Central Park in the Dark

David Gessner reviews Marie Winn's Central Park in the Dark.

When last we heard from  Marie Winn, she had evolved from a reporter for the Wall Street Jour­nal into a bird-watcher who stalked the canyons of New York follow­ing a hawk named Pale Male, an adventure which she chronicled in her popular book, Red-Tails in Love. This, it turns out, was just the beginning of Winn's transforma­tion into a stalker of the urban wild, and in her new book she describes the many nights that she and a small band of fellow nature lov­ers spent roaming Central Park in search of bugs and beasts. Central Park in the Dark is the fascinating story of the author's discovery of a new country -- one that few New Yorkers visit, at least in the way she does -- a country called night. Initially, and understandably, afraid of going into the park after sunset, Winn grows braver and braver until she and her friends become the park's unofficial night watch­men, playing a role like Thoreau's self-appointed one as "inspector of snowstorms." In this role they check nightly on sleeping robins, hunting screech owls, feeding moths, and, of course, a nesting hawk or two.

What draws them into the park is a series of mysteries, like what the long-eared owl they've been watching has been eating. By pick­ing tiny rodent skulls and teeth out of the pellets the owl has coughed up, Winn discovers that the answer to this question is white-footed mice, a discovery that causes quite a stir at the American Museum of Natural History, where no one was aware that such a rodent inhabited the park across the street. Of this bit of detective work Winn writes poetically: "You've penetrated the darkness with the help of an owl's digestive system."

Amateurs have long added to our store of knowledge about orni­thology, and Winn and her friends are no exception. They don't just watch the night creatures, they fig­ure things out: for instance, that the park's screech owls are diminish­ing in number precisely because evolution has taught them to fly low after rodents, a habit that can be fatal in a park traversed by cars. At another point Winn wonders: just where do all the robins go at night?  The search for an answer leads not just around the park but to the Internet, where Winn un­covers an article by a nineteenth-century naturalist who discovered a single tree in Cambridge, Mas­sachusetts, that held 1,200 birds. Eventually Winn and her friends find their own robin tree and, in the pre-dawn darkness, watch it explode with birds as "a huge black wave of robinhood surged out into the morning's gloom." And so a simple question leads to another mystery solved and another wild sight that few have ever seen.

Part of the pleasure of the book is that its sense of discovery is con­tagious. While reading it I found myself getting out before dawn to check in on my local birds. My one quibble is with the author's occa­sional descent into cuteness. There is a point, about two-thirds into the book, when a serious birder takes Winn to task for using cute names for the birds -- specifically, calling two screech owls Spiffy and Un­made Bed. Winn replies that she didn't name, but merely described, the birds, and then suggests that the offended gentleman "lighten up." I can imagine, however, that more than a few serious nature lovers, birders, and scientists will respond to Winn's book the way that birder did to the naming.  Too cute, too lovey-dovey, too anthro­pomorphic.

While the grumblers have a point, I would say to them just what Winn said to the birder. Lighten up. Lighten up and enjoy, because the only reason these tendencies are bothersome at all is because of what they get in the way of: a terrifically engrossing story. And without her quirks, many read­ers wouldn't follow Winn on her increasingly bold adventures into the night. Proper, if eccentric, full of her jokes and her friends, the author sets out to solve her small mysteries. But at its best the book itself has a larger question in mind: how to be in this confused, mod­ern world. Marie Winn, cute bird names and all, answers that with her passion as she throws herself out into the darkness, demonstrat­ing for the rest of us the pleasure of connecting one's life to the greater mysteries.