• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Read An Issue
  • About
  • Advertising Information
  • Where to Find the Reader
  • Subscribe to our Mailing List
  • Contact Us

Park Slope Reader

  • The Reader Interview
  • Eat Local
  • Dispatches From Babyville
  • Park Slope Life
  • Reader Profile
  • Slope Survey

Local Ecology

Best of Summer – Our Friends, The Trees: How Trees Make Brooklyn Better (2018)

August 5, 2020 By Ryan Gellis Filed Under: Local Ecology, Outside Tagged With: ryan gellis

An allee of London Planes

We take for granted the beauty of these verdant towers, how we come to expect their shade and fail to acknowledge their constant toil as the city’s respiring lungs and filtering kidneys.

The first time I climbed a tree, in the summer of 2008, I was working a seasonal job for the Parks Department. My job was to muscle logs and stacked branches into a chipper, but a fringe benefit was working with the climbers and pruners. These professional arborists spend their days up in Brooklyn’s urban tree canopy inspecting, pruning and sometimes removing trees. For a young guy whose interest in comic books and environmental science never really seemed to intersect, here I had found my real-life superheroes. For several weeks in the swampy heat of July, I would finish my wood-chipping route at a feverish pace to ensure I could carve out time at the end of the day to meet up with a climber, throw a rope up over a high branch and use a technique called hip-thrusting to hump my way into the tree, exploring the otherworldly environment that exists within the sprawling space of a tree’s canopy and the views it affords to those who climb it.

London plane

Five years later I was back in a harness, standing on an upper limb of a London plane tree in the middle of Grand Army Plaza, holding a dead branch in one hand as I sawed it off with the other. Below me traffic was circumnavigating the plaza and above me squirrels were making similar circles around the tree in lusty chase of one another. I was taking a test to become the junior arborist for the Prospect Park Alliance. My new boss was right beside me, dangling comfortably in his harness. I’d passed, he said, in no rush to vacate our lofty perch with views straight down Flatbush Avenue. I realized, from the vantage point of the birds, what a large role trees play in our urban existence. How we take for granted the beauty of their verdant towers, how we come to expect their shade and fail to acknowledge their constant toil as the city’s respiring lungs and filtering kidneys.

By then I was hooked on trees, taking every opportunity to defend their place in our urban environment and teach people more about them. Here’s a fact: the London plane tree, unmistakable when it sloughs off its thin beige and green bark to reveal a slippery smooth new layer, is the most common street tree in the borough of Brooklyn. The ubiquity of this tree in the city is no accident. Street trees suffer from almost every arboreal insult possible, from drought and flood to storm damage, limited growing space and constant assault by speeding vehicles. Few trees are better at withstanding these stressors than the London plane. But they also indicate that the city has a long way to go in making our streets a more habitable environment. Where trees can’t grow neither can people or communities.

Looking up into a Red Oak

The  Mighty Oak 

If street trees are a civil engineer’s answer to mitigating intense weather, then our large parks and urban forests are a naturalist’s haven for maintaining biological diversity and environmental resilience. To say nothing of the way that parks can act as a tincture to calm the soul. Starving artists, disciplined runners, stray cats, role-playing camp kids, dogs pulling their humans, Baby Bjorn-bound mothers, hyperactive chipmunks, stony-faced little-leaguers; Everyone sought respite from their frantic lives in Prospect Park. With all those people it is hard to imagine there is room for between thirty and forty thousand trees in the park. The woodlands represent the only native forest in Brooklyn.  Two hundred years ago, as Brooklyn’s population was booming its ancient woods had mostly disappeared to make room for farms. In fact, when the park was constructed in the middle of the 19th century it was on top of nearly treeless pastureland.  

Now the park’s woodlands are lush with trees, shrubs, and wildlife. The keystone species in our neck of the woods is the oak tree. Oaks come in many sub-species, adapted to specific niches like the marsh-loving willow oak or the red oak which seeks out hilltops. In all cases, the oak is the beginning of a biological chain that stretches from the fungus feeding at its roots to the plants that bask in its diffused sunlight all the way up the chain to the squirrel glutted on acorns or the Redtail hawk feasting on a squirrel.

A perfectly shaped Linden Tree providing shade

American Linden

The balancing act for urban forestry is to harness the vast positive effects of nature’s most beneficial flora while limiting the negative factors a tree can produce. Since every tree has a different profile of benefits it takes a lot of consideration to get it right. A red maple can soak up plenty of water in flood prone areas but its roots can be invasive to nearby homes. The horse chestnut is one of the most efficient carbon dioxide absorbers but its weak wood can peel apart in heavy storms.

A few months back I had to stage a defense for an American linden tree. The Linden is a great shade tree as well as a reliable flower feast for native bees. This one was decades old and its roots were lifting the sidewalk around it. The construction crew wanted to remove it. The homeowners nearby also didn’t like the pollen which littered their stoop every year. I argued to keep it. It was healthy, it was mature enough to finally be making a net contribution to its environment. We ended up saving the tree and putting a ramped sidewalk over the roots. Days later I walked up to the site, sweating under the hot afternoon sun, watching the posse of homeowners and construction workers chatting. I was making a beeline for relief to the same area they were all standing in, under the shade of that very linden tree.

Sugar Maple

In the canopy of a sugar maple

Arboriculture, the cultivation and management of trees, is ever-evolving. Climate change plays its part. Many people know that the state tree of New York is the sugar maple. Not only because I guzzle maple syrup do I love this majestic tree with eye-popping fall foliage and mature bark that evokes the wise and grizzled visage of Dumbledore’s beard. The sugar maple is a foundational part of Northeastern American culture. Literally, sugar maple timber provides much of the framework and flooring for some of the oldest structures in this part of the country. In recent years local sugar maples have been in decline. Its natural defenses consist of growing in places where the winter is cold enough to kill off most of its pests without harming the cold-hardy tree. Brooklyn used to fall more reliably into that temperate zone, but now climate change is shifting the territory of New York’s state tree outside of New York City. 

As we introduce new non-native trees to our city blocks like the Korean mountain ash or the Siberian elm we are also in the process of losing many of our critical native species. American Elms once lined neighborhood blocks, providing shade with sprawling behemoth branches. Then Dutch elm disease decimated the population. The American chestnut used to hold a more important place in our forests than the oak until the chestnut blight changed that. Now invasive pests and fungi are posing serious threats to our maples, oaks, and pines. In a world of unfettered global trade our new normal for ecology is ceaseless change.

For now, Prospect Park still feels like home in my native, ever-changing Brooklyn. Its trees make up an indelible part of my story. Prospect Park just celebrated its 150th anniversary this past fall. Does that make it old by public park standards or young in comparison to the life of an oak tree? Lately, I make it out into the Park less often, mostly losing myself in its interior, finding locations I’ve known and yet still never really discovered. 

Filed Under: Local Ecology, Outside Tagged With: ryan gellis

A First Timer’s Guide To Birdwatching

October 19, 2016 By Annika Andersson Filed Under: Local Ecology Tagged With: BBC, birds, birdwatching, brooklyn bird club, cardinals, ducks, hummingbird, Prospect Park, robins, starlings

Browsing different alternatives online, I was looking for a new Brooklyn experience. I wanted to do an activity involving fresh air and the peace and quiet of nature, as much as allowed by living in the largest city in the U.S.

Luckily Prospect Park, Brooklyn’s giant 585-acre lung, offers plenty of fun from horseback riding to nature walks throughout the fall.

I opted for Brooklyn Bird Club’s (BBC) birdwatching tours. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday morning, a knowledgable guide will lead you through the best birdwatching spots in the park, starting from various entrances. The walks run throughout September, which is migration season, and will be replaced from October and onwards by monthly Sunday walks. Weekly beginner walks continues Saturdays at noon.

Tour leader Tom Stephenson helped identify the different species with a nifty 3D App.
Tour leader Tom Stephenson helped identify the different species with a nifty 3D App.

I have very little previous experience of birdwatching. In fact, my whole experience consists of one single birdwatching excursion during my childhood in Sweden. Because the days are so long during summer, we had to get up at 3am to catch the sunrise, which is when the birds are the most active. I remember the excitement of being up that early, and allowed out in the middle of the night. I also remember the deafening cacophony of what must have been thousands of birds singing their tunes in the magic hour of dawn. I absorbed this new, secret world of sounds in awe, feeling like I’ve entered some kind of a parallel universe.

What I don’t remember, however, is seeing any birds. Perhaps a guided tour under Tom Stephenson’s competent leadership would ensure a visual birdwatching experience this time? At 7:15am on Thursday, August 25, we met at the Grand Plaza entrance of Prospect Park, along with a group of about 12 enthusiastic birdwatchers. Tom kindly lent me a pair of binoculars, and having been briefed about my lack of experience, offered some insights to what we were about to experience.

Apparently, Prospect Park, despite being crammed in between urban concrete, is a birdwatching heaven. Home to over 200 species, an impressive 40-100 species can be spotted in one single walk, although you’re more likely to hit the higher numbers in the spring. One reason for the abundance of birdlife, is that the general westerly component of winds in the U.S. tend to push migrating birds towards the east coast. Since they will resist flying over water, their flight path is often concentrated along the eastern shoreline.

Urban areas without parks offer no place to rest and recharge, which the birds are dependent on, to survive their long journeys. They need the right kinds of shelter and feeding environments, where they can stay for several days to gain enough body fat to continue or recover from their long journey. Sadly, urban areas by the sea without parks become death traps for migrating birds, especially if there are many feral cats.

Prospect Park is one of New York’s 130 Important Bird Areas (IBA) critical for bird conservation, and harbors some species unusual enough to create headlines (in birdwatching circles). Three years ago, the first Brooklyn-nesting Ruby-throated Hummingbird was documented by BBC, although the birds you are likely to spot most frequently are American Robins, European Starlings, Northern Cardinals and House Sparrows. But with Tom being not only an avid birdwatcher, but also the distinguished author of The Warbler Guide, which won the 2014 National Outdoor Book Award in Nature Guidebooks, we set out to find the Warblers.

We walked at a slow pace, and I had the chance to chat a bit with my fellow birdwatchers, who turned out to be a very friendly and welcoming bunch. Many were regulars, and most of them locals, but some were tourists just briefly visiting. Rachel Ramaker, a Dutch girl living in England, had brought her binoculars for the opportunity to birdwatch. In fact, since a set of binoculars is all you need, birdwatching is a great hobby to bring along when traveling. It’s easy to join local networks for a chance to spot new species, although Rachel turned out to be a frequent visitor, as well informed as the locals. Charmed by Park Slope, she said she kept meticulous track of local happenings through the Park Slope Reader.

mail-attachment-4
Black and White Warbler

mail-attachment
Eastern Wood-Pewee

blwwar
Prothonotary Warbler

mail-attachment-2
Chestnut-sided Warbler

 

 

It didn’t take long before we spotted our first birds. Well, to be accurate, it didn’t take long before the group started to see Starlings, Robins, and Cardinals. I couldn’t see anything but blurry leaves, and was surprised to learn that using binoculars requires a bit of a technique. You have to look at one spot, and bring the binoculars up while still looking, Tom instructed, rather than trying to find the spot by circling around with the binoculars.

To me, Tom gave the impression of a bird whisperer. He whistled, they answered, and we watched. He could hear if it was young birds, not yet able to sing as well as their parents, and explained that baby birds deprived of hearing their parents sing will never be able to learn it well later. Some species will even loose the ability completely and sing songs that would be unrecognizable by their own species, making it unlikely for them to ever be able to breed. It’s mainly the male birds who sing in Prospect Park, I learnt, as opposed to the birds in tropical forests, where both males and females sing. This is because tropical birds don’t migrate, so both males and females have to help out defending their territory.

When we got to the lake, Wood Ducks were peacefully gliding by. I learnt that they are the only duck with claws, which they use to climb up high trees, to nest in holes, like owls. The trees help them avoid predators, and at least two pairs of Wood Ducks have successfully raised their young in Prospect Park this season. The list of spotted birds kept growing, and would eventually come to include Double-crested Cormorant, Canada Goose, Mute Swan, Wood Duck, Mallard, Northern Shoveler, Spotted Sandpiper, Rock Dove, Mourning Dove, Chimney Swift, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Eastern Kingbird, Warbling Vireo, Red-eyed Vireo, Blue Jay, Barn Swallow, Tufted Titmouse, Red-breasted Nuthatch, White-breasted Nuthatch, Veery, American Robin, Gray Catbird, European Starling, Cedar Waxwing, Blue-winged Warbler, Yellow Warbler, Chestnut-sided Warbler, Black-throated Green Warbler, Black-and-white Warbler, American Redstart, Northern Waterthrush, Common Yellowthroat, Northern Cardinal, Common Grackle, Baltimore Oriole, House Finch, American Goldfinch and House Sparrow.

An impressive 42 birds were spotted while I practiced maneuvering my binoculars. But it wasn’t in vain. Eventually, I managed to focus on a movement in the leaves, and soon a… wait, could it be… yes, a Blue-Winged Warbler emerged and strutted about in the sun for quite some time, as if to reward me for my struggles, before disappearing back into the leaves. I was surprised at the thrill I felt of getting so close visually to the delicate Warbler.

Will I do it again? Probably! Birdwatching is a great recreational outdoor activity, and the slow pace makes it suitable for all fitness levels. Even I, with a broken ankle in a boot, had no trouble keeping up. My advice to the first timer would be to start with the Saturday beginner walks in the winter, when there are no leaves in the way. Also, this is not the right target group for cute cat stories. Cats are the number one bird killer. Don’t mention your cat!

——

To do: www.prospectpark.org/visit-the-park/things-to-do
Birdwatching: www.prospectpark.org/visit-the-park/things-to-do/birdwatching
Tom’s book on Warblers: press.princeton.edu/titles/9968.html
Goats: www.prospectpark.org/news-events/news/return-goats
BBC: www.brooklynbirdclub.org
Schedule: www.brooklynbirdclub.org/trips.htm

 

All bird images courtesy of Tom Stephenson
Featured image and image of Tom Stephenson courtesy of Annika Andersson

Filed Under: Local Ecology Tagged With: BBC, birds, birdwatching, brooklyn bird club, cardinals, ducks, hummingbird, Prospect Park, robins, starlings

Home Grown

October 12, 2012 By admin Filed Under: Local Ecology

The climate-controlled rooftop greenhouse allows Gotham Greens in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to grow an assortment of greens and herbs year-round.

The climate-controlled rooftop greenhouse allows Gotham Greens in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to grow an assortment of greens and herbs year-round.

Urban farming in New York City is not just another hipster hobby to be added to the list along with home brewing and screen-printing. While your typewriter and sewing machine sit unused in the corner of your room, urban farms are taking over rooftops, abandoned lots, and even truck beds throughout the five boroughs, ranging from the communal to the commercial level, and improving the quality of life city-wide.

One would think that the obvious problem with urban farming — the utter lack of farmland — would be New York City’s big downfall.  However, urban farms in New York City are actually revolutionizing the food network, giving us New Yorkers even more bragging rights.

To combat the space problem, many farmers have taken to rooftop farming, employing hydroponic methods — growing plants in nutrient-rich solutions rather than soil.  Hydroponics has actually increased farming efficiency, requiring less space and water than a traditional farm.  Gotham Greens, located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, boasts producing 20 times as much produce in their rooftop greenhouse than would a traditional farm of the same square footage.

Agricultural engineering has tackled the farmland problem by overcompensating when it comes to controlling traditionally indomitable environmental factors, such as extreme weather and pests.  Gotham Greens coddles their greens and herbs in a rooftop greenhouse using Controlled Environment Agriculture, maintaining ideal growing conditions for their produce and allowing them to provide superior quality produce year-round.

One of the biggest advantages of farming directly in the city is decreased shipping distances.  “Locally grown” has been a buzzword for years, and it’s easy to see why: the benefits are invaluable, especially in a city plagued by food deserts.  Urban farms generate easily accessible produce to the community, all while reducing the carbon footprint.  Local also means fresher. According to Jon Perri, the produce manager of Dean and Deluca, “There’s a demand for certain products that just don’t ship very well.  For example, basil, because basil needs to be stored at a different temperature once it’s harvested than most other produce, so local growing cuts down on the damage of cold storage on basil.”  Talk about being “green,” literally and figuratively.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Johanna Dyer, the environmental benefits of urban farms expand beyond those of providing easy access to local and nutritious food.  “Urban farms can help support wildlife in the area — from migrating birds to butterflies. They also help clean up the city’s rivers and beaches by absorbing rain before it can reach storm drains, preventing runoff pollution and sewage overflows.  On top of that, the added green space cleanses the air, and helps make the city an all-around more enjoyable place to live.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has gotten behind the “going green” trend, instating a package of laws last year to promote the consumption of local food, as well as facilitate the process of starting an urban farm.  These laws allow farmers to forego neighborhood building code restrictions that previously obstructed the construction of rooftop farms.  Farmers also have access to a searchable government database of city-owned property with farming potential, including buildings and empty lots. Besides the environmental and health benefits of encouraging urban farming, commercial farms also create tax revenue for the city.  Says Gotham Greens CEO Viraj Puri, “We’ve got the support of a lot of politicians and elected officials who are really excited about the job creation.  We’ve created 20 full-time jobs.”

Other urban farms remain on the ground and focus on building the community.  Added Value turned the need for quality produce in Red Hook into an opportunity to reach out to the residents.  Since it started laying the groundwork in 2001, Added Value has provided local teens with the chance to learn new skills while promoting social responsibility.  Taqwa Community Farm in the Bronx and Battery Urban Farm in lower Manhattan also teach farm-based education to students of all ages, instilling the ideals of urban farming into the next generation.

The big question about urban farming is of its future.  As the prevalence and promotion of urban farming continue to grow, more and more proposals for urban farms keep popping up around the city, and more people are getting involved in their community gardens.  BrightFarms, an experienced founder of urban farms, is seeking a retail partner for its proposed farm in Sunset Park, Brooklyn to be the largest urban farm in the world.  Likewise, the city’s Economic Development Corporation is in search of private developers to build a much-welcomed farm atop a warehouse in Hunts Point in the Bronx.  Current farms are also looking to expand, like Gotham Greens, which has two new bigger and better greenhouses in the works.

However, despite the countless positive outcomes of urban farming, it is still a fledgling endeavor.  Viraj Puri of Gotham Greens recites the anthem “one step at a time.”  “We’d like to be able to feed more New Yorkers, diversify the products we’re growing, sell to more restaurants, more supermarkets, more farmers markets.  We’re taking it one step at time but we’d definitely like to increase operation, especially in New York.”  With patience, urban farming has the potential to revolutionize food production in this country, and what better guinea pig for such advancement than New York City — a city full of innovative thinkers and veggie-lovers?

Filed Under: Local Ecology

Primary Sidebar

The Spring 2025 Issue is now available

The Reader Community

READER CONTRIBUTORS

Copyright © 2025 · Park Slope Reader