potatoes have descended on new york city

peent

an american woodcock in nyc’s bryant park.

prescript

hi all! i have my winter outing schedule more or less ironed out. hope to see you there! also… have you purchased my book for all of your friends yet? :)

nyc bird alliance young conservationists “birds of winter” series, all free, registration links to come:

• saturday january 10 2026, 9am - 10:30am (free): finches @ prospect park grand army plaza entrance

• saturday february 7 2026, 9am - 10:30am (free): gulls @ coney island boardwalk, stillwell ave entrance

• saturday february 28, 9am - 10:30am (free): ducks @ jamaica bay wildlife refuge visitor center

finally: i have a post i’m soooo excited to share with you (it’s about rare snails!!!) but it’s been taking a while to put together, so here’s a fun little one to hold you over. hope you get to see some woodcocks this week.

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peent!

certain places are renowned for easy viewing of the world’s most charistmatic animals. you go to the serengeti for lions, the salish sea for orcas, the darien for harpy eagles. and if you want great looks at the american woodcock, you go to… midtown manhattan.

i’m serious!

now, i mostly just want an excuse to talk about woodcocks because they’re one of the silliest north american bird species. but i’m not lying—nyc’s bryant park could be the world’s easiest place to get good looks at the species. it’s not an especially healthy situation for the woodcocks involved, but i hope the ever-increasing attention helps spread awareness of the challenges that migratory wildlife faces while passing through nyc.

peent!

ok, let’s talk cocks. nonbirders might scoff at my listing woodcock among national geographic charismatic megafauna. but woodcocks have a cult-like following. nyc’s woodcock-themed bird walks regularly command crowds of 100+ people. there’s always some viral woodcock video circulating, plus a popular meme page dedicated to them. and my friend jorge, one of costa rica’s best birders who has seen many of the neotropics’ rarest birds, told me that the american woodcock is the bird he wants to see most.

what’s the allure? well… it’s hard to believe that woodcocks are real. stick a straw into a potato then glue on some googly eyes and you will have created something almost as silly looking as a woodcock. they waddle as if dancing to “walk like an egyptian.” they perform nighttime courtship flights of high-flying zigzags and spirals, ending with a plummet. their main vocalization is “peent.” their cockamamie aura has earned them some of the best nicknames in all of birddom: timberdoodle, bogsucker, mudbat, labrador twister, and, among my friends, potato.

god they’re so stupid i love them

while wacky, woodcocks are exceedingly hard to see. their oblong shape and patterned plumage make them virtually indistinguishable from pine cones. sometimes they’ll sit still even when nearly underfoot to avoid blowing their cover. and when you do notice them, they shoot off with a twitter before giving good looks.

unless you pay a visit to new york city’s bryant park, that is, where you can often find woodcocks sitting beneath shrubs or out in the open during the right time of year—late fall and late winter through early spring, especially in mid-november and mid-march. new york city accounts for ~2,500 of the ~20,000 woodcock photos contributed to cornell’s macaulay library and 900 of the 10,000 woodcock observations contributed to the inaturalist database. i interpret this to mean that, despite the fact that the bird ranges across the eastern united states, nyc is the easiest place to actually see woodcocks well enough to photograph.

but why?

peent

nyc birders (and longtime newsletter readers) know that our area is an easy place to see many of eastern north america’s birds. it’s a biodiverse estuary located in the middle of the atlantic flyway, a popular coastal bird migration route. it sits at a point where the coastline takes a sharp turn, funneling species tracing the shore. further, humans have replaced much of that estuary with concrete, forcing birds into just a few parks with limited habitat options. shy birds like connecticut warblers, virginia rails, and american woodcocks end up out in the open because they don’t have other choices. then there are the obvious biases: we have lots of birdwatchers, with lots of eyes to uncover rare stuff.

that doesn’t explain everything though. woodcocks aren’t just stopping in by chance—data from the dbird database of dead birds found in new york city shows that, more than most other species, woodcocks end up dead in midtown, usually from window collisions. recent research studying five years of radio-tagged woodcocks found that they fly at lower altitudes than most other migratory birds, averaging only 1250 feet—the height of the empire state building. combined with the fact that bright lights attract birds the same way that they attract moths, and the fact that woodcocks have sacrificed some of their front-facing vision for a wider field-of-view overall, well, the city is kind of optimized for catching and killing woodcocks.

an american woodcock far after dusk performing a courtship flight.

it’s tough not to be a spoilsport when bryant park’s woodcocks inevitably go viral, but i always feel uneasy seeing them swarmed by visitors focused on getting a nice look and crisp photos. because for many of these trapped critters, a neck-snapping faceplant could be their next and final move. people hoping to see woodcocks with rosier futures should consider visiting brooklyn’s green-wood cemetery, where the birds are most often encountered by walking slowly through leaf litter and under pine trees.

still, i have to remind myself—woodcocks are the best, and it’s pretty amazing that you can easily see them a stone's throw from times square. and i’d like to think that most bryant park woodcock viewers eventually hear about the bird’s dangerous trials navigating the city. you can sort of think of woodcocks as mascots for urban conservation that epitomize the city’s unique threats to wildlife and attempts to protect them. so with that i say… PEENT!

potato salad

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postscript

i still haven’t written about my work trip to florida from last month, but florida, too, epitomizes human/wildlife interactions. there were animals everywhere! perhaps no species portrayed this better than the roseate spoonbill. i got there a few days early to do some birding and didn’t see any spoonbills in any of the wonderful habitats i explored. but once i had to start commuting to and from the conference center, i started noticing spoonbills in housing developments and roadside ditches being silly little gremlins.