Prospect: A Year in the Park

A bull in Brooklyn

The chopper hovering over the house was deafening. Okay, four choppers. What violent offender had NYPD so focused on the Parade Grounds?

A sprint across the street put me squarely in the middle of an unfolding chase worthy of a white Bronco--but this was a brown cow. Or bull, actually. A rogue bovine, presumably an escapee from a slaughterhouse truck, was loping around one of the soccer fields before a growing crowd. 

 

 

 

 

An armada of police and emergency vehicles was converging on the scene. We were cleared from the field, then told, repeatedly, to move across the street. The local news crews wouldn't budge--it's not every day you see a bull on the loose in Flatbush. "You wanna get hit with a tranquilizer dart?" bawled a cop. (No, actually, I thought, stepping back a bit.) "ACROSS THE STREET, people! Am I speakin' CHINESE?"

 

 

 

 

 

Three guys armed with dart guns and a rifle circled the wary beast, and finally a report issued. "Shit, missed it," said a local news cameraman as he struggled to set up his tripod. A soft "whoa!" escaped the crowd.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bull was finally penned in behind some benches, where his energy barely ebbed. "Yo, cut that fence and free my homie!" yelled a guy in a do-rag. Now the bull's tongue lolled; he sank to his knees, then rallied and tried to crash over the fence. "That's right, don't give up!" said a woman. "You see the strength!"

From further back in the crowd, an activist voice roared frantically: "We have a rescue vehicle from an animal sanctuary 10 minutes away!" "Yeah, don't kill it!" others chimed in.

A lasso was produced, and Number 7741, as his yellow tag proclaimed him, was led stumbling into an NYPD horse trailer. I suspect he was en route to a Kosher slaughterhouse, given the proprietary concern with which a pair of Orthodox guys were conferring with the police brass on scene. An early report from a local blog suggests that poor 7741 will indeed make it to a farm animal sanctuary, a happy fate that has awaited several of our high-profile escapees.

I hope so. While no vegetarian, I confess I winced upon coming home and seeing the "humanely raised" Whole Foods hamburger meat defrosting on my counter.

I saw the strength.

This is NOT the first rodeo, as it were, on the Parade Grounds; read here about the now-forgotten night when the "Cat's Meow" club on Coney Island Avenue burned down, a stable caught fire, and 135 horses stampeded across this very ground!

A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you?

No, actually, I wouldn't*. Even human foragers don't want to munch English ivy, poison ivy, goutweed, and other invasive plants that have run riot in now-sunny areas of Prospect Park after hundreds of trees fell victim to Superstorm Sandy.

But goats? They'll be happy to help. The park has hired a gang of experienced weed-whackers from green-goats.com, the brainchild of former dairy goat farmers Ann and Larry Cihanek. Their team of power-mowers has already gone to work in Liberty State Park and Fort Wadsworth, Staten Island, among other urban sites; this, however, is the first time that goats have come to the rescue in Brooklyn. And predictably, the media went mad.

 

 

At a press conference yesterday, park officials introduced members of the press to the eight goats who will work, in three teams, in fenced enclosures along the park's steeply hilly and overgrown eastern edge, as part of a multi-year woodlands restoration program.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In small groups, journos were permitted into the enclosure, where they giggled and scrambled and generally fell victim to the curious charm that has made goats the current darlings of Instagram.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not all members of the team were on message. One snoozed obliviously before the Opening Remarks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This guy, named Raptor, was more interested in nibbling bark than weeds. (For this reason, some young trees will get goat-guards.) Raptor is a breed called the La Mancha, bred for almost non-existent outer ears. This collegue more than made up for it with extravagantly lengthy ones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photographers called out pleadingly to the goats in paparazzi fashion, but while some had perfected "Blue Steel" and even "Magnum," others shrugged off the attention with goatish aplomb.

    

Few visitors petted the goats, although we were not forbidden to do so, perhaps because we were warned they might have rubbed their hairy flanks on poison ivy. Undeterred, I bonded with a perfectly charming goat named Skittles. I am a goat-whisperer! (Hint: If they are scratching their backs with their horns, scratch that spot for them.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Needles to say, this being Brooklyn, concerns were voiced over the goats winding up as someone's dinner. Mr. Cihanek said he wasn't worried; the goats, he recounted, tend to bring out the protective best in people. The few who have escaped their enclosures have been rounded up and returned, often by folks from cultures fond of their culinary potential. Let's face it: People love these creatures, and not just because their four stomachs can handle 25% of their body weight in vegetation every day. The goats will remain in the park, says the Alliance, "until their work is done."

The woodlands restoration, funded by post-Sandy grant money from the National Parks Service via New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, goes beyond goats. According to the Prospect Park Alliance, historic preservation work will happen sometime in the future in the (sadly neglected) Vale of Cashmere (whose leaky pond, right, is now a mucky swamp) and also atop Lookout Hill, whose trees were decimated by Sandy.

In the meantime, there are goats!

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey

A kiddley divey too, Wooden shoe!"

Spring Park News: Goats and crafts and GOATS?!

Stuff happenin' in Prospect Park this spring: The "minds behind Smorgasborg and Brooklyn Flea," those uber-drivers of all things hipster and gentrified, are bringing a crafts market ("curated," of course) to Grand Army Plaza, according to the Prospect Park Alliance: "Beginning Sunday, May 8, and continuing every Sunday through October, Grand Army Plaza will host a variety of local artisans, makers and designers." Hey, don't overlook the delightful little free-range Saturday artisans' market that has spontaneously generated near the Greenmarket, which I profiled here (the faces and offerings have changed but there are always a few nice booths worth looking at). 

 

Photo: Julie Larsen-Maher/Prospect Park Alliance

And then...there are going to be goats.

Yes, goats. Again, the Alliance:

"Throughout the Park, storms like Hurricane Sandy have felled or damaged over 500 trees, enabling invasive plants to thrive and further harm the natural ecosystem. In the Park's Northeast Perimeter, where over 50 trees were damaged or destroyed, goats will be working alongside Prospect Park Alliance staff to restore the woodlands. The goats will eat these invasive weeds so that the Alliance can plant new native trees and plants next spring to beautify the landscape and bolster natural habitat for birds, and ensure the Park is more resilient against future storms."

Photo: GreenGoats.com

According to this account in today's New York Times, the eight goats (from goat-deployment experts Green Goats have been hired by the Alliance for the season for $15,000 to feast away on pesky vegetation like poison ivy, which they relish, in the Vale of Cashmere. (Will that make them Cashmere goats? Just a little goat-herding humor there.) That per-goat salary is more than my honor student is likely to make on a summer job; maybe I should teach her to munch invasive plants.

No one seems to have addressed the potential peril to urban goats, even in an "enclosure"; I fear for their misuse for meat or even intimate companionship in this notoriously secluded locale. (They have done their weed-whacking thing in Liberty State Park, but this appears to be their Brooklyn debut.) The park, however, does have a robust history of ruminants, including the Long Meadow's herd of sheep (said to have had an excess of Brooklyn attitude). I wish our Brooklyn goats much luck, hope to meet them at a wool-centric "Bleat and Greet" event on May 22, and look forward to bringing you more news of their progress against botanical entropy.

All kidding aside, these Green Goat folks, from the Rhinebeck/Red Hook area, are tough and tender-hearted innovators, whose herd was tragically lost in a barn fire last year; I'm happy to know Brooklyn will be a part of their resurgence:

To the world below

The mysterious clearings on the southern end of Prospect Park are larger and more open since Sandy, but have lost none of their air of remoteness and melancholy. Stumps are everywhere, although the park has done an amazing job at picking up the deadfall.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speaking of mystery, what means this message carved on one of the storm's survivors? I took it as an omen, and looked down as I scuffed through the leaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The world below is this guy's pantry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A trail of rose petals led to the lakeside, where a lone mom and her baby watched the ducks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It led to the scene of a recent celebration involving "Crazy Stallion" malt liquor and this evocative tableau. Latex and a feather...how saucy, and also, in December, how nippy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No thin ice yet, but it's coming; if the world really is getting warmer, thin ice may be the only kind we'll get, ever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I entered the park by the Peristyle, I looked down and found this amputated rose. Then the petals later...but I couldn't figure out what it meant (unless perhaps St. Therese was "friending" and "poking" me like the overage teenager that she is). I left the rose on a bench, to mystify someone else on a cloudy afternoon. 

Turbo-spring

Two weeks of late May mysteriously land in the middle of March, and I manage not to get over to the park more than once or twice. The reason: My own garden has been bursting out and yelling at me to perform every manner of service for it. A dozen rosebushes alone have been screeching to be pruned, and without the excuse of being miserable in the cold, I have been their slave.

But I've got to get over there because all sorts of stuff is going on. From my front porch, I can see that the trees are greening up, smudged with verdant pastel, a full month ahead of schedule. And that's not all.

* The Lakeside project is shaping up to be pretty damn amazing. Here's the Animated Architect Sketch; I love the snowy part, and the part where the trees drop down magically on Music Island. And the part at the very beginning where the Robert Moses crap building just disappears. (Thanks to the Q at Parkside blog for the heads-up.)

* The "Googa-Mooga" festival is stirring wild interest among the hip; it's some sort of food and music fest on May 19 and 20 that mysteriously, while "free," requires a ticket of extraordinary scarcity. Spouse has managed to acquire at least one of these prized tickets, which has him very excited even though we have yet to learn what bands are playing. Oh well: The festival's website proclaims that "food is the new rock," so we can dance along to the artisanal pickles.)

 
  * And on March 31, the Carousel reopens for its hundredth anniversary. It's been given a nice tune-up by Todd W. Goings, a carousel doctor (what a dream job!), nicely profiled here. (Photo, right: Chester Higgins, New York Times)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* At the Prospect Park Zoo, the Golden Tamarins have a wee baby riding around on their blond backs. (Photo: Julie Larsen Maher/WCS)

 

 

Meanwhile, check out a nicely researched gem on the park's mysterious Vale of Cashmere at the wonderful history blog of the Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklynology. This is the long-gone "Children's Shelter." The Vale, that haunted and troubled gem, looks very different than the playground envisioned by Vaux and Olmsted. Time to get over there and see for myself.

Tweet-up

Spring on a rampage at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. Got pansies for the front-porch pot, and a red geranium to remind me of Italy. If we'd bought these branches, the cats just would've knocked 'em over.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two kinds of sparrows (good kinds, not just Eurosparrows) werer feasting on grass seed on the meadow: Song Sparrow (I think...)

 

 

 

 

...and White-Throated Sparrow (I think).

 

 

 

 

 

 

More colorful: my first sighted Robin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GRATUITOUS FUZZY CUTENESS

 

 

 

A date with Mad Anthony

Guest Park! This Sunday past, we decided that the foliage in Prospect Park wasn't quite advanced enough, and headed up the Palisades Parkway toward Bear Mountain. Squabbling over having missed the visitors' center, and uncertain just where the Bear Mountain exit was, we peeled off into the vast, deserted parking lot of the Anthony Wayne Recreation Area, a spot my family used to visit on childhood car trips. (We liked him because he was nicknamed "Mad Anthony," partly for his bayonet-happy antics in a Revolutionary War battle at nearby Stony Point.)  A few hikers headed up into the woods, so we took the picnic cooler and followed them...to our own private meadow.

The sunny space, surrounded by near-peak foliage, was all ours; not a boom box in earshot or another soul in sight. A hawk circled low overhead. The picnic table had cool shelf fungus on it.

 

 

 

 

 

After consuming sandwiches, we explored the edge of the woods. Lovely berries ripened in red and black.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found a pile of these feathers near a stream, perhaps leftovers from the hawk. Whose feathers have such perfect white polka-dots?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the day's best nature-walk treasure: this dear little mole, whose rigor mortis had just begun to set in. Or, as Spouse remarked, "CSI: Wind in the Willows."

Up next, in Guest Park, Part II: We make it to Bear Mountain, where we find stuffed bats, orbiting raccoons, Japanese tourists, and beer. Stay tuned, especially if you can't get Channel 5 or 9!

And we can stay all day

The Prospect Park Zoo on Friday, where the California sea lions charmed an admiring cross-section of Brooklyn.

 

A cool and competent-looking Daughter was on duty at her volunteer job; over the summer, in this zoo of intimate scale, she has forged a deep empathy with a number of unlikely creatures. Her favorite, the inscrutable Slow Loris, lives in too much darkness to photograph. But she is also fond (who isn't?) of the zany meerkats.

 

As daughter helped little kids stencil their favorite animals, I peered up into the Great Horned Owl's lair. This guy stared down at my face with implacable fury, as if my nose were a snack but for the glass between us.

Nearby, these cockatoos cuddled like living Peeps.

In the petting barn, Daughter loves the simplicity of this "Baby Doll" sheep named Ginger, a stumpy blob of grubby fleece.

And, incredibly, she has forgiven Loki the Alpaca, who gurgled and then spat squarely on her nose on her first day of work. Mother has not forgiven, you sneaky sleazeball.

When Daughter got off work, we nabbed a bag of Popeye's chicken, ate it in the park, and walked home on a perfect late-summer evening.

Panting at the library

A blisteringly hot Saturday morning on the steps of the central Brooklyn Public Library, right across the street from Prospect Park. Next to the Art Deco entrance are carved the words, "Here are enshrined the longings of great hearts." Today, most of us—human and animal—just longed for a cool drink.

Wish granted—by one delightful new feature of the renovated plaza. Babies love it; so do Newfoundlands.

 

For that matter, so do toddlers...

 

...and grown-up ladies. Is this why some people have the curious habit of calling their feet "dogs"?

 

Huge vans surrounded the plaza, bedecked with adorable cat and dog faces; inside them, an ASPCA clinic offered pet microchipping, vaccinating, spay and neuter services, and, most heart-rendingly, adoptions.

 

I always want every single one. But I especially hope that this mellow guy went home with a good family today.

To learn more about the ASPCA's mobile spay/neuter clinics, go here.

Night moves

"Prospect Park in the Dark" was an event for park members and families Friday night. As sunset lingered, we gathered at the Audubon Center in the Boat House. The duckweed has almost covered the lake. 

 

BIRDS

After a briefing on nocturnal urban nature by author Marie Winn, we traipsed out to see twilight on the wing. Saw the family of mute swans, three green herons, a cardinal foraging in a trash can, chimney swifts, and what I call the "mocha" ducks, a streaky hybrid of mallards and white eatin' ducks (which are close enough to mallards to interbreed). The mocha ducks have the distinctive curly tail "cowlick" of the mallards. Thanks to guide Gabriel Willow and electric boat Independence captain Jim for a silent glide across the lake.

 

A swallow fed bugs to her babies in a nest tucked into the facade of the Boat House. Swallows decorate their nests with white feathers (see the swan feather sticking out on the right?)

Next, it was on to look for bats, with Brooklyn's "bat man" Paul Keim and his trusty sonar detector.

BATS

On Paul's hand-held sonic decoder, we could hear the chittering signals of the little brown bats that swooped overhead. He said bats are a "keystone species": If they go, we go, because without them, the insects will take over the earth.

BUGS

That was happening in the Nethermead, at a bug-viewing pavilion with a UV light, laptop and super-macro camera. The celebrity sighting of the night was this stag beetle. Earlier, lightning bugs had risen over the clover in ethereal clouds, just as the stars began to pop out overhead.

STARS

Back at the Boathouse, a telescope was set up for amateur astronomy. But we had already seen Venus and Saturn glowing, and a honey-colored full moon rise over Brooklyn, so we headed home.

Here's a catbird singing (not meowing, that was me), while our birding guide tells us stuff in the background. Bird starts singing at 12 seconds in, and ignores the commentary with aplomb.

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