Island Retreats for Wading Birds
 

December 4, 2003

So, You Were Expecting a Pigeon?

By JOSEPH BERGER

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Ornithologists say the great blue herons that choose to settle down on islands in New York City are making a smart choice. In fact, several species are now nesting or roosting on 14 uninhabited islands in the area.

The spot was in the heart of an urban bedlam, surrounded by the hurtling traffic of the Triborough Bridge, the smokestacks of Con Edison, the grim warrens of Rikers Island, the roar of La Guardia jets and three sewage treatment plants.

Yet there hunched on a beach on South Brother Island in the East River, looking like old philosophers mulling a tangled question, were five great blue herons.

These long-legged waterfowl would seem to find the quiet of the Everglades more congenial than the hurly burly of New York City. But for many years now, herons — as well as egrets, ibises and other wading birds — have been nesting or roosting on South Brother Island and 13 other uninhabited islands managed by New York City's Parks Department or the National Park Service with help from the New York City Audubon Society.

Several of the islands are unlikely sanctuaries, a stone's throw from Gracie Mansion or the United Nations or Co-op City. Yet the fact that there are wading birds hovering near these landmarks is a lyrical measure of the restored health of the city's waterways and of the salt marshes where the birds feed.

While the herons' taste for New York may suggest a wackiness that should make them fit right in with the city's other eccentrics, ornithologists think the birds' choice may be a sign of shrewd intelligence. A healthy island amid turbulent waters and urban eyesores is actually an "oasis in the wild," said Alexander R. Brash, chief of the Parks Department's natural resources group, discouraging countrified predators like barn owls and raccoons as well as trespassing humans.

While 1,837 pairs of herons, egrets and ibises have been thriving on seven of the 14 islands, the news is not all good. These species have all but abandoned three islands in Staten Island's refinery-lined Kill Van Kull and Arthur Kill waterways, where they once flourished.

Some blame human intruders, pollution and the proliferation of trees unsuitable for nesting. Others say wading birds have forsaken those islands because owls, hawks and raccoons who once fed on garbage in the Fresh Kills landfill have ventured farther afield as the landfill gradually closed and are preying on heron eggs and young on the island.

By contrast, South Brother and its bigger sibling, North Brother Island, have resisted such an invasion. North Brother's vegetation — a jungle of thick brush, low trees and tangled bittersweet vines set among the ruins of a dozen quarantine and hospital buildings — has produced a secure haven for the black-crowned night heron, the city's most populous heron species. More than 230 crude nests of sticks and twigs were counted there last June.

Mr. Brash showed off some of these nests on a sunny, but blustery day last week. "Birds tend to be faithful to a place as long as something works," he said. "If they're successful in raising young, they'll come back because success is what's it's all about."

The five great blue herons Mr. Brash encountered on South Brother Island, he said, may be migrating birds or vagabonds from other areas along Long Island Sound. As a boat with human visitors approached, the great blue herons arched their necks and pushed off their reed-like legs, dashing off in a splendid gust of blue and gray like a band of squatters fleeing the police.

Still, Mr. Brash said, the big herons spend time on South Brother because it is safe and there are now plentiful salt marshes nearby where they can feed on small fish. And, he said, some ornithologists believe that the large herons do nest in the city, but their nests have not been spotted because herons like to build them in inaccessible places.

"We see them here during the summer, so there's reason to believe they are nesting," he said. "We just haven't found their nests."

Mr. Brash, the 45-year-old son of a Wall Street investment banker, traces his passion for birds back to his mother, a biology teacher. He trained as an ornithologist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

As part of what is known as the Harbor Herons Project, parks officials and Audubon volunteers survey the 14 islands every May, when nests laden with fledgling herons and egrets can be counted, sometimes by using a long pole with a mirror at its end. Two parent herons are counted for each active nest.

Officials also post signs warning intruders that they are trespassing on a heron nesting area and risking fines. And they tinker with the vegetation. There are plans to replace inhospitable Norway maples on North Brother with gray birch, which are high enough to resist raccoons but not so high as to invite owls and hawks.

Away from the islands, parks officials, armed with grants from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, have been working on growing grasses needed for salt marshes like those around Pelham Bay Park.

The Parks Department formed the natural resources group 20 years ago to acquire and restore parkland. It employs 30 ecologists, hydrologists, landscape architects and engineers and is working on $90 million worth of projects. Mill Rock Island in the East River and White Island in Marine Park in Brooklyn have been owned by the department since the 1950's and 1960's, respectively, but the first island picked up by the natural resources group was Prall's Island in Arthur Kill in 1984. The department now manages or monitors 10 islands, including two that are privately owned: South Brother, which is owned by Hampton Scows, a Long Island-based water freight company, and Huckleberry Island, which is owned by the New York Athletic Club and is technically in the waters off Westchester County.

The 14 islands include several improbable refuges. Mill Rock Island is just a few hundred feet from Gracie Mansion, yet about three dozen great-backed gulls and herring gulls nest near the island's perimeter, and there is evidence that a pair of black-crowned night herons may have started nesting there, according to the Audubon Society reports. U Thant Island, across from the United Nations and named for the onetime secretary general, has a dozen nests of double-crested cormorants, one of which is plainly visible to passing boats. Ruffle Bar is a 143-acre sandbar that is nearly swamped at high tide yet supports nesting gulls and oystercatchers and may soon have brush thick enough for herons.

Goose Island, acquired from the Sanitation Department within the past year, is right off the towers of Co-op City and the Metro-North railroad tracks, but 123 nests of black-crowned and yellow-crowned night herons, snowy egrets and great egrets were counted there last May. Nearby residents who spy on the island with binoculars report sightings of other unusual birds.

The 43-acre Shooters Island is between Newark Bay and the Kill Van Kull in a channel favored by cargo ships and tankers. Yet as the city began filtering its sewage in the 1970's and taking other steps to clean its waterways, wading birds began cropping up on the island.

A 1990 spill of a half-million gallons of fuel oil in the Arthur Kill waterway destroyed 700 waterfowl and damaged 200 acres of salt marsh. Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, said that lawsuits stemming from oil spills provided money to restore islands. The birds slowly returned to Shooters Island, and by the mid-1990's there were dozens of nests of night herons and great egrets. Now only cormorants and a single osprey pair nest there.

It is possible that the heron colonies simply moved to islands nearby, like West Siders moving to Westchester. That may be why Hoffman Island, off the eastern shore of Staten Island, has had an upsurge in its heron population. Mr. Benepe said he thought it might be necessary to acquire additional islands as alternate havens for birds.

Mr. Benepe and Mr. Brash grew up in Manhattan, and for them, managing the bird islands may be motivated as much by sentiment as by environmental concerns.

"Lots of kids in New York City are never going to go to Yellowstone," Mr. Brash said. "The only wildlife they'll see are the herons."

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Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Sometimes, egrets visit the city.

Flushing Bay
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Egrets in Flushing Bay
 

The egrets are nice. The buildings are not.

That was my impression when I took the photo on this thread.

June 2, 2006
The East River Is Cleaner Now. The Water Birds Say So.
By TONI WHITT

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Egrets on South Brother Island in the East River have grown in numbers, as have other birds on two other islands near Rikers Island.

An archipelago of sorts, a collection of rock formations dotted with scrub brush, has been home to New York's mental institutions, quarantine hospitals and some of the city's most famous residents. Long abandoned by people, some of the islands have now become home to migratory birds that have flocked there in numbers not seen in decades.

The Audubon Society of New York, in partnership with New York Water Taxi, took visitors on a tour of the islands yesterday to showcase the bustling wildlife on display just a short boat ride away from asphalt, concrete and steel towers of Manhattan. Cormorants, egrets, herons and American oystercatchers are just some of the species not usually spotted in New York that have congregated on the islands, which include North and South Brother Islands, between Rikers Island and the Bronx, and Mill Rock, just north of Gracie Mansion.

The tour passes the mouth of Newtown Creek, a gritty industrial area along the Brooklyn-Queens border where the Rockefellers built their first Standard Oil refineries in the late 19th century and where an oil spill in 1950 larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster polluted the soil and waterways in Greenpoint. For the past two decades the Audubon Society has been working to help clean the waters around New York and bring birds back to the area.

That effort has been so successful that the organization now operates scheduled boat tours for close-up views of wild birds that have become hugely popular with birdwatchers. Yesterday's trip, from South Street Seaport, was a preview. The summer tours begin tomorrow.

"Look! Oystercatchers," said Gabriel Willow, a tour guide who works as a teacher and naturalist at the Audubon Center in Prospect Park, almost breathless as he interrupted his story about the history of South Brother Island, where Babe Ruth used to practice his batting, to point out the small birds flying just above the tree line. "There's three of them. It's an oystercatcher orgy!"

The birds, related to sandpipers, are brown and black with red beaks, and, Mr. Willow said their presence is a sign that the local waterways are cleaner.

"If there are oystercatchers, there's probably oysters, and if there are oysters, water quality is improving," he said.

More than a dozen species of water birds have returned to the area since the 1970's. There are about eight species of heron and egret alone.

Mill Rock Island, home to 50 pairs of black-crowned night heron, in the most dangerous part of the channel because of its swift waters and eddies, was the site of the largest planned explosion before testing began for the atomic bomb.

In the 1700's and 1800's, thousands of ships ran aground in the channel because of rocks, shoals and reefs near Mill Rock. One island, known as Flood Rock, was a particular problem, so New York decided to get rid of it, as well as several other hazards. Workers drilled holes in the shoals and rock near Mill Island and on Flood Island in 1885, and set off an explosion that was felt in New Jersey and sent a geyser of water and debris 250 feet into the air.

It obliterated Flood Island, and pieces of rock were used as fill to bring two small islands together to form what is now Mill Rock.

North Brother Island, where egret and heron nests are concentrated, was home to Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary, from 1907 to 1938. After World War II, the military built homes there for returning veterans.

One of those veterans wrote a short story that was turned into the screenplay for the classic Hitchcock film, "The Birds."

"He apparently was freaked out about the birds on the island," Mr. Willow said. "Now we have a whole new appreciation for the birds."

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Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

South Brother Island
 

City Claims Final Private Island in East River

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...n/birds600.jpg Richard Lee for The New York Times
South Brother Island, long undeveloped, has become a migratory stop and nesting spot for birds. Egrets flocked to the island in the spring of 2006.

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: November 20, 2007

South Brother Island, seven acres of dense forest, bittersweet vines, flocks of wild birds and little else, is a speck in the East River — and a glimpse of what the rest of the city might have looked like thousands of years ago.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...on/view650.jpgJoyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
South Brother Island and its larger sibling, North Brother, lie off Hunts Point. Typhoid Mary was quarantined on North Brother.

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The island was sold to a Long Island firm for $10 in 1975.

Historically overlooked and unwanted, it changed hands for $10 in 1975, despite being located in the middle of New York City.

But South Brother, the last East River island of any significant size to remain in private hands, will finally get its due today when it is formally transferred to the city as part of a complex $2 million deal brokered by the Trust for Public Land and financed with federal money secured by United States Representative José E. Serrano.

“The idea of buying an island — I mean, how many people get to buy an island?” said Mr. Serrano, whose district includes South Brother.

South Brother, situated between the Bronx and Queens and within sight of the Rikers Island guard towers, will most likely be left as it is, officials said, preserved as a nature sanctuary and administered by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation.

The island — the smaller sibling of the better known North Brother Island, which is 500 feet to the north and once the quarantine home of Typhoid Mary — suddenly became a desirable property precisely because it had been unwanted for so long.

Neighboring islands, including North Brother, became sites for hospitals that treated infectious diseases like typhus and tuberculosis and for mental hospitals, power plants, jails, homeless shelters and cemeteries for the indigent. But South Brother, neglected by humans, turned into a prime nesting spot for birds and a migration stopping point for such New York City exotica as the great blue heron.

“It is a natural jewel,” said Clark Wallace, project manager for the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit conservation group.

In addition to several types of herons, the island’s bird population includes ibises, oyster catchers, cormorants and egrets. In its forest are locust, white mulberry and black cherry trees, covered by thick tangles of oriental bittersweet vines that cover trees and ground alike. Because there are no predators on the island, many birds build their nests on the ground.

K. Jacob Ruppert, whose great-great-uncle Jacob Ruppert Jr. owned the island and was a co-owner of the New York Yankees in the early 1900s, said South Brother was a bird paradise when he paid his only visit in 2004.

“There’s no beautiful lagoon,” he said. “It’s a mound of bird poop. But there are beautiful birds. I never thought I could walk up to a swan on her nest. The ground is nothing but bird droppings and broken egg shells.”

But humans, even if few have ever set foot on the island, have had an impact.

During New York City Audubon’s annual surveys of the island, volunteers have found dead birds entangled in fishing lines and other debris. Adult birds have been found dead on or near nests that contained unhatched eggs, and Mr. Ruppert said he spotted a television set that had washed ashore.

Maria Torres, president and chief operating officer of the Point, a nonprofit group that is working to revitalize the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, and Mr. Serrano said they had been interested in buying South Brother for the public since 1997. But the owner, Hampton Scows, a Long Island sand and gravel company, had not been interested in selling until recently.

Official with Hampton Scows declined to comment, as did the company’s lawyer, Michael McMahon.

But once Hampton Scows signaled its willingness to sell, the Point and the Bronx-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which had received federal money through Mr. Serrano’s efforts to buy private land along the Bronx and East Rivers for public use, agreed to pool their money to come up with the $2 million asking price.

Unlike better-known East River islands like Randalls, Roosevelt and Rikers, South Brother’s past is murky.

Both North and South Brother Islands were claimed by the Dutch West India Company in 1614, according to “The Other Islands of New York,” a book by Sharon Seitz and Stuart Miller, and both were originally named “De Gesellen.” (The term was translated as “the companions.”)

The islands soon passed into the hands of the English, but remained undeveloped for almost two centuries because of the treacherous currents surrounding them, according to the book.

South Brother may have been a base for Union soldiers during the Civil War, and in about 1894, it was purchased by Jacob Ruppert Jr., a brewing magnate who bought the Yankees with Col. Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston in 1915. (Mr. Ruppert’s tenure in baseball included the purchase of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox, the opening of Yankee Stadium and eight World Series titles.) Mr. Ruppert built a yacht house on South Brother, and amateur baseball games were held on an adjacent field. Legend has it that Ruth would occasionally show up to practice his swing, swatting balls far into the East River.

After Mr. Ruppert’s summer home burned down in 1909, South Brother went through another long fallow period. The island changed hands several more times until 1975, when Hampton Scows bought it for $10.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company.

Arthur Kill
 

Reclaiming New York's Blighted Waters

by David Wheeler
April 7, 2008

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An Osprey nesting in Arthur Kill, one of America's busiest industrial waterways

From his 30-foot wooden skiff, Andy Willner points out a sailboat headed north through the narrow tidal strait. A double-crested cormorant flies above, its sleek black form unmistakable on the powder blue sky. A grassy mountain rises behind the sailboat, stretching for miles. In a few hours, low tide will bring snowy egrets, glossy ibis and great blue herons by the score.

At this moment, it is easy to forget that the mountain is Fresh Kills Landfill, the largest landfill on earth, so massive it is among the few manmade structures that can be seen from space. Just as improbably, the water under the boat is the Arthur Kill, arguably America's busiest industrial waterway, lined on both sides with refineries and factories.

Since a massive oil spill in 1990, nature has staged a remarkable comeback here, thanks in large part to a newfound appreciation for how improvement of long-neglected waterways like the Arthur Kill can enhance the quality of life for millions of people.

The story of Arthur Kill is remarkable in and of itself. It also parallels the journeys of other industrial waterways in New York - from Newtown Creek to the Bronx River - that advocates hope will someday run clean, providing habitat for wildlife and recreation and respite for New Yorkers.

http://www.gothamgazette.com/graphic...aysSlideSm.jpg Along with wildlife, anglers also have returned to Arthur Kill.
Launch the slideshow

Curtailing Pollution

Connecting Newark Bay with Raritan Bay along Staten Island's western shore, the Arthur Kill is vital to New York Harbor and the Hudson-Raritan Estuary. With the Manhattan skyline visible in the distance, thousands of tankers ship billions of gallons of oil through the strait each year, making the Arthur Kill more heavily traveled than the Panama Canal.

As recently as a few decades ago, the Arthur Kill was so polluted that crabs and clams would die within an hour of being submerged in its waters. That began to change with the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, which forced the construction of modern sewage treatment facilities throughout the metropolitan area.

"The Clean Water Act reduced sewage runoff, and the water improved dramatically," says Katharine Parsons, a senior scientist at Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. "That allowed crabs and shrimp to recolonize the area, and the birds followed." Beginning in 1986, Parsons fund the numbers of egrets, herons and increasing by 15 percent each year.

That all changed on New Years Day 1990, when Exxon spilled 567,000 gallons of oil into Arthur Kill.

"We had just started monitoring the kill in 1989, and you talk about being baptized in oil," says Willner, who is retiring after 18 years as executive director for the environmental organization NY/NJ Baykeeper. "It was awful, but it led to the restoration and awareness of how important these wetlands were. These smaller parcels are like the last little gardens of Eden in this vast gray industrial area."

The oil spill was particularly damaging for birds such like snowy egrets and glossy ibis, which tends to be choosy eaters and could no longer rely on the crabs devastated by the massive oil spill.

For nature to bounce back, humans had to take a more active role. Later that year, New York City and the state Department of Environmental Conservation agreed to allocate $600 million to clean up Fresh Kills and other leaking city landfills. Federal agencies joined state and city agencies in New York and New Jersey in addressing the mounting debris, much of it from garbage barges going to Fresh Kills, that had ruined shorelines throughout the metropolitan area and forced hundreds of public beach closures in the late 1980s.

Through the Floatables Action Plan, over 350 million pounds of debris have since been collected from New York Harbor. By surveying the harbor and picking up the waste, the plan managed to control the driftwood, plastic bags and bottles, garbage barge waste, and other debris that lined the banks of Arthur Kill.

"Once people began managing a lot of the waste going to Fresh Kills, habitat started to develop," says Mark Gallagher, an environmental consultant who has worked on wetlands restoration projects. "When the shoreline was covered with floatables, it was awfully hard for herons to forage."

The infamous stench that often wafted over the region was finally corralled with the construction of a landfill gas extraction system that captures the methane and converts it into reusable natural gas.

The city shut Fresh Kills in 2001. That same year, Fresh Kills upgraded its leachate collection system, finally containing the hazardous runoff that had flown unabated into the Arthur Kill and New York Harbor for decades.

Together the two events had a major effect. Recovery could begin - with a little help.

Rebuilding a Habitat

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Herons and egrets within the Arthur Kill watershed

The area could begin to heal itself. "Nature has a built-in resilience to it," says Glenn Phillips, executive director of New York City Audubon. "For wetlands, their job is to mitigate the environment. If we leave them alone, let them do their work, they fix our mistakes."

Nature needed a little help, however. At restoration sites throughout the estuary, salt marshes destroyed by industry and oil spills are being replanted with native spartina alterniflora, a hardy salt-marsh cordgrass that may have evolved natural resistance to low levels of contamination.

Ecologists replanted six acres under the Goethals Bridge after the Exxon spill, and helped it become a thriving salt marsh again. Six acres is hardly a vast wilderness, but it is a start. Each of those single acres can hold a million fiddler crabs.

"It's the corniest line, but it really is true with tidal wetlands - if you build it, they will come," says Gallagher. "The very first day you let the tide come in, the fish and crabs come in with the tide. Soon after that you see birds... there to eat the fish."

The buffet lasts all year, as the Arthur Kill remains ice-free even during the fiercest winters. When ice seals off the Raritan River and other nearby rivers and lakes, thousands of buffleheads, mergansers and other ducks flock to the Arthur Kill at the mouth of its largest tributary, New Jersey's Rahway River.

Over 8,000 acres of the Arthur Kill watershed have been preserved, mostly along its tributaries. Nearly 4,000 wading birds now nest in the estuary. Many of them feed in the Arthur Kill and nest on the archipelago of small islands in Kill Van Kull and the East River. The abundance of the "harbor herons" would have seemed far-fetched a century ago, when many of these species were on the verge of extinction.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1914 allowed the herons and egrets to recover around the nation, but they seemed to be in no hurry to recolonize the filthy waters of the Big Apple. Now the recovering ecosystems of Fresh Kills Landfill attract birds migrating along the Atlantic Flyway, forming a substantial wildlife corridor with the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge and the 2,500-acre Staten Island Greenbelt.

Other wildlife has returned as well.

Bill Schultz, the long-time Raritan Riverkeeper and a former Perth Amboy fireman, began wreck-diving in the Arthur Kill about 20 years ago. He has seen the harbor's biodiversity improve first-hand, encountering schools of fish swarming like a single organism, loggerhead sea turtles, and even a sand shark.

Most dramatic is New York Harbor's own Atlantic sturgeon - an armor-plated, toothless behemoth that evolved during the reign of the dinosaurs, and can grow as large as 12 feet long and weigh nearly 800 pounds.

People also are starting to return to this Industrial Venice. "There's no question public use is increasing in the Arthur Kill," says Willner, who kayaks the harbor with other environmentalists in a group they jokingly call "Nine Jerks," short for NY-NJ Endangered River Kayakers. "We see sailboats a lot, and people picnic in some spots and even swim or jet-ski."

At Staten Island's popular Tottenville Beach, visitors walk along outcrops of terminal moraine, where the Wisconsin Glacier reached its limit around 75,000 years ago. The Hudson River initially carved out the Arthur Kill - "kille" is the Dutch term for river channel - when its main channel was blocked by glaciers or moraine east of Staten Island. Those remnants of the last ice age remained visible on Tottenville's old roads, which were paved with millions of oyster shells in the early 1900s.

North of Tottenville, Fresh Kills now points the way to further use of the area. The Parks Department is transforming 2,200 acres of once-noxious land - nearly half of which is actual landfill - into a public park. Three times larger than Central Park, Fresh Kills will again be home to native habitat from maritime oak forest and pine barrens to salt marsh and native prairies, as well as athletic fields and nature trails.

The future park offers guided bus tours twice a month from April to November, and the tours fill up quickly, according to Parks Department spokesperson Trish Bertuccio.

"People are looking forward to creating new memories, and they're anticipating something great," she says. "We call it a park of the 21st century, catering to a new generation of park users that do things like kayaking, canoeing, mountain biking and watching birds, and maybe even horseback riding."

Construction of the park's first project, recreational fields at Owl Hollow, starts this spring. The complete Fresh Kills Park, however, is estimated to take at least 30 years.

The Challenges Ahead

Much still remains to be done for the Arthur Kill to fully recover.

"The progress has been extraordinary," says Baykeeper's Willner. "But like many places in the estuary, it's been one step forward, one step back."

The kill's undersea life - including bluefish, winter flounder and striped bass - offers a perfect example. The soaring population of fish has attracted recreational anglers and crabbers. But government advisories warn against frequent consumption of locally caught seafood, particularly for children and pregnant women.

"Some of the most contaminated areas still in New York Harbor are the sediments of Arthur Kill, Kill Van Kull, and Newark Harbor," says Parsons. "The sediment problems are not intractable, but they're very difficult. They're not just a problem for the birds, but for subsistence fishermen who may not understand the risks they're taking in eating contaminated fish."

Last year's New York City Audubon survey of the harbor herons also found no herons nesting on the Arthur Kill islands. "They nest in New York, but they almost entirely forage and feed in New Jersey," says Audubon's Phillips.
Experts attribute the Arthur Kill's nesting decline on raids on nests by raccoons and other mammals, human disturbance and a recent Asian longhorned beetle infestation, which required many suitable nesting trees to be destroyed.

For Parsons, the recent decline in breeding by wading birds in the Arthur Kill is telling.

"The legacy from the industrial era caught up to them," she says. "It caused the birds to not reproduce enough to be sustained. Even though they were successful, they were marginally successful."

"New York Harbor is definitely experiencing an improvement, a slow purging of the toxins the way you would expect," says Parsons. "It's a cause for hope, although not at the pace needed by these birds on the harbor today."

On to the Bronx and Brooklyn

As the activists of the Arthur Kill work to speed up a long-term recovery, similar goals are being pursued on polluted waterways across New York City.
In the heart of the Bronx, the Bronx River Alliance teamed with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the parks department, the Army Corps of Engineers and dozens of other groups, agencies and residents to restore the lower Bronx River, an eight-mile stretch infamous for its urban decay. The alliance combines monitoring and cleanups with recreation like greenway biking trails and kayaking programs.

The Canal, on the Brooklyn waterfront, was long known for its stagnant, putrid water. But in 1999, the environmental protection department reactivated the canal's pump system after 40 years of neglect.

"Now we have horseshoe crabs using the shallow water for their mating dance in the spring, then blue crabs coming in for mating, and by fall large schools of fish," says Owen Foote, a founder of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. "Shortly after sunset, the whole shoreline comes to life with the splashes where the big fish are eating the little fish."

The Gowanus Dredgers host public canoeing events and shoreline cleanups, and they've launched similar clubs along Newtown Creek between Long Island City and Greenpoint, the East River's Buttermilk Channel, and the Staten Island shoreline.

Still, the water is by no means pristine. "Our t-shirts on the back say, 'Don't flush when it rains,'" says Foote, "because the sewage plant can't handle the capacity and it goes straight into the water."

The DEP last year approved a $125 million water quality improvement plan to modernize the canal's pumping station and reduce the levels of sewage discharge into the Gowanus. While this will help, heavy rains will still send sewage into the canal.

New York City's sewage problem is hardly limited to the Gowanus. Each year, an estimated 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and polluted stormwater enter New York Harbor, a particular problem for sheltered waterways such as the Gowanus.

While modernizing the sewage system will take years and cost millions, source controls - planting more trees and vegetated areas - could prove equally effective at capturing the stormwater before it enters the sewage system. Cities such as Chicago and Washington D.C. successfully utilize similar greening measures to control runoff.

The challenges facing New York Harbor are many. But if the Arthur Kill can start to recover, with all the deadly destruction heaped into its water and along its shoreline, there is hope yet for just about any waterway.

The seeming contradictions of the Arthur Kill and other urban waterways - nature returning despite continued pollution, stunning wildlife vistas set to a backdrop of heavy industry - reflect New York's legacy as both a center of commerce and a city built atop an estuary.

After centuries of treating the waterways as open sewers, humans appear to be the best bet for creating a new legacy for New York Harbor. "We encourage direct contact with the water itself," says Foote, "because then you see the need to clean it up."

David Wheeler is a freelance writer and the director of operations for the Edison Wetlands Association, a non-profit environmental organization that works on environmental restoration in New Jersey.

Copyright 2008 Gotham Gazette.