David Furst: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm David Furst in for Alison Stewart today. New York has a reputation as a concrete jungle. If you know where to look and what to look for, you can see a very different kind of urban jungle. Not concrete, a jungle populated by actual wildlife. The product of centuries of interplay between one of the world's biggest cities that humans built up from the bedrock, and the wildlife that was here long before any skyscrapers were.

Urban naturalism is an incredibly popular hobby, but often it's seen as an escape from our urban landscape. A new book called Wild NYC: Experience the Amazing Nature in and Around New York City aims to help people get out there to see how the natural world and the human-built environment feed off each other and change each other. Here with us in the studio, please welcome Ryan Mandelbaum, Brooklyn-based science writer, nature educator, wildlife photographer, and now co-author of the new book, Wild NYC: Experience the Amazing Nature in and Around New York City. It's a long title. Welcome.

Ryan Mandelbaum: It's great to be here. I'm excited to talk about this one.

David Furst: It's a long title because you're trying to do a lot in this book. It's partly a guidebook. It explains also the lives of our plant and animal neighbors and where you can go to observe them in their natural habitats. The book also makes this argument for a naturalism that blurs the line between the city and the natural world that it's embedded in. Can you talk about your motivation for writing this?

Ryan Mandelbaum: Sure. I'm from New York. My parents are Brooklyn-born and raised. I've always been excited about learning about the world. When I first started writing, I was told that the New York City Bird Alliance was painting lawn flamingos white in order to help attract egrets back to breeding areas. I went out and I wanted to try and see an egret for myself, and I failed. Then I called up one of my friends who worked in New York for the Parks Department, and she took me to see a great blue heron nest where it was just in a regular city park. I just couldn't believe that some of this incredible nature was actually right among us. It blew my mind. I've been a different person ever since.

David Furst: Has it been important to you to treat naturalism as something that we participate in ourselves and not something that can be separated from us?

Ryan Mandelbaum: New York City has been a place where humans have lived for its history. For millennia, there have been humans living here, and since then, there's been colonization and different groups of people have lived here, but the wildlife has always been here. It's always been an incredibly biodiverse place. Now that there's humans here, the kinds of wildlife that lives here has changed. I posit that we could actually live together with the wildlife here in a more harmoniously than you'd expect for New York City.

David Furst: Should we think about an opportunity to connect with nature on an everyday basis, almost an every minute basis, instead of something that we have to schedule and make an appointment for in the calendar and go on a special trip for?

Ryan Mandelbaum: Oh, yes, of course. I actually have my binoculars here in the studio. On my walk over, I spotted a northern parula, which is a migratory songbird, in a tree. These are the kinds of moments that the folks who are really attuned with New York City's nature have, basically, every day.

David Furst: You worked on this book with a former colleague, Chelsea Beck, who, let's talk about. I think she's responsible for most of the illustrations and infographics in the book. You put a wildlife zine together while you were both working at Gizmodo. Can you talk about that and how that was a precursor to this book?

Ryan Mandelbaum: Sure. I did something a little weird when I worked at Gizmodo. I was hired to write about physics and tech. Then I caught the birding bug right when I started and decided to start a [crosstalk]--

David Furst: A natural progression.

Ryan Mandelbaum: That's right. I started Birdmodo, and I wrote bird articles almost every day. Chelsea is somebody who-- I joke that Chelsea's as weird as I am and caught the bug with me. We put together this zine, an event about birdwatching in New York City. When we decided it was a great success, it was really fun. Then we decided to put together this book and write a proposal for it. It's been a long time in the making.

David Furst: It's a beautiful book, and the illustrations are remarkable. Are there any of them in particular you want to call out?

Ryan Mandelbaum: I think that the way that Chelsea has captured the personality of the wildlife-- If you flip through the book, there's a lot of these doodles of personified animals. There's a mourning dove in mourning wear and a squirrel with a briefcase, or even on the cover, the great blue heron wearing "The I Love New York" plastic bag as a dress. She's really captured the quirky weirdness that the way that wildlife interact with New York City and the way that I see New York City as well.

David Furst: I'm David Furst, by the way, in for Alison Stewart. We're speaking with writer and naturalist Ryan Mandelbaum. If you would like to join this conversation and talk about the wildlife in our area, maybe you want to hear about the wildlife that let us know about the wildlife that makes your corner of the city special, or maybe you have a question about wildlife in the urban landscape. 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Can you highlight a couple of your favorite spots in the city that really illustrate what you're talking about here? Where do you like to go to experience wild NYC?

Ryan Mandelbaum: This is an interesting thing in the book is that a lot of the history of New York City's parks actually started with cemeteries being a place of repose. Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery, inspired by Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston. Now I had to move recently. Prospect Park was my favorite place to go. Now I live across the street from Greenwood Cemetery. I'm at Greenwood Cemetery almost every day, looking for insects on the wildflower garden, looking for migrating birds. Great selection of mammals there. That's one of my favorites. Then shout out to Staten Island. As a borough has just some of the most incredibly diverse nature and wildlife. It's fabulous.

David Furst: There's a question here we have about cemeteries. Why are there lizards in New York City cemeteries? This is coming from our very own Kate Hinds.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Hello, Kate. It is humans living in a place, we often bring things with us. Both intentionally and not, humans will travel. We bring plants around the world, we bring animals around the world. What likely happened was these Italian fence lizards, a pet would have been released. Sometimes they get out on their own, sometimes they don't, and they find a place that they can survive. There's fence lizards that live-- Sorry, Italian wall lizards. Italian wall lizards, which live throughout parts of the city. Greenwood Cemetery is a great place to see them.

You can often find them just crawling up on the mausoleums and on the graves. Then there's a bird called the American kestrel, which you'll see perched on the main chapel there, which will come in and feed on the lizards.

David Furst: You share a really great example of how human activity plays an active role in shaping our natural environment. Trains that unintentionally bring plant life from the Appalachians and Catskills back with them and deposit them in East Harlem. Can you talk about that?

Ryan Mandelbaum: This is one of my favorite and maybe unknown nature things in New York City, is the Metro-North Viaduct on Park Avenue and 109th street uptown has this selection of uncommon cliff ferns that have managed to colonize it. You can just-- it's not like a park. You're just walking along the side of the road, but if you look closely, you can see a variety of just incredible ferns and stuff that you really wouldn't see unless you took a trip upstate. Yes, what's probably happening is spores are coming down along the trains and finding a habitat that in New York City looks much like the habitat where they came from.

David Furst: If you would like to join this conversation, let me give you that phone number once again. It's 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Let's hear from Marissa joining from Staten Island. Welcome.

Marissa: Hi. How are you today?

David Furst: Great. Do you have some wildlife you want to shout out here?

Marissa: Yes, I just want to shout out the seals. We have harbor seals on Staten Island, and earlier this month, we had a juvenile gray seal as well.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes, that's awesome. New York City, especially in the wintertime, we definitely have a great population of seals. There's actually a boat company that does whale watching cruises. Sometimes they'll do harbor cruises around the city. Both on the shore as well as some of the offshore islands of New York City, we see collections of harbor seals. Yes, they're amazing, and I'm glad people notice them.

David Furst: Got a text about sea life as well. Someone saying, "I grew up in Rockaway Beach, love to go to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge to see ospreys and other migratory birds." Great location for that.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes, it's probably one of the best bird-watching locations here in the city. It has these big pools of fresh water that attract waterfowl in the winter, but then in the springtime, you can get dozens of species of migratory songbird. It is really fantastic.

David Furst: Ann from Brooklyn, welcome to the conversation. Some wildlife you want to talk about also aquatic.

Ann: Yes. Thanks for taking my call. I'm so excited to hear about this book. I just wanted to say that I work for Billion Oyster Project. Just this morning, I was in WNYC Transmitter Park in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Along with our oyster cages, we pulled up skilletfish and mud crabs, and even a blackfish. Lots of wildlife above and below the water.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes, that's amazing. Billion Oyster Project is also just an incredible organization. They do get a feature in the book. I talk about them a bit. New York would have once had extensive oyster reefs that through pollution and things like that have-- Many of them have died out. They're trying to restock New York's harbor with oysters, and they're just doing incredible work.

David Furst: We are speaking-- By the way, the name of the book. Let's get this out here one more time. Wild NYC. Sub-title, Experience the Amazing Nature in and Around New York City. We're speaking with author Ryan Mandelbaum, and it's great to have you here. We have a lot of questions coming in for you right now, so get ready. Someone also wants to say they also see dolphins and whales right off the shore of Rockaway. Oh, here's a question. Tell us about the turkeys on Staten Island.

Ryan Mandelbaum: The turkeys, they're like turbo turkeys. What would have happened is-- I don't know if I write about this in the book, but turkeys are-- they live throughout the United States. They would have been hunted quite a lot, and their populations went down. Then I believe that the turkeys were restocked with hunting programs in the eastern United States, and they ended up in Staten Island. They're more resilient and bigger, and better than ever. Turkeys are not afraid of humans. We end up having turkeys that fight their own reflection when they walk around the street in Staten Island, and guys will go, "Hey, I'm walking here," but it's to the turkey. They're pretty incredible.

David Furst: I was not prepared to talk about turbo turkeys today. That's a fantastic thing to hear about. Let's talk about some of the other wild and weird examples from your book. I have to bring up this one. Dog vomit slime mold.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Ugh. Incredible. They're the best.

David Furst: It may have been a band that I saw one time in Asbury Park, but tell me, please explain.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Slime molds are like almost sentient slimes that live in-- This one specifically, you'll find in wood chips, but also sometimes highly altered urban environments. Then their fruiting bodies are these big, yellow, spongy-looking, almost mushroomy things that look like dog vomit. Slime molds, just generally, are extremely interesting. Sometimes they're giant single-celled organisms like an amoeba, and then some they create spores, and then they fuse together, and it's just this wild and wonderful thing. I've led bird walks in days where there's no birds sometimes. We found a dog vomit slime mold. That was just the highlight of everybody's day.

David Furst: That's your plan B.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Exactly. Nobody's mad about a slime mold.

David Furst: Turbo turkeys and slime mold. We are really covering all the bases right now. A lot of calls coming through. If you want to join the conversation, 212-433-9692. Let's hear a question coming in right now. Lucy from Brooklyn, welcome to All Of It.

Lucy: Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to say that as a wannabe birder, but a useless birder, because I don't know bird calls or what they look like. The app that I have on my phone, which my sister Ann turned me onto, called Merlin, has changed my life. It's free. When I'm running in Brower park in central Brooklyn and I hear a bunch of birds, I can just hit record and it tells me all the birds that I'm listening to. I would have never known that there was a mockingbird there, or a blue jay, or a cardinal, or any number of different birds that it picks up. It's just been a great help to me in my desire to be a birder.

David Furst: Ryan, what about that app, Merlin? Maybe other apps as well to help us shift from being a wannabe birder to birder.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes, Lucy, I'm really glad you brought that up. One of the things is, of course, as you want to disconnect from nature, leave your phone home. There's some incredible apps right now that really help you go from not knowing anything to becoming an amateur naturalist yourself. Merlin is a fantastic app by the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology that is special exactly for that, for artificial intelligence, identifying photos and sounds of birds.

It can also serve as a field guide with its own photos that it supplies. You can then document your sightings using eBird, which is like, I call it the Pokedex of birding, but there's plenty of others. iNaturalist is a fabulous app that is like Merlin, but for everything. All of these apps, even for me, were extremely valuable when I was putting together this book. Every day, I have either Merlin or eBird, or iNaturalist open in order to enrich my New York City experience.

David Furst: We are talking about the new book Wild NYC with Ryan Mandelbaum and hearing your stories interacting with Wild NYC. Let's hear from Madeline calling in from Brooklyn. Welcome to All Of It.

Madeline: Hi. Thank you. This is very exciting. I am a native New Yorker working on a documentary about the biodiversity of the Brazilian Amazon, and when my 21 year olds were still in my belly, they're twins, I was on the 25th floor of 3rd Avenue and 29th street and I heard rustling in the living room and I had some feeling it was wildlife. I went out there, and by the way, I was giant. It was a little scary. It was an American kestrel. It looked like one of the Kiss members with the makeup because that type of kestrel has that long black line.

I had had a cockatiel in my life, and I managed to get a broom and get it on the broom and get it to the window, and when it flew away, it was like a Clint Eastwood movie. It took a giant arc, and you could hear in the background that sound. Anyway, it was incredible.

David Furst: Wow. Thank you for sharing that story, Madeline. Wild NYC. Truly wildlife all around us.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Kestrels are a wonderful bird. Many New Yorkers have heard of the peregrine falcon, which is a falcon that can live in the city. Kestrels are another smaller falcon that does breed-- and I had them breeding in Park Slope. Really wonderful nature observation. They're beautiful, blue, orange, white, awesome little bird.

David Furst: We have a text question here. Writing in, "Hello, I'm Isaac from Brooklyn, the 15-year-old founder of Rewild Brooklyn. I would like to shout out Marine Park and Plum Beach. One question I have is about reintroducing native wildlife back into the city. What is your opinion on that?"

Ryan Mandelbaum: It's interesting, and I don't know how much I talk about this in the book, but I have talked about it on my newsletter, which is that the city has actually tried some rewilding or reintroductions. The key thing is they work when the habitat is good enough for the animal to thrive. I mean, you can't just, for example, release a bunch of screech owls into Central Park and hope that they're going to make it. If you are doing the other bits, such as planting the appropriate plants and the prey is available and you're not using perhaps certain pesticides, anything like that, once you've actually created an ecosystem, then the reintroduction can work. I'm for it as long as we're doing the whole thing.

David Furst: We're speaking with the author of Wild NYC, Ryan Mandelbaum, here on All Of It. A lot of calls coming through. We're going to try to get to another one or two here. 212-433-9692. Ron in River Vale, New Jersey, welcome to All Of It.

Ron: Hi, how are you? I just want to mention that, Ryan, what you say really resonates with me. I'm a huge native plant nerd, and I used to live right over the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee and started studying out about native plants. At the time, I was thinking, "Wow, where I am, you're not going to see anything. Everything is introduced." I read about this. Basically, the only cactus that is native to our area, eastern prickly pear cactus.

Sure enough, just while wandering around right by the base of the George Washington Bridge on the Jersey side with all these cars, I see just big-- huge, huge swatches of eastern prickly pear cactus growing there. I took a couple of pads and now I have it growing natively in my yard. What you said about keeping your eyes open and watching out, there's all kinds of stuff here. That really resonates. Thank you so much.

David Furst: Ryan, you're really smiling listening to that.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes. I love the prickly pear cactus. I often lead nature tours here in New York City. I love the birds. Often, that's what people want the focus to be on. There's, especially at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, you'll be walking and looking around, and then just showing people that there's a native cactus that just grows here in New York City is often the highlight of the day. I totally understand, Ron. It is so cool finding prickly pear cactus here.

David Furst: Producer Kate Hinds piping in to say you can see eastern prickly pear cacti at Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge as well.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes, you sure can. In a couple of surprising places in the city, too. A place I go often is Floyd Bennett Field, and they have tons and tons of prickly pear growing there.

David Furst: As we're talking about the wildlife all around us, let's hear from Evelyn in Manhattan. Welcome to All Of It.

Evelyn: Hi.

David Furst: Hello. Do you have a wildlife story?

Evelyn: I do. I was living on West End Avenue. One night in the middle of the night, my husband was awakened by a neighbor who said, "Oh, my God, they're someone on my fire escape." He went down with a baseball bat, and he called the police, and the police came, and it was a giant raccoon. His eyes glowed in the dark on the fire escape on the eighth floor of our building.

David Furst: They absolutely glow. I have seen that many times. I hope the baseball bat wasn't utilized.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes, raccoons as well. I think that this is an interesting one, because people joke about how they are trash pandas, which I love that nickname. What's really happening is that there are certain species that have figured out life among humans here in New York City. Raccoons are native to the area, and they can be successful sometimes to a fault in some of these areas. We really, as humans, are ecosystem architects.

David Furst: One more quick call. Let's hear from Bob in Manhattan. Welcome to All Of It.

Bob: Hi. You mentioned peregrine falcons. Some years ago, I was in the Chrysler Building up in where the arches are, where you see the triangular windows. They were dentist office there at that time. I was there at night to see a dentist late. Anyway, I realized while I was standing there that those windows are casement windows and they simply have a latch, and you can open them from the inside. I opened one of these windows, and in a flash, I had this male peregrine falcon. Must have been defending its nest. Flying right at my face with its talons out.

David Furst: Whoa.

Bob: I don't think it came closer than three or four feet, but it was pretty startling.

David Furst: That is a close encounter.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes. Definitely, some animals can get very territorial around their nests. I'm glad you were okay. An amazing experience. Of course.

David Furst: Just as we're wrapping up, Ryan, in our last minute, as spring continues and summer is on the horizon, what kinds of seasonal changes to our local wildlife do you think we should be watching for, keeping our eye on?

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes. We are just entering the peak of the northbound migratory bird migration. All of the parks today probably have some interesting birds, and I encourage people to look at them. Then as the summer goes on, we're going to see breeding birds. We're going to see tons of insects. I love dragonflies and butterflies, and moths. Summer, June, July, August is great for that. Fall is bird migration again, and winter, we have, of course, there's the whales and then the harbor seals. Every single day of the year, there is something really exciting and interesting to look at here. I hope you all enjoy it.

David Furst: You are ready because you have your binoculars with you. You're ready for watching some stuff on your way out.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes. My friend Paul found a rare warbler in Central Park today. I may go chase it.

David Furst: Okay. That's what's next. Ryan Mandelbaum, Brooklyn-based science writer, nature educator, wildlife photographer, co author of the new book Wild NYC: Experience the Amazing Nature in and Around New York City. Thank you for joining us.

Ryan Mandelbaum: Yes, thank you so much for having me.