American Scientist

BIRD CITY: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds. Ryan Goldberg. 288 pp. Algonquin Books, 2025. $28.

Journalist Ryan Goldberg’s Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds is a hyperlocal travelogue that embeds the reader in the experience of finding birds in New York City, illustrating how birding can connect us to our home places, even the profoundly urban. Through Goldberg’s explorations, readers meet an impressive flock of characters—both avian and human—that make the city a rewarding place to take up birding.

Organized as a journey through the seasons, the book offers a series of ecology-laced vignettes on what it means for millions of birds and millions of people to share an urbanized landscape. Bird City begins in winter as Goldberg is wrapping up his participation in the Christmas Bird Count (CBC), which is one of the longest-running bird counts in the world, along with an immense flock of volunteers. Through his account of the CBC’s electrifying camaraderie, Goldberg introduces a first taste of the central theme of the book: Birding is so much more than a life-enriching hobby. At its best, the act of birding helps us understand the biological trends and act on the conservation challenges birds face. In response to a passerby’s question about what he was doing, Goldberg reflects about the act of counting: “What were we looking for? Not just birds—or at least not for the mere sake of a sighting. It was for the larger story the birds were telling us.”

In pursuit of that larger story, Goldberg writes about birdy places just blocks from New York landmarks—not quite known for their wildness, yet critical to the species that rely on them: tidal marshes hugging JFK airport, streams winding through the Bronx Zoo, beaches flanking Coney Island, and Prospect Park in the heart of Brooklyn. There, Goldberg discovers joyful encounters with all sorts of birds. “Once I reached the Butterfly Meadow, I found four other birders milling around in the pale light, saying little. We’d all checked BirdCast and knew that more than half a million birds had flown over Brooklyn overnight. More were coming, and their altitude was low. The birds we’d waited all year to see were looking for a place to land.” He later writes, “Over the next couple hours, birders would find 27 warbler species in Prospect Park alone, almost an entire season’s worth compressed into a morning.” Or as a fellow birder called it, an “extreme birdapalooza.”

Bird City doesn’t rest on the adrenaline that comes with witnessing spring migration or finding a rare bird. Goldberg also delves into the ecology of bird life in the Big Apple. After experiencing the “extreme birdapalooza," he muses, “A complex choreography was at play, and I wondered about my role—or the role of my species—in the web of relationships.” To understand this web, Goldberg visits the precious “marginal landscapes” in a city at the crossroads of salt water, freshwater, and forest habitats. At the former Fresh Kills landfill (the Staten Island landfill closed in 2001 and is now in the process of being made into a park, slated to finish in 2037), he recounts how, “On a sunny May morning in 2015, Dick Veit [a seabird researcher and professor] brought his ecology class to ‘the dump,’ as he still called it, and heard an insect-like song. Then another.” What he found was remarkable: grasshopper sparrows had decided that this distinctly unnatural landscape was now an attractive spot to nest; another example of how human and the wild can coexist in the city.

That’s not to say it’s all positive. Through encounters with birders, scientists, and activists, Goldberg shares the dangers of landscapes peppered with rodenticide, light pollution, and glass-clad buildings. He tails Melissa Breyer, a volunteer for Project Safe Flight, which is a collision-monitoring program of NYC Bird Alliance, who walks a daily route around the skyscrapers of southern Manhattan during migration season to monitor for birds that have struck the vast windowscapes. He goes to the Rockaways, where he talks with Chris Allieri, the founder of the NYC Plover Project, which calls for protections for piping plovers, who need areas of the shore, free of humans, in order to mate and lay their eggs. Through these encounters with people attending to birds in danger, Goldberg helps readers understand complex conservation issues concretely and empathetically.

Even as the list of dangers grows, Goldberg builds a hopeful path, from sharing a city law requiring new buildings to use bird-safe glass and brigades protecting vulnerable chicks on crowded beach days, to stumbling upon a school group gathered on banks of the Bronx River for their day of action chanting, “Protect the egrets!” and “We are the water protectors!”

Bird City is an accessible story about birding that even nonbirders can appreciate, thanks to Goldberg’s relaxed, conversational approach. The book is a window into just how much bird life passes through the city and how connecting with them helps us understand and connect with the precious lands at the crossroads of salt water, freshwater, and forest habitats. Whether you’re a city dweller or not, Goldberg provides inspiration for how to move birding beyond a chase for the next bird to a powerful way to make sure wildlife and humans can coexist in our increasingly urbanized world.