Nature in New York

Manhattan Island is a veritable paradise for psychiatrists, phrenologists and social anthropologists, but serious students of nature usually ignore it. Naturalist William Beebe, 76, a native New Yorker, is an exception. Beebe, longtime director of tropical research at the New York Zoological Society, has had his share of far-ranging expeditions, from field trips up into the Himalayas to descents half a mile below sea level in his bathysphere. But he has also filled many a notebook with material found in his own back streets. His newest book, Unseen Life of New York (Duell-Little; $4), is a once-over-lightly of the natural life that peeks out around, above and below Manhattan's skyscrapers.

Bronx Mink. Author Beebe admits that the concrete sidewalks and smog-filled air have done more damage to New York's bird and animal population than organized battalions of hunters.* Only five or six kinds of birds now nest in Manhattan's Central Park, which 50 years ago harbored 60 different species. But there remain, within the city and its environs, 52 species of amphibians and reptiles, and 15,000 varieties of insects. There are 260 varieties of fish in neighboring municipal waters above the 25-fathom mark. Once, from a boat anchored due southeast of the Statue of Liberty, Beebe hauled up 55 species of "deep-sea, on-like beings."

On another occasion, Beebe trapped eleven "magnificent mink" in The Bronx, on the 262 roped-off acres of the Zoological Society's Bronx Zoo, and had the satisfaction of taking the skins to a downtown fur trader for manufacture into a fur piece. At different spots in the city, he has found all twelve of the great divisions of earthly life, including sponges, starfish, innumerable kinds of worms and the one-celled protozoa that stand at the beginnings of animal existence. Taking the air one night on his roof on West 67th Street, he saw a brace of wild black ducks tear past him on their way from Long Island to a safer place up the Hudson.

His most spectacular bird-watching tour was a night spent in the torch of the Statue of Liberty (by special permission of the city authorities). "Every few seconds," writes Beebe, "the sound of bird voices came from overhead; the peet-sweet of a sandpiper, the croak of perhaps a green heron, the thin notes of warblers ..." After a night fog increased, birds began to dash against the statue, blinded by its light. The next morning, Beebe and a companion counted the bodies of 271.

Manhattan Grubber. As a naturalist with an educated imagination, Beebe finds himself constantly running into evidences of New York's glacial-age past. Where other sidewalk superintendents see only the ponderous antics of the power shovel, Beebe mentally catalogues the two-billion-year-old rocks of a new skyscraper's foundation. The city has also had its share of more individualized fossil remains: the tooth of a 500,000-year-old horse dug up near Ft. Schuyler in The Bronx, the tusk of a mastodon uncovered during the cutting of the Harlem River Ship Canal. New York's oldest known inhabitant, says Beebe, (and probably its first Jersey commuter)was a crocodile-like creature called the phytosaur, whose bones were found just across the Hudson River, on the Palisades. Its specific name: Rutiodon manhattanensis, freely translated as the Manhattan Grubber. Its estimated age: 200 million years.

On off-days from his work at the zoo, Beebe spends his time collecting eels' eggs, birds' eggs or minute bits of protoplasm. He recommends the practice to other New Yorkers who are curious about how life around them can develop. For those of more speculative mind, he offers a prophecy of New York's ultimate effacement when, thousands of years from now, the fifth glacial period begins its inevitable course.

Says Naturalist Beebe: "At. last the enormous, pale green ice front of cliff, a half or a full mile in height, crunches and grinds its way . . . The houses, everything, crumble like clusters of twigs and pebbles. Last of all, if there could be any human eye to see, the age-old . . . stone itself is stirred, pushed from its bed, and like a great snowball, rolls slowly southward in the forefront of the glacier.

"Another ice age is on its way!"

* week two duck hunters, survivors of a hardier era, were fined $5 apiece for shooting ducks within New York City limits.

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