On the Wing at Wagner

Biology professor publishes new book on the birds to be found on Grymes Hill

The Wagner College campus is one of the natural marvels of New York City: a green, living oasis embedded in one of the world’s great urban centers.

In our 2014 Wagner Magazine story, “Rooted in Grymes Hill,” we took a broad look at our very own hundred-acre wood with the help of Wagner biology professor Horst Onken. You can still find the story on our website at wagner.edu/rooted.

Now, Professor Onken has produced a new guide to the natural life on our campus: a free ebook entitled “Birds at Wagner College,” available in the Archives & Special Collections section of the Horrmann Library website. Download it by visiting wagner.edu/bird-book.

Onken, who joined the faculty of our biology department in 2006, was raised in northwest Germany, surrounded by the greenhouses and orchards of his family’s nursery.

“I enjoyed that a lot,” Onken told us in 2014. “It was right on the outskirts of town — on one side of us were fields; on the other, forests.”

Birds were, naturally, a part of the population of the Onken nursery.

“My parents had bird feeders in the window,” he recalls, “and they would teach us who was coming to visit there at the bird feeder.”

The idea for a book about the birds of Wagner College’s Grymes Hill campus had its genesis in the Covid shutdown of 2020.

“When Covid started, we suddenly had to stay home, and we had to teach from home,” Onken says. “I live in New Jersey, and not having to commute to campus saved me an hour and a half every day.

“I am an avid walker; I like to walk more than to ride on a bike. In the spring of 2020, what I did with my saved time was I went for walks to the beach. I live a mile from the beach, and I live basically across the road from a state park where I saw all these birds, and that got me back into more serious birding.”

Onken’s walks — and his bird observations — during the Covid shutdown, combined with a new service responsibility, generated the idea for a bird book.

“About two years ago, I got a message from the Provost’s Office encouraging me to apply for the Martha Megerle Chair,” Onken told us.

The Megerle family had established the Martha Megerle and Eugen E. Megerle Chairs in the Sciences in 2011. The Megerle Chairs rotate every two years among the faculty in biology, chemistry, microbiology, physics and anthropology. Faculty members who are awarded one of these funded positions in support of their research are obligated to create tools that will benefit the college community in some way.

Onken had two ideas for his Megerle Chair projects: the bird book, and an update of a 1974 booklet entitled “Woody Plants at Wagner College.” The 16-page mimeographed booklet, which covered just 33 varieties of plants found on campus, was a collaboration between biology professor Dean Christianson (1967–75) and student John Cain ’73, with leaf drawings by Paul Grecay ’74 and species location map by Alice Cook Taylor ’74. You’ll find a link to the booklet at wagner.edu/woody-plants.

The bird book came first.

‘Wait, watch and listen’

Birding is evidently the observation and the recording of birds. It can be done by everybody. It can be done stationary, by observing a bird feeder, by sitting on a bench in a park, or by just looking out of the window. It can also be done by walking in any environment where birds are, which is virtually everywhere. The time input can be 5 minutes or 5 hours. It does not matter. I guess everybody is a birder. Most of us recognize the birds around us. What distinguishes a real birder from the rest of us is that birders record their sightings.
— from “Birds at Wagner College”

In the front of Onken’s book, he describes a simple set of tools you can use — starting with the book itself, which you might want to download onto a tablet computer for easy portability. In his “Introduction, or How to Get Lost in the World of Birds,” Onken writes,

If used in the right way, [“Birds at Wagner College”] may provide many hopefully pleasant journeys through the “world” of birds at Wagner College.
Readers will find one-page descriptions for each of the 105 most abundant birds that at least occasionally visit the college campus. Learn about their habitat, their food, their love life, how they nest, their behavior, their migration, about conservation issues … you name it. Get lost in the world of birds!

Onken also suggests that you download a pair of apps onto your phone, Merlin and eBird — both created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and both available on the major online app stores — which will help you with identifying and recording your observations.

Merlin will help you identify birds you don’t recognize, and eBird will help you share your observations with other “birders.”

“Let’s say you’ve seen a bird, but you don’t know what it is,” Onken says.

“You can tell Merlin, ‘Well, the bird

was about this size,’ give them the color … they already know where you are, geographically, from the app’s GPS tracking function. Basically, it’s like a search engine that goes through all the checklists of the last time different birds were seen in your vicinity and matches them up with the description you’ve provided. You get all those, and then you look at pictures and pick the one out that you actually saw.”

You can also use Merlin to match a photo you’ve taken of a bird, or an audio recording you’ve captured of a bird’s song.

The second app Onken recommends, eBird, will help you record the checklist you will make of the birds you’ve seen.

“Anybody who wants to can sit in their yard or wherever they observe birds and make a checklist. You would say, ‘Okay, at 1 p.m. I’m sitting here, and I’m going to sit for 30 minutes,’ and you just write down all the bird species that you see, be they hopping around or flying by. Then you would go to your computer, make an ac-count with eBird [go to ebird.org], log into your account, and record your checklist.”

Onken suggests several places to watch birds on campus:

The center of the campus is a good choice for birds that are common at Wagner College and that are usually synanthropic, meaning that these bird species live near humans and beneﬁt from humans, or the environments created by humans. Think of house sparrows, pigeons, robins, starlings, blue jays, crows, gulls … However, other bird species may be seen or heard in the center of the college campus.

At certain times of the year, birds are moving across the country to or from their breeding grounds and they hit the college campus to feed on insect larvae or whatever they can ﬁnd. Look up to the branches of trees and discover birds [searching] for food in April and May as well as September and October.

The likelihood of meeting other birds increases in the following spots:

Sit down on the guard railing of the lower Tiers parking lot and watch the “wilderness” below you. Wait, watch and listen.
Sit down on the bench overlooking the tennis courts. Wait, watch and listen. Sit down on the rim of one of the planters beside the Powerhouse at Campus Road. Wait, watch and listen.

Raptors like hawks, ospreys, falcons, or eagles are usually only visible from spots that oﬀer an open sky (parking lots or on the hill in front of Foundation Hall), because they just move by and do not regularly hunt at Wagner College. For any other bird species that just ﬂies by (geese, gulls, crows) the same applies.

Students have been drawn for years to Wagner College’s Grymes Hill campus for its unique combination of characteristics: just 45 minutes from virtually anywhere in New York City, one of the world’s great metropolitan centers, but surrounded by open space, green lawns and wooded forests teeming with wildlife.