Connecticut Audubon Society (CAS) hosted the fourth of five planned “Young, Gifted, And Wild About Birds” online presentations on March 24.

The latest program, “Grassland Birds Are Thriving In The Least Likely Place,” was led by Shannon Curley, PhD, of New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and Jose Ramirez-Garofalo, a PhD candidate at Rutgers University.

Tom Andersen, communications director for CAS, introduced Curley and Ramirez-Garofalo. Anderson noted he was born and raised in Staten Island, where the duo’s research at Freshkills Park took place.

“Freshkills Park includes a thousand acres of grasslands. Shannon and Jose have been studying its birds for half a dozen years,” Andersen said.

Curley started off by sharing how Freshkills Park used to be a landfill before it was “converted and reclaimed into [a] beautiful urban green space.”

Ramirez-Garofalo described how the land historically consisted of vast tidal creeks and coastal marsh before New York established the site as Fresh Kills Landfill in 1948.

As a landfill, it had four active mounds and would receive as much as 29,000 tons of trash per day.

“By 1954, Fresh Kills landfill was the largest landfill in the world,” Ramirez-Garofalo said.

By 1991, Fresh Kills was New York City’s only operating landfill receiving residential garbage.

The New York State Legislature passed a bill in 1996 that required the landfill to stop accepting solid waste by December 2001.

The following year, two of the four garbage mounds were closed with an impermeable cap.

“By March 22, 2001, the landfill received its last barge of garbage,” Ramirez-Garofalo said. “Unfortunately, by September 2001, after the World Trade Center attacks, the governor forced Fresh Kills to reopen and receive the materials from the World Trade Center site. That became the west mound.”

Freshkills Park now sits atop the former Fresh Kills Landfill.

“Currently it’s at 2,200 acres, which makes it about three times the size of Central Park,” Curley said.

She described this conversion as an “engineering feat,” because the mounds are sealed with a cap and layers of soil and geotextiles. There is also a system of wells, trenches, and pipes that collect landfill byproducts underground and then it is sent off to nearby treatment plants.

According to the presentation, the South Mound was capped in 1996, the North Mound was capped in 1997, the East Mound was capped in 2011, and the West Mound was capped in 2021.

Curley showed a photo of what each mound site looks like today. She explained the North Mound has a view of the skyline, the south mound sees some grassland birds while the east mound sees the most, and the west mound was the most recent to be capped.

Grassland Bird Studies

Curley said that studying the birds in this area, as well as other places, is important because birds respond to climate and land use changes, making them ecological indicators of habitat quality.

“If we study these birds and the changes in the bird communities over time, it helps us develop these management and conservation practices that we can use long-term,” she said. “In our case, urban reclaimed green space is very important, because seeing this wildlife return is seen as a measure of success for us.”

The bird research projects that Curley and Ramirez-Garofalo took part in were grassland bird surveys, bird banding projects to find territory use and productivity, and Sedge Wren monitoring.

They will soon be putting VHF nanotagging on three grassland birds, banding Foster’s Terns and Northern Saw-whet Owl, and conducting arthropod sampling.

Ramirez-Garofalo shared that Staten Island previously had species such as Eastern Meadowlark, Bobolink, Sedge Wren, Grasshopper Sparrow, and Vesper Sparrows nesting, but when the island became more developed those species were extirpated.

He noted that over the last ten years, however, some of the species have returned for migration and breeding.

“Now at Freshkills Park, we have really large numbers of Savannah Sparrows … they are the most abundant of grassland birds that we have,” Ramirez-Garofalo said.

Curley showed photos of their grassland bird survey research for productivity. It included a Savannah Sparrow nest with eggs as well as the same nest a few days later filled with the nestlings that had all hatched.

“Trying to find these nests [is] actually very challenging. As you can imagine, at this point in the summer, the grasses are about four to five feet tall and these nests are typically the size of a small fist … what we are trying to do is look at it to get an idea of how many birds are fledging from these nests and how well our birds are doing in the park,” she said.

As for the bird banding part of the research process, Ramirez-Garofalo said North American birds are equipped with an individually marked aluminum band or colored band.

Data being collected includes the date, time, location; species, age and gender; mass, wing length, and the molt and/or feather condition.

They are then able to learn grassland birds’ territories held for most of the breeding season, as well as territory size and density.

Ramirez-Garofalo noted that Sedge Wrens, a threatened species in New York, were difficult to study because they require wet meadows/grasslands to breed and have “little to no site fidelity.” Sedge Wrens can even make around seven decoy nests.

Additionally, there have been some notable bird visitors to the park, including the Upland Sandpiper and the Henslow Sparrow, which he said could begin breeding in the area again sometime in the future.

Another aspect that was taken into consideration for the study was predator impact.

Curley said, “We do have some predators of our grassland birds. In 2018, Red Fox began to breed at Freshkills Park. By 2020, there were at least ten families. And as of 2021, there are about 20 families.”

The increase in Red Foxes has coincided with a decline in nesting success of bird species such as Spotted Sandpipers and Killdeer.

Ramirez-Garofalo spoke to white-tailed deer being an opportunistic predator of ground nesting birds, though they have not personally experienced it.

Freshkills Park

Freshkills Park is not yet open to the public.

“There’s a portion of the park that will be opened, that was off the capped mound, sometime in 2022,” Curley informed the group. “However, we do offer kayak tours, nature walks, and photography tours within the closed portion of the park.”

The presentation concluded with Q&A period.

Reporter Alissa Silber can be reached at alissa@thebee.com.