A Bird’s-Eye View of Morgan Mail

 

By Linda Saucerman with Samantha Moller

 

 

Caption: Morgan Mail and adjacent park, Yigal Gelb

 

            “Did you just find a dead bird?” a woman asks me as I pick up what has become my third dead bird of the morning -- a catbird -- and place it inside of a plastic baggy. I answer her in the affirmative and explain that I am a volunteer with NYC Audubon’s Project Safe Flight (PSF), a program that monitors the building collisions of migratory birds throughout the city.

            “I’ve walked this way every day for 10 years on my way to work and I see a lot of dead birds on this street,” says the woman, who gives her name as Kathy. “I thought someone was poisoning them.”

            Curious commuters walking from West 28th Street between 9th and 10th avenues often noticed the carcasses alongside the wall of the Morgan Mail Processing Facility, but it wasn’t until Project Safe Flight volunteers began collecting them in 2002 that people had a chance to ask what was killing all of these strange-looking and beautiful birds.

            Kathy was one of several people who stopped me during my route at Morgan Mail in the spring of 2005. A woman named Heidi also spoke to me, saying that last autumn she was so alarmed by the number of dead birds at Morgan Mail that she called the city to report it as cases of West Nile Virus.

            Answering questions from the public as to why these birds are dying involves a bit of history. To begin with, New York is an ancient migratory path for many bird species making their way from South America to as far north as Canada. In the case of Morgan Mail, the trees from the Chelsea Park across the street make it an enticing stopover for migratory birds. The trees reflected in the opaque windows of Morgan Mail attract the birds to fly over. But instead of landing in what they think is a tree, they hit the windows with such force that they most often die. Many birds are found with their heads split open and their beaks bashed in.

            I have been amazed by the variety of birds that I’ve seen during my collection at this site. While pigeons and sparrows seem to be “street smart” and don’t hit these windows, exotic tourists like Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Northern Parulas, and Red-eyed Vireos don’t seem to make the distinction between a live tree and a reflection. During peak migration in May 2005, I found seven different dead migratory birds in a single morning. I returned that afternoon to find two more.

            Although Morgan Mail is not the only building where these bird collisions occur, it does hold the distinction of being one of the deadliest to migratory birds. PSF volunteers at places like 3 World Financial Center, the Time Life Building, and 1 Liberty Plaza often report finding dead or injured birds. These are big, impressive glass buildings that you might expect would fell a large number of birds. But this past spring it was Morgan Mail that outpaced all other buildings being monitored by PSF. From March 16 to June 23, 2005, volunteers throughout Manhattan and parts of Queens collected over 200 birds. A small percentage of birds were found injured, but a majority of them were dead. Of those dead birds, 76 of them were collected at Morgan Mail, representing almost 40 percent of the total collection.

            A very small number of the birds collected get to have a happy ending. If they’re stunned by their initial collision, and if they’re found by a volunteer soon enough, they can recover in a safe, warm place, like a ventilated brown paper bag under a desk at my office. An injured female hummingbird came out of her daze about two hours after I discovered her. She began buzzing so loudly that my coworkers looked at me funny when my “lunch” began to sound like a spastic bumblebee. I released her that afternoon in Central Park and hoped that the rest of her flight would be a safe one.

            That afternoon I returned to Morgan Mail to find that another bird had smacked into the windows. This one was a dead worm-eating warbler, a songbird that is more petite than a sparrow and with beautiful yellow streaks near its eyes.

            As I picked up the bird, people passed me on the sidewalk as they headed home after a day’s work. Like many New Yorkers, they were oblivious to the dead bird and not really noticing the Morgan Mail building and the other structures that surround all of us in this urban jungle. But since March 2005, I have spent my mornings pacing the sidewalk along Morgan Mail Processing Facility. I often look up and stare at the walls of the building and its dangerous windows and hope that one day I’ll never have to find another dead or injured migratory bird near the building’s sidewalk.

 

Caption: Collision-causing windows on the south side of Morgan Mail. Nicole Delacretaz

 

Some of the birds killed at Morgan Mail include the following uncommon birds:

Wilson’s Warbler

 

Brown Creeper

 

Worm-eating Warbler