western Grebe cruising the Arthur Kill off the western end of Staten Island, a black and white Pacific Loon seen from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn on an eye-wateringly freezing January day, and a western, dark Swainson’s Hawk harassing pigeons over Brooklyn’s Sunset Park Municipal Recycling Center. I’m giving this year’s kudos to a flibbertigibbet who deigned to pose for up close views in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park: an off-course from the west coast, shimmering Rufous Hummingbird.
BIRD(S) OF THE YEAR 2024. And the winners are: Penguins, Penguins, Penguins! Having seen Gentoo, Magellanic, Adelie, Chinstrap, and, drum roll, please, Emperor Penguins, all in one year, all in their natural, end-of-the-world habitats is still surreal to me. The brutal beauty of where these birds call home matched with their easily anthropomorphized, upright countenance froze me in place with a deep, melancholic awe and joy.
This brings down the curtain on the 2024 “Millies.” As well as this handful of award-winners, tens of thousands of other birds that call NYC home, or have been tourists during this very birdy year, deserve personal, heroic shout outs. Go out and see them whenever and wherever you can.
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All Photos by Keith Michael.
IN MEMORIAM
Let’s take a moment of silence for the passing of two inspirational giants in NYC’s avian diadem. The city is a lonelier place without them.
The Bald Eagle “Rover” who grew up in Brooklyn, then moved to the environs of Central Park as an adult, met his untimely demise in a collision with a car on the Henry Hudson Parkway.
“Flaco” the Eurasian Eagle Owl escapee from the Central Park Zoo, who after more than a year of internationally acclaimed freedom in Central Park fatefully succumbed to rodenticide poisoning.
