Of Turtles, Birds and Beehives: Nature Clashes with City Development

Last night, a friend who lives on 11th Street and Second Avenue told me she keeps on getting woken up in the middle of the night by a bird that mimics the sound of a car alarm. I did not believe her, but it turns out her account of the strange urban bird call is actually a northern mocking bird adapting to New York City life, said Haley Main, the environmental educator of the Audobon Society’s "For the Birds!" program. The birds also mimic cellular phone rings, and they are “all over” the city.

This week brought a flock of notable stories of wildlife adapting and, sometimes, colliding with development here.

On Monday, Williamsburg residents were in an uproar over the spray-painting of the neighborhood’s own “Myrtle the Turtle,” which they blamed on construction workers at a nearby building site. Seen as a “symbol of the fallout of Williamsburg development,” the incident created a mini-media frenzy.

A couple of days later, the Post reported that a volunteer beekeeper from the Bronx Zoo had to be dispatched to 75th Street and Second Avenue to deal with a hive that had formed on a yellow, metal newspaper box.

Then, yesterday, came the news that squirrels were encroaching on Astoria’s Queensview Co-op and getting inside parked cars, prompting residents to hire a “nuiscance wildlife control operator” to get rid of them.

“Birds and animals are able to adapt,” Ms. Main of the Audobon Society said. “That’s why the squirrels go inside and the beehives form [on a newspaper box], but their habits are changing because of the pace of building.”

The heat and pollution push the squirrels to seek shelter, just like discarded food leads birds like Canadian geese to stop migrating.

“We create a situation where the wildlife flourishes, and then becomes a nuisance, though I hate to use that word,” she said. “Rather than changing our habits, people do things to get rid of them.”