New Haven Bird Club Has An Eagle Eye

It was 8 a.m. on Saturday in Edgewood Park. No one was playing at the tennis courts, or the basketball courts. No one was using the skate park. But about a dozen people from the New Haven Bird Club congregated in the parking lot with a common mission: to spot and count birds, and along the way, unveil Edgewood Park as a spot of wilderness in the middle of the city.

Founded in 1907, the New Haven Bird Club is one of the oldest organizations of its kind in the United States. It works with other like-minded organizations, such as the New Haven Parks Department and regional chapters of the Audubon Society, to further its stated aim ​“to make available to members and the general public more opportunities for recreation and education in bird watching.” In addition, ​“the NHBC is dedicated to the conservation of natural resources in New Haven and surrounding areas. It works with other regional groups on conservation issues including the preservation of Long Wharf and Milford Point, areas noted for shorebirds.”

The club tracks bird migrations throughout the year. It conducts a census of hawks at Lighthouse Point Park from September through November. It publishes a newsletter and a yearbook. It has regular talks and lectures. It runs a mentorship program for science students. And it runs at least one bird walk a month, usually more, ranging across the state from Osbornedale State Park in Derby to Hammonasset Beach to Litchfield to Rhode Island. But several of its walks are concentrated in New Haven, from Yale’s golf course at the end of Westville, to the Fargeorge Wildlife Preserve off Quinnipiac Avenue, to Lighthouse Point — and, on Saturday, to Edgewood Park.

This particular walk was led by Bill Batsford; he and his wife Donna (also in attendance) have been birders for ​“over 20 years,” Donna reported. They got into it while Bill was working as a cardiologist at Yale-New Haven Hospital and Donna worked at Foote School’s admissions office as director of financial aid. A science teacher at Foote named John Cunningham ​“took people on a bird walk for Mother’s Day” in East Rock Park. The Batsfords were taken with just how much Cunningham knew about the birds — and thus, by extension, the ecosystem of the park — and how skilled he was at drawing the walkers’ attention to the wildlife around them.

“He’d hear it and then he’d find it,” Donna said.

The Batsfords are now guides themselves. ​“Bill was the kindest person to me,” said Laurie Reynolds, the club’s membership secretary. ​“I can tell you the walk where I became friends with them.”

Reynolds got into birding because of ​“empty nest syndrome,” she said, though she had always paid attention to the birds around her. Growing up in Brooklyn, her father kept feeders and a birdbath. Nearby was Jamaica Bay, so they got a lot of birds. ​“My mother had to tell the neighbors we were using the binoculars on the birds, not them.”

Five years ago Reynolds attended her first Bird Club event after seeing advertisements for the club’s walks. ​“The very first walk, the group of people was so welcoming, and would show me around,” she said. ​“It was something I needed at that moment. I didn’t know anybody that well, and at the end of the walk, three people said, ​‘we’re going to go out for lunch afterward — would you like to join us?’” They became fast friends.

The sense of camaraderie was palpable as Batsford spoke easily with his fellow birders in the Edgewood Park lot. He had a pair of binoculars, as did all the other birders; he also had brought a camera with an impressive zoom lens. ​“It’s a city park,” he said. ​“I’m constantly distracted by motion, and 85 percent of the time, it’s cars going by,” he joked. But the park ​“has habitat,” he said. On recent visits he’d made this fall, he saw kingfisher and snipe, as well as ​“a beautiful adult bald eagle, followed by a secondary.” The plan was to follow the West River through the park and double back on the other side.

“Please everybody, listen and call out what you hear,” Batsford said. As Reynolds put it, ​“Birders listen. They don’t look.”

Nonetheless, having barely left the parking lot, one of the birders spotted a phoebe by the tennis courts. Batsford heard the call of a red-winged blackbird, the first of many that would be counted that day. They counted bluejays and grackles. Soon, Batsford announced, they would be checking out what he knew was a wood duck breeding area in the park.

The birders collectively were announcing the birds they identified not only for their fellow birders; it also allowed Reynolds to track the group’s overall numbers in eBird, an app run by Cornell University’s esteemed ornithology lab that allows birders all over the world to take part in overall bird counts. For individual people and clubs, it’s a chance to track their own progress as birders and share with others. For the lab, it amounts to highly successful crowdsourced data collection. Hundreds of thousands of users log in more than 100 million bird sightings every year.

They approached an algae-covered pond off the park’s footpath. ​“Contrary to appearances, don’t try walking across the pond,” Batsford said. Conversation turned to birds that have been seen at other times in the spot. ​“We have never failed to get screech owl in the park for the Christmas count,” Batsford said.

A catbird was heard but not seen. ​“Hearing it is fine. Seeing it is much better,” Batsford said. Reynolds explained that the fall walks tend to be quieter than the spring walks. ​“In the spring all the birds are singing,” she said. But in the fall, ​“they have no reason to sing because they’re not mating.” But then the catbird — possibly the one that had called — was spotted in a thicket of vines. A bluejay flew overhead. There was a cackle from a nearby tree. ​“Another bluejay,” Batsford said wryly, drawing laughter.

They spotted a cardinal in the same thicket. Then a flicker, a type of woodpecker, perched in a dead tree.

“Something really big just went down to the left,” said Lori Datlow, one of the group members. She thought it might be a great blue heron.

The group continued southward to a small bridge across the West River. Looking northward, it was easy to spot not one, but two great blue herons in the water, along with four wood ducks.

My camera’s lens wasn’t powerful enough to get me closer than this image, I’m afraid. But through the binoculars, herons and ducks came vividly into focus. Through the binoculars, the West River was teeming with life. A kingfisher flew overhead, calling as it went. ​“It’s always worth coming to this bridge, looking up and down,” Batsford said. On a previous trip in the spring, he said, ​“I saw a great blue heron eating an eel. The eel was hanging to the ground. It fought hard, and I thought it might strangle the heron. They fought for about a half an hour, but the heron finally got it down.”

More bluejays were making a racket in a nearby tree. ​“Bluejays being bluejays,” Batsford said.

By this time joggers were starting to appear on the footpath. The group spotted a titmouse, and a flock of red-wing blackbirds in the tops of the nearby trees. They spotted one bird they couldn’t identify, even after snapping a picture and running it through a bird identification app on someone’s phone. The app suggested it was another red-wing blackbird. ​“I don’t think that’s right,” Batsford said, even though ​“nine-tenths of the birds we’ve seen on the tops of the trees have been blackbirds.”

A hawk flew overhead, too fast to identify at first. Then it returned and several people declared it to be a red-tailed hawk. In the water near where the footpath crossed under Edgewood Avenue, the group came upon a flock of mallard ducks.

They proceeded under the bridge. On the other side of it, they spotted another phoebe and a red-bellied woodpecker.

Matt Goldenberg, a psychiatrist at Yale-New Haven Hospital, explained that the Edgewood bridge was about as high up the river as one could get in a kayak at high tide. As a child, he said. ​“my father had bird feeders, so I knew the basic birds.” He attended Yale as an undergraduate and went to its medical school. He returned in 2013 to take his current position as staff and med school faculty. He was taken with the herons and egrets, the large birds he could find along the shore. Then he ran into Batsford on the Milford shore one day. Batsford had a scope. Looking through it, Goldenberg said, was ​“a revelation.”

He lives in Westville and visits the park three to seven times a week, kayaking or walking, and looking for birds. ​“It’s a great mindfulness activity,” he said. ​“It’s time away from the phone. Time in nature.” This is particularly true when he kayaks, which he does starting where the river joins Route 34 and Ella Grasso Boulevard. ​“Whenever I go, I have the river to myself,” he said. That’s something that, if he had more time, he might like to have a hand in changing, figuring out how to get more people access to the river.

Goldenberg attends the bird walks because ​“I always see so much more when I’m with people who have been doing this a long time. I see a lot of species I’d never seen before.” He noted that the bird count is getting more important in the face of a recent study finding a steep decline in the North American bird population — 3 billion birds and hundreds of species — in the past 50 years.

At the Edgewood Park Duck Pond between Edgewood and Chapel, a duck skittered over the water and landed, as if on cue. The sound of a brass band warming up for the Yale-Cornell football game at the Yale Bowl wafted through the air. The group crossed Chapel Street and reentered the park on the other side of the West River. ​“No egret yet,” someone in the group remarked, but five minutes later, as the group began to head north through the park again, an egret circled the group, flashing in the sun.

They spotted another woodpecker in a tree bordering a mowed field. On the other side of the field, a runner in a fluorescent green shirt jogged to a path that the birders also followed, back into the woods and to an area that had been specifically designed as an urban oasis for wildlife — planted with trees to make it a more hospitable bird habitat.

The birders continued northward, following the lip of the park near Yale Avenue. They spotted a Cooper’s hawk near the lookout point overlooking part of the West River marsh.

Returning back to the parking lot, Reynolds read aloud the group’s total tally. In almost two miles and three hours through the park, the Bird Club had identified 27 different species of bird, including a mourning dove, a double-breasted cormorant, a mockingbird, and a goldfinch, along with flocks of catbirds, grackles, blackbirds, bluejays, and mallards.

Donna Batsford said that while many of the birders in the group are retired, they have members of all ages who participate when they can. Some walks can have up to 30 people on them. They get young people. Then people get busy with families. Then, when they’re empty nesters, ​“they come back to us,” she said.

Reynolds mentioned that Yale’s students have their own bird club, but they sometimes take joint expeditions. She meets other birders as young as 11, and ranging through high school age. ​“Sometimes you go on a walk and meet a kid who says, ​‘I didn’t know there were people who like birds, like me.”

The New Haven Bird Club’s next walk is Oct. 2 at Lighthouse Point Park at 8 a.m. For a full listing of the club’s events and information about how to get involved, visit its website here.