I try to start each month with at least one outing planned to see some wildlife, both out of my own desires and also so that I can recap what I saw in this newsletter. In January, I had two of these outings planned, but when the weekend came up there was a snowstorm and I was feeling extremely worn-down. So I didn’t go.

When I wracked my brain to think about the wildlife I did see this past month, only one individual creature comes to mind. I think about the cockroach that died sometime in my building’s stairwell in December and has remained there, elegantly sprawled on the tile, ever since. At first I refused to dispose of the roach because I thought it would be a good way of testing how often my building’s stairwell is cleaned (the answer appears to be never). Now, the cockroach has become a touchpoint of sorts—something I look out for as I ascend the steps. Oh, I think. We’re both still here.

The last two weeks, my mental state has continuously ricocheted between fear, fury, and grief. I hate it! I’m sure this is true for many of us, and I have no new insight to share about how bad it’s feeling now and how much worse it’s going to get.

To help steel myself for many more of these emotional troughs, I’ve been listening to Barry Lopez audiobooks and, unsurprisingly, found so much heart in his words. As Lopez writes in Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, “If we are to manage the havoc—ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war—we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas—the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak, and that to be generous is to be foolish—can have no future with us.” Barry!!! I do love a contemplative man whose prose is full of absolute heaters.

My parents got me my first pair of binoculars this Christmas, and I spent a rainy afternoon this weekend watching every living thing scurrying around the backyards I can see from my window. There weren’t too many birds out, presumably because of the rain, but there were a handful of plump squirrels running around the red carpet of leaves in my neighbors’ yard. I can, of course, see these squirrels without the binoculars, so I wasn’t expecting anything particularly revelatory through my newfound magnification. But I was surprised by how, so close-up, the squirrels looked utterly distinct from one another.

Although the first squirrel looked like any other gray squirrel at a distance, I saw through the binoculars that it had a pink scar running down its spine. The scar was wide and pale pink but did not seem to hamper the squirrel as it scampered around, crunching on nuts. What could have given the squirrel such a nasty scar? I imagined a hawk clutching the animal in its talons before dropping its meal, an electrical burn, some oddly linear kind of mange? I unfortunately took no pictures through the binoculars — so great is my respect for this squirrel’s privacy.

The other squirrels were in better shape. One had little white spots around its ears, and another had a handsome red stripe down its back. I marveled at each of these squirrels, individuals with unique lives and perhaps even interpersonal drama that I was not privy to — at least before I got the binoculars. Maybe soon I will even have squirrel gossip to share!

I also recently became acquainted with some other of my local wildlife, specifically the flies that occasionally spend time in my apartment. I wrote about how you can identify a house fly, and why it is probably not a real house fly, in Defector. This was a fun story, in part because I went down a rabbit hole of forensic entomology that scratched the part of my brain that was once addicted to Law and Order: SVU.

We are allegedly heading into the most wonderful time of the year, but I have been feeling extremely grim, oscillating between moments of utter despondency to moments of utter despondency where at least I’ve taken a gummy. I am grateful for my coworkers at Defector whose post-election writing has helped me articulate what to do with all this misery and hatred, and I am grateful to work somewhere where we can say the obvious. I am also grateful that Defector has allowed me to have critical, revelatory, and deeply insightful discussions with my coworkers about some of this year’s most horrible Christmas movies.

So while it’s pretty freaking cold outside, it arguably has never been a better time to be outdoors. I find it extremely calming to breathe in the crisp air and succumb to the awe of a big, beautiful bird with an unshakeable urge to kill! A few weeks ago, I attended a bilingual NYC Bird Alliance event in Sunset Park led by bird guide Xinyi Zhang. I’d never been to Sunset Park (the park) before, and our group strolled around its loop while taking in some pretty spectacular views of Manhattan.

Xinyi described the birds we saw in both Mandarin and English. I don’t know Mandarin, but I have been trying to learn some words on Duolingo. And I honestly felt glee when I recognized a stray word (mostly “park” and “white” in reference to a white-throated sparrow.) We almost immediately saw a fairly extroverted hermit thrush, which obligingly hopped around a bush looking like a perfect beaked circle on a few toothpick legs. But all of us agreed that the stars of the birding walk were a trio of red-tailed hawks.

Last month has made me feel like the universe is atoning for the fact that it rained nearly every weekend this summer. The sun has been Out. The sky has been Clear. And the leaves? The leaves have been Turning!! I grew up in northern California, which means I have absolutely no chill about fall in New York. I take long walks in my neighborhood and step on every leaf. A single visit to Prospect Park is enough to quench my parched psychic well. I am not a very good birder, so I haven’t really seen many of the birds that have been migrating through the city, but I’m sure I’ve heard them during walks along the park, and their songs have made my fall all the more beautiful.

The creatures I have seen this month are eastern chipmunks. They are another East Coast feature I have absolutely no chill about. I grew up seeing squirrels, thinking that chipmunks were fantastical creatures that existed in Disney movies like Sleeping Beauty. The first time I saw a chipmunk in New York, it was even cuter than I’d imagined it would be — a peanut-shaped critter in an incredibly rigid, alert stance. How could something so small and cute also be so serious? I swooned! Now, every time I walk in a woodsy area, my eyes are peeled for stripes of brown on logs and stones.

I was rewarded with one perfect chipmunk sighting a few weeks ago in Prospect Park. They were going about their daily routine, scampering, squeaking, etc. I stopped in my tracks to take a pretty terrible photo that does not do justice to the little rodent or the way the afternoon light dappled their beautiful coat. The chipmunk vanished a few seconds later, as an incoming dog crunched in the leaves, but I think of them often.

I spent much of last month traveling, which meant I did not get my shit adequately together to go out and behold wildlife in New York City’s beautiful parks, forests, and waterways. But I did spend a lot of time beholding the wildlife that hang out around my roof, which is a lovely place to watch the sunset — specifically the gauzy blush haze encircling Brooklyn’s ominous 74-story condo, a.k.a. the Sauron Tower.

Many of the non-human visitors on my roof are little guys I can see basically anywhere, but even these encounters can be filled with a degree of wonder. On a recent rooftop picnic, my friends and I watched as a yellowjacket returned time after time to carve out a mouthful of chicken that had fallen out of a taco and carry its repast elsewhere, presumably to its colony. I could hardly blame them. That taco was good!

My most surprising rooftop neighbors have been the swooping diamonds I’ve learned are chimney swifts. When I first saw one overhead at sunset — a dark, erratic streak in the sky — I assumed it was a bat. What else, I reasoned, emerges in small, chittering swarms at dusk? But the more I watched the flying things, the more I felt certain they could not be bats, especially as I’d gotten to observe bat-flight up close on a recent bat walk. Their wings were too sleekly angled and beat too stiffly to be a bat. Luckily Gabriel Willow helped me ID these birds as chimney swifts.

I recently turned 30 (huge for me personally) and celebrated by going whale-watching on the American Princess, which is a beautiful diva name for a beautiful diva ship. It was a scorching hot day, but the commute to the cruise’s docks in Sheepshead Bay was easy and breezy — I took my trusty steed the B44-SBS all the way down.

As soon as you step on board the boat and feel those coastal breezes, even while it’s still docked, you know it is the start of a magical day. The last time I went on the American Princess was in 2019, also for my birthday, and I saw three whales and ate two hot dogs, which was a winning combination. That time, I also saw two ladies bring a platter of cocktail shrimp on board, which they feasted on inside the windowed, interior section of the boat. Simply aspirational! Now, the American Princess only allows you to bring sandwiches on board, a rule I understand. BYO–cocktail-shrimp-platter on the whale-watching boat opens a window to a kind of karmic justice (think of the uncooked shrimps when the Titanic went down) that I would like to avoid. So I brought bagels.

As we set off on the water, Celia Ackerman, a whale watch naturalist and research associate with the research organization Gotham Whale, spoke on a mic explaining the history of whales in New York.

Humpback whales were once all but extinct in New York City, per this Popular Science story. The waters of New York Harbor were a dumping ground for sewage, medical waste, and even paint. In the middle of the 20th century, when General Motors poured unwanted paint into the river, people could tell what shades were popular based on the current color of the river. But in the 1970s, the passage of the Clean Water Act improved water quality—dissolved oxygen nearly doubled and poop-related bacteria diminished, per JSTOR Daily. As the water cleared up, algae and zooplankton flourished, which replenished schools of small, silvery-gold fish called bunker that is a favorite food of bigger fish, dolphin, and humpback whales. And recent limits on commercial fishing of bunker have allowed the populations to flourish.

Until today, it’s been an unbearably gross, muggy, and hot, hot, hot couple of weeks in NYC. As a relentlessly perspiring person, I try to avoid spending time outdoors unless there is a pressing need for me to do so. But I’ve realized that the best time to go outside in times like these is after the sun sets, the air cools down, and you can walk around feeling more like a person and less like a sweat rag.

Night might not sound like the best time to see wildlife, considering the conspicuous absence of the sun. But there is a whole cast of creatures that only emerge at or after twilight, and it can be profoundly humbling to try and observe them on their own terms — a reminder of the limits of our sensory perception of the world, or umwelt, and the unfathomable sensory experience of a creature like a bat.

About a week ago, I went on a bat walk at the Ridgewood Reservoir hosted by urban naturalist Gabriel Willow and the folks at NYC H20, which stewards the reservoir. We started the walk in the tangerine glow of dusk, circling the biking path around the reservoir as night well. Gabriel encouraged us not to look at or use any artificial lights like phones or headlamps, but rather to let our eyes adjust to the dark. They did, revealing the distant scrabbling shadows of raccoons, a flying heron, and, the stars of the evening: a cloud of bats. (The following bat video was taken before it got really dark.)

I originally planned to send this newsletter out monthly — which I think I still will do in the slower, winter months — but the creatures are truly out and about in the summer, and I learned about so many new events since sending out the first edition. I wanted to send out an official email with the big, updated list of events. Thank you to everyone who emailed or dm-ed with suggestions!

I had also planned a creature-filled week that I was excited to share with you. Specifically, I was going to bird on a boat, whale-watch, and walk with bats, but my plans were torn asunder when I got COVID last weekend and instead spent my days feeling wretched in bed. This summer surge is no joke (and I’m thankful for the The Sick Times’ newsletter for weekly updates on Covid-19 trends in the U.S.) But I did manage one outing last week, when I went mothing for the first time in New York City!

What is mothing, you might ask? It’s like birding, but for moths, kind of. I actually went long on mothing yesterday in this piece for Defector, which goes a lot deeper into how you can attract moths, what equipment you might need, and some books that might help, as well as some insights from an icon named Gary. Ever since that jaunt, I’d been itching to see what moths my own borough has to offer. I figured I’d start in Prospect Park, which has a decently sized forest. I dug around iNaturalist to see if anyone had gone mothing in the park — any photo of a moth on a white sheet is guaranteed evidence of mothing — and decided to try and set up by a little clearing by the woods above the Boathouse.

Welcome to Creatures NYC, a newsletter that will let you know all about how to encounter and appreciate all the cute and/or freaky little creatures that roam the city alongside us. Thank you for subscribing!

If we haven’t met, my name is Sabrina, and I’m a writer and a real critter freak. I wrote a memoir about sea creatures called How Far the Light Reaches and I write about non-human life for Defector. I’ve been living in Brooklyn for about 7 years now, and pretty early on I felt a kind of existential dread because the only wild animals I ever saw were rats, cockroaches, and house sparrows. Pessimistically, I figured this would be my lot as long as I lived in the city.

But I was wrong! The city is teeming with non-human New Yorkers fluttering, scuttling, swimming, breaching, and molting all around us. This year I made a goal to spend as much time as I can with the wildlife in and around NYC, and it’s already been so rewarding — I’ve watched pastel green eggs tumble into the sand behind a mating pair of horseshoe crabs, threw a beached and wriggling pipefish back into the grimy waters of Plumb Beach, and observed the centipedes living on my roof from a respectful distance. After spending a beautiful day with friends at the 8th Annual Jamaica Bay Wildlife Center Horseshoe Crab Festival, a friend suggested I make a newsletter of events like that happening in the city. I thought it was a great idea!