Field Trip: Croton Point

Croton Point Park is an hour north of the city by train ($18 roundtrip, off-peak). The park itself is just to the west of the Croton-Harmon train station – which inspired this line I donate to Country music gratis, “my heart’s as empty as a commuter parking lot on Sunday” — across a bridge spanning the train yard. In winter, I mean real winter, when ice is on the Hudson and snow on the ground, the park is an excellent place to see bald eagles. Piscivores, the eagles come south in search of open water. The water intake at the nearby Indian Point nuclear plant is also a big draw since it chops up fish.

You have not lived until you’ve seen a bald eagle perched majestically — the cliche is true — on a chunk of ice swept down the river. (It is not unheard of to witness this from the west side of Manhattan, by the way, in a hard winter.) But, because it’s been such a mild one, it was quiet on the bald eagle front compared to previous Februarys. One juvenile bird was seen, repeatedly going after some food in the water and harried by a trio of gulls as it did so. The Scavengers’ Ball. A mature eagle, with signature white head and tail, was also seen overhead, and then later — probably the same bird — perched on a snag in Croton Bay.

Croton Point was for many years a Westchester Co. garbage dump. The hill at its center is a grasslands covered pile of off-gassing landfill. Some English yew trees, planted in the mid 1800s (and purchased in Flushing), a couple of wine cellars (now closed off, but open when I first visited), and a shoreline littered with locally manufactured bricks, are some of the remnants of the place’s unexpected history. By a telling irony, the Point is also the site of Native American middens, piles of oyster shells and the like, that give evidence of thousands of years of human habitation.

While our walk started quietly, we ended up spotting these species in addition to the Bald Eagles: American Black Duck, Bufflehead Duck, Ring-Billed Gull, Greater Black-Backed Gull, Red-tailed Hawk, Mourning Dove, Rock Dove, Carolina Wren, Golden-crowned Kinglet, White-breasted Nuthatch, Black-capped Chickadee, Brown Creeper, Belted Kingfisher, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, American Crow, Fish Crow, Northern Mockingbird, Song Sparrow, House Finch, Starling. And was that the bark of an owl? Next time, we’ll stay later.

Busy all around. It was mild enough to picnic on the beach here, where we watched and heard a male Kingfisher plunge into the calm waters for small fry.