Bird #115

By Keith Michael

Seeing eye to eye with a Horned Grebe. Photo by Keith Michael.

Giving a bird a number, like a marathon runner, is a curious thing, but recently, I saw my 115th bird species in the West Village: Horned Grebe. Pop the champagne.

My Local Patch extends roughly from Hudson River Park’s Gansevoort Peninsula to the north, Pier 25 to the south, Seventh Avenue to the east, and the Hudson River to the west. True, these wobble around the official boundaries of the West Village, yet they define what I consider my neighborhood birding turf.

Keeping a list of bird species seen is an esoteric form of collecting akin to counting the number of Adirondacks high peaks climbed, the number of steps walked in a day, or the number of states or countries visited. Unlike salt-and-pepper shakers or stamps, there’s nothing tangible that one is collecting. Nonetheless, it’s a way of organizing time, experiences, and memories. Listing birds seems even more rarefied because it’s primarily a record of the satisfaction of identifying one kind of bird as being different from another. Even more ephemeral, seeing and counting a single bird is a proxy for its entire species—the equivalent of meeting one new person and boasting that you’re now bosom buddies with the entire human race.

Bird #115, that Horned Grebe, is a fairly small, duck-like water bird which only appears around New York City during the winter months. When we see them, they’re basically blackish on top and white underneath with fiery red eyes. We rarely see them start to molt into their namesake summer breeding plumage when their necks flame red and they sport dashing orange “horns” in intimidating swathes behind their eyes. As a diving bird, keeping track of one when you do see it can be challenging. Once they go down seeking aquatic tidbits, they may pop back up far from where they were last seen. It wasn’t so unusual that one might appear in the Hudson River at the end of Gansevoort Peninsula, but I’d never seen one here before.

I’m frequently asked, “What’s the rarest, or what’s your favorite bird that you’ve seen in the West Village?” Posit that I hate these questions. Easily, the rarest was Bird #103, a Couch’s Kingbird that showed up in December 2014. This gray-headed, yellow-breasted, and olive-backed bird is supposed to be in Mexico, but somehow it time-traveled to a balcony in the West Village and hung out in the neighborhood for weeks. A first for New York State, it attracted hordes of birders with their magnum lenses, comically flocking from views of the bird’s favorite perches from Abingdon Square to West 11th Street to Bleecker Playground, and back. Another rarity-contender was Bird #88, a Red-necked Phalarope in August 2013 that chose to linger in the pile field north of Pier 40. Phalaropes, dainty shorebirds known for spinning in circles in the water to stir up their meals as well as the unusual fact that the females’ plumage out-shines the males, do occasionally migrate through NYC from their summers in Alaska to their wintering grounds off of Chile in South America. Seeing one briefly in the West Village felt like a brush with a superstar. My Favorite? I’ll do a politician’s dodge to that question.

Of course, Bird #1 was memorable, as I frequently reference in my annual Bird of the Year Awards: House Finch. Now nearly 20 years ago, I still remember standing on the northeast corner at the intersection of West 4th and West 12th Streets, looking diagonally across to a small tree, seeing this chortling pink bird, and thinking that I should start keeping a list of the different kinds of birds that I see in the neighborhood. Early on, it was fairly easy to keep adding new birds to The List, basically keeping pace with my blossoming identification abilities. After studying numerous field guides, May 2014 added nine new species of brightly colored Warblers in only three weeks. Then there was a dry spell after 2014, with no new birds except for a flyover Mute Swan pair, up until the pandemic. The unexpected boon of spending more quality time outside during the spring 2020 lockdown added four new birds within weeks: #105 Blue-headed Vireo, #106 Orchard Oriole, #107 Warbling Vireo, and #108 Veery. Aren’t their names beguiling?

Since then, I’ve already featured four of my New West Village Birds here in The Village View, the catwalk of six new birds in 2023: #109 Osprey, #110 Marsh Wren, #112 Rusty Blackbird, and #114 Purple Sandpiper. A bright yellow, orange-capped Palm Warbler (Bird #111) was a surprise. Spotted on the lawn in Hudson River Park, the eye-opener was not due to the rarity of the bird, but because I discovered that even though I’d seen Palm Warblers bebopping around the neighborhood for years, even written about them, I’d never added it to The List. Happy Day! How many other birds might I have overlooked listing? Bird #113, an Ash-throated Flycatcher—frankly, a dingy sort of celebrity—became a regular for more than a week that December, beckoning handfuls of birdwatchers at a time to the Arthur W. Strickler Triangle between Bank and Bethune Streets. Find it and they will come.

What new birds would I really like to see in the coming weeks? Seriously, any new bird will do. A dumpling, long-billed American Woodcock must be loitering under a bush within the West Village blocks, and, surely, a Bald Eagle has winged over Perry Street sometime when I wasn’t looking. I just need to see them myself so that I can add them to My List.