A New York the easiest animals to meet are always the same: rats, pigeons and squirrels. It is not exactly the fauna that pushes people to stop looking and it will be precisely why, when something different appears, the news spreads immediately. This is what is happening these days in Bryant Park, where an American beccaccia specimen has attracted the attention of residents, tourists and birdwatchers, who gradually organized and gathered, transforming a normal green space into a pilgrimage point to observe the rare apparition.
The species, scientifically known as Scolopax minor and nicknamed “timberdoodle” in the United States, is a migratory bird belonging to the beccacce family and, unlike other lemon birds, lives mainly in the woods and feeds looking for insects and worms in the soil thanks to the long sensitive beak. It is recognizable for the compact body, the mimetic brown plumage and especially for the characteristic oscillatory movement as it walks, a sort of rhythmic “dondolio” that contributed to its recent popularity on social media.
The presence in Manhattan is also due to the migratory route of the East Coast, where during spring it often happens that many species stop temporarily especially in urban parks to rest and feed before continuing north, in areas more suitable for nesting, between the state of New York and Canada. These birds use any green area available, even very small, as an intermediate stage. The peculiarity of the case of Bryant Park is due to the fact that the beccaccia was spotted in the middle of the day, despite being a mainly nocturnal and notoriously difficult species to detect.
On social networks videos and photographs of the animal – often accompanied by musical songs – have contributed to transform it into a viral phenomenon and the scene that was created in the park is unusual also for the New York standards: groups of people stopped to observe a single animal, binoculars at hand. In parallel, Bryant Park organized short observation tours, riding the growing interest in the small slope.
L’articolo All crazy about the American beak in Bryant Park proviene da IlNewyorkese.
