In June 2018, I went on a little road trip holiday from Ireland to the USA, to meet new found cousins in Baltimore and Boston and go to a couple of family reunions, and to do some family history research and to retrace some of the steps that siblings and cousins of my ancestors had taken when they emigrated to the USA from Ireland.
I brought my camera to record the places and people I was visiting on my holiday and I also took my binoculars and scope to do a little birdwatching along the way too. I am going to limit this blog to the birdwatching side of my holiday, and create a little bird trip report to re-live that holiday in these pandemic times when international travel is not so easy, particularly for any birders who have never been to the USA.
I arrived in JFK Airport in New York on Saturday the 9th June 2018 and decided to stay in a hotel in Long Island City in Queens for a day so that I could check out Calvary Cemetery in Queens, where I knew a number of my grandparents cousins, who are sadly long-deceased, were buried.
The next morning, on Sunday the 10th June 2018, I went for a walk near my hotel in the Queensbridge area in Long Island City, and the first birds I saw were ones that had been introduced to New York from the Old World, including feral pigeons, house sparrows and starlings.
While walking past the Queensbridge North Houses, which are six storey high brick apartment buildings that were built in the 1930s, with laid out green areas with mature trees, another pedestrian told me to keep an eye out for falcons and that he had often seen them. It was an ideal place for Peregrine Falcons with the high rise apartment buildings and the large number of feral pigeons and starlings, and it is always great to meet another birdwatcher.
Sadly I did not see any peregrines there but I did get my first views of a Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cederum) in amongst the trees growing in the grounds of the Queensbridge North Houses, which was a nice surprise in the middle of such a big city like New York and Queens. I did not get a photo of that bird, but it was great to see it for the first time and it was a big tick for me. I got photos and better views of Cedar Waxwings later on in my holiday when I was in Ipswich in Massachusetts and I attach a photo of one of those waxwings here:
On my way back to my hotel, I also got my first views of an American Crow on the roof of a building but it was too far away to get a good photo of it. The day was now cloudy, and it started to rain so I headed back to the hotel and went for lunch nearby.
In the afternoon when the rain stopped, I headed on a walk to Calvary Cemetery on Queens Boulevard, but it was now a very dark and grey day for New York in the summer, and it was more like a day in Ireland. When I reached Calvary Cemetery at around 3.30 pm, the sheer size of the cemetery suddenly hit me and I realised that I would not have enough time to fully explore it and find any of the graves of my relatives. It covers 365 acres with over 3 million interments, and it is almost three times the size of Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin and is nearly half the size of Central Park in New York.
There was a sign on the gate of the Queens Boulevard entrance that said it closed at 4.15 pm and the only other humans I could see were a couple of lads to the left of me drinking a few cans of beer, but the cemetery looked well maintained with green, mown grass and mature trees. Like many cemeteries around the world it is an oasis of green space in the middle of the big city. It was now about 3.45 pm and it was now cloudy and the light was poor, even though it was the middle of June.
Just inside the main entrance I could see there were starlings ahead of me on the ground and then I saw another bird, a woodpecker on the ground feeding and it was a female Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) which was another new bird for me.
I then saw my first American Robin (Turdus migratorius) hopping around the gravestones, a nice male and this bird would be the one I would see most frequently on this road trip holiday. It is a similar size and shape to the European Blackbird (Turdus merula) and this American Robin was behaving exactly like a Blackbird would in Ireland with similar movements and stance and they are closely related.
At that moment, a security man in a patrol car, who was patrolling the cemetery, then drove up and advised me that the cemetery was closing soon. So I left and started to walk west and turned left into 50th Street and then turned right into 47th Avenue along the boundary of the cemetery, where I heard a bird calling quite loudly and vocally and it was my first views of a Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottis) sitting and calling from a barb wire perch on the fence around the cemetery.
The light was very poor even though it was only just around 4.30 pm in the middle of June because of the heavy cloud, so the mockingbird looked like a dark grey bird with a prominent white wing bar, but I would see better views of this bird species in better light during my holiday. This bird was the most vocal of the all the ones I saw on the trip and it was great to see it in the Big Apple on the edge of this cemetery oasis of nature.
I headed back to my hotel to get an early night's rest because the next day I was checking out and taking a Greyhound Bus from the Port Authority in Manhattan, New York to Baltimore. I had opted for the bus as it was much cheaper and quicker than the other two options of train and plane, and the security protocols at airports have made planes a much slower option for relatively short journeys, and I could look out the windows at the scenery and possible passing birds on the bus. My holiday was only beginning......
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