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Meet The Neighbors (New York Observed)

by Ellen Pall

from The New York Times, October 28, 2007

LEAF DETECTIVE Leslie Day examining the nibbled leaves of a Callery pear tree.

The afternoon started with pelting rain. Leslie Day, author of “Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City,” was coming to take me on a nature hike around my block, and nature wasn’t going to make it easy.

For 15 years I had lived in the same Upper West Side building with a secret shame: I didn’t know the names of the trees on my street. But Dr. Day, whose richly detailed “Field Guide” (to be published next month by Johns Hopkins University Press) is a celebration of the city’s plants, creatures and even rocks, would change all that.

I woke up that morning already more attuned to nature. I spotted a cloud of fruit flies in my kitchen, noticed feathers in the courtyard on my way to the building’s gym. At noon, my newly alert ears detected the sloshing of rain on the air-conditioners.

Soon, a wet umbrella arrived in my lobby, Dr. Day beneath it, a rosy, smiling presence in jeans, a cotton jacket and a pair of binoculars. I showed her the feathers I’d picked up that morning. She considered the first one, turning it over in her hands. It was gray, long and narrow.

“This could be from a mourning dove,” she said. She spelled “mourning.” Dr. Day, 62, teaches at the ElisabethMorrow School in Englewood, N.J.

“They’re pretty common around here, and they’re also a common prey for hawks,” she said. “They are lovely birds.” Her voice fell as she marveled: “If you look closely in their eyes, they are blue. It’s startlingly beautiful.”

Dr. Day marvels a lot. A sort of Julia Child of nature, she grew up in and near the city, devoted to wildlife. At 4, she nursed injured butterflies in Englewood Cliffs. At 5, she founded the Girls’ Leaf Club in Forest Hills, Queens. The “Guide” was commissioned by an editor who learned of Dr. Day on the Web site of the City Naturalists Summer Institute for Teachers, a now-defunct program she set up to help science teachers use parks in their classes.

Now she examined some small, fluffy feathers I’d found. “These are down,” she said. “I think all these feathers are from the same dove. It could be this is the remains of a kill.”

A kill!

“Or it could be molting.”

The word “kill” rang in my ears as we headed outdoors. No wonder New Yorkers are wary of nature. Too violent.

I’d excluded nearby Riverside Park from our tour, preferring to make my peace with the natural world of the four tree-lined sidewalks that define my square of the city grid: West 83rd Street, West End Avenue, West 84th Street and Riverside Drive. We waded east, then stopped beside a tree I’d wondered about for years. Willow oak, Dr. Day diagnosed, ending a 15-year mystery.

“It’s fun to be a nature sleuth,” she said. She pointed out the unusual narrowness of the oak’s crown. “That’s because it’s competing with the other trees.”

Several feet ahead stood a honey locust. The name, Dr. Day explained, comes from the sweet, fleshy part of the tree’s pods. But some honey locusts, she added, sprout fierce, long thorns that give rise to injuries. “People have gotten seriously hurt,” she said, adding that the city had stopped planting this variety. Reverently, she noted that Mayor Bloomberg, who wrote the introduction to the “Guide,” had pledged to plant a million new trees in streets and parks.

Then Dr. Day allowed herself to become distracted by a tree on the other side of 83rd Street, a sophora tree. “People call them Eve’s necklace,” she said, “because of the beadlike quality of the hanging seeds.” When I failed to discern the seeds, she lent me her binoculars, gently reversing them as I put the wrong end to my eyes.

Moving down the sidewalk, we passed a spindly, almost leafless skeleton. Dr. Day’s terse post-mortem: “Street trees have a tough life.”

Three Callery pears came next.

“And look!” Dr. Day said excitedly. “Lichen!” Indeed, bits of pale green lace clung to the trunk of one of the pears, signs, she said, of good air quality. In 1975, when she first moved into the nearby 79th Street Boat Basin, where she still lives, she never saw any lichen. Now she finds it often.

We trekked on, then stopped abruptly at a tree growing in a small front garden. “A mulberry!” she breathed. “Mulberries are delicious!”

She pointed out a detail straight out of “Alice in Wonderland”: the leaves of a mulberry tree are of two types, some egg-shaped, others lobed.

“Holy cats,” I marveled.

“Mulberries are non-native,” Dr. Day said, explaining there is a “strong, wonderful” movement afoot to plant only native species in the city, to the benefit of local insects and animals, which prefer them. “But mulberries do feed birds,” she said wistfully. “And homeless people.”

On West End Avenue, Dr. Day admired the beauty of a wet London plane’s pied trunk. On 84th Street, from the ground beneath another Eve’s necklace, she picked up a fragile bit of green: the de-petaled remnant of one of the tree’s flowers. “These are the anthers, the male part,” she said, pointing to a ring of frail prongs, “and ——” Her cellphone rang.

‘‘THAT’S fabulous,” Dr. Day told the caller, beaming. “Just let them fly around the house a bit, and then they mate.” She hung up. “I gave my friend some luna moth eggs,” she explained, then turned my attention to the female parts of the flower still in her hand.

“Seeds are fertilized eggs. Once fertilization takes place, the ovary swells to protect the baby plant inside the seed,” she said. “An apple is an ovary.” This was a fact I was a little sorry to learn. “A cucumber, a pumpkin,” she went on. “Anything with seeds.”

Dr. Day drew my attention to the call of a blue jay, then raved about some lindens. “You have great trees!” she said.

On Riverside Drive, Dr. Day spotted an ant on a ginkgo. Then we hiked back to my building, expedition completed. The next day, I found a dry leaf in my foyer. Willow oak.

Ellen Pall’s books include the novel “Among the Ginzburgs” and the Nine Muses mysteries. Leslie Day’s Web site: fieldguidenyc.com.