New York Times: Jamaica Bay: Wilderness on the Edge


Don Riepe, near an osprey nest, has lived on Jamaica Bay since 1981. He is among the advocates who work to protect the bay from human intrusion.
Photo Credit: Mylan Cannon  

OF all the ways to describe Jamaica Bay — it is the city’s largest open space, it is a perch of choice for more than 300 species of birds, it is that wetland thing you fly above while landing at (or leaving) Kennedy Airport — the most suggestive of its singularity is that it sits within the only national park in the United States you can reach by subway.

A giant salt water puddle, pooled over 20,000 acres beneath the leaky eaves of southern Queens and Brooklyn, the bay lies at the far end of the Rockaways A line. And to ride that line from Times Square to Canal Street to Broadway Junction, and then through Ozone Park to Howard Beach and Broad Channel, where suddenly there are marshes offshore and ibises and egrets in the sky, is to understand that with a simple 90-minute trip one can find a wilderness within the city limits.

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Posted by WILDNEWJERSEY at 8/1/2011 6:00 AM
Categories: Birds
Tags: jamaica bay birds new york city Osprey egret
 

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