Red-Tails in Love (eBook)

Excerpt from the PrologueFalling in Love
Loving helps us to discern, to discriminate. The bird-lover in a wood at once distinguishes the twittering of different species, which to ordinary people sound the same.
MARCEL PROUST

Scene One
The Bird Register

If it is possible to fall in love with a thing, I believe I fell in love with the Bird Register the day I first opened it. The emotions were familiar: the same feeling of excitement, of undeserved luck, the mildly deluded sensation that a new kind of happiness was just around the corner, the certainty that life was about to divide forever into a before and after.
The Loeb Boathouse, a nondescript building located at the east end of Central Park's rowboat lake, is where the Register resides, though not always in the same place. During the years I've known it, the Bird Book, as it is often called, has lived
on the frozen-yogurt bar, on a shelf behind it, and on the cafeteria counter where the little packets of sugar, mayonnaise, mustard, and grape jelly are kept. Currently it may be found behind the podium where reservations are taken for the Boathouse Caf, a private restaurant. It may have moved again by the time you read this, but keep looking. It's sure to be there, somewhere, sitting right out in the open as if it were an inconsequential thing instead of a local tribe's central treasure.
I remember casually picking up the plain, blue canvas loose-leaf notebook with its sloppily hand-lettered legend on the front cover: CENTRAL PARK BIRD REGISTER AND NATURE NOTES: ENJOY BUT PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE. I opened it for a quick glance at its contents. Then, with that greedy feeling one gets after cautiously tasting some unpromising new dish and discovering it to be delicious, I stood there devouring page after page.
I had known there were robins and sparrows and blue jays in Central Park. I had even seen a warbler or two on occasion. Now I read of owls and snipes, goshawks and scarlet tanagers, flycatchers, vireos, kinglets, and twenty, thirty species of warbler--all, it appeared, more accessible than in any wild forest or meadow.
Squirrels, rats, and dogs were the only mammals I had encountered in my past visits to the park. Here were raccoons and woodchucks and bats. And snapping turtles laying eggs. And bullfrogs croaking at dawn. And butterflies and dragonflies. And so much more, all to be found at such intriguing locations as the Humming Tombstone, Willow Rock, the Oven, Muggers Woods, the Point, the Azalea Pond. Where were these places? I wanted to find them. They weren't on any Central Park map.
The detailed observations, notations, exhortations, invitations, descriptions, maps, diagrams, even poems in the Bird Register gave me a tantalizing glimpse not only of the unexpected wildlife treasures of Central Park but of a community as well. Who were these people? I longed to know them, to learn their secrets. And there was the Bird Register right out in the open. 'Don't be an eavesdropper,' its voices seemed to be saying. 'Come and join us, come and learn.'

Scene Two
Into the Woods

Everyone in the birdwatching tribe knows Sarah Elliott. A trim, redheaded, trenchant woman in her sixties, Sarah once roamed the park with a different band of Regulars from those active today. She remains a vital link with the past, for it was she who started the Bird Register in the first place.
A native of Chicago, Sarah was not solidly hooked on birds until she moved to New York in the early 1960s. There she began birdwatching in earnest, learning to identify birds in the company of some of the city's top birders of the time: Richard Harrison, Dick Plunkett, Bert Hale. Central...