Fall migration is starting to pick up, and even in the middle of downtown Jersey City, there are birds everywhere.
Yesterday morning, while doing a collision monitoring walk near Newport, we kept spotting warblers and other migrants flitting through the trees around the PATH station – often with glass, windows, and high-rise buildings just feet behind them.
Black-throated Green Warbler in a tree next to the Jersey City Newport PATH station, with another building in the background
For birds making an exhausting journey south, any patch of green can offer a place to stop, rest, and refuel. In Jersey City, that includes the small pockets of habitat tucked between buildings in Newport, throughout downtown, and in Journal Square.
Watching them move through these spaces is a reminder of the complicated reality of urban migration: birds finding habitat wherever they can, while navigating a landscape full of glass that they may not recognize as a barrier.
It’s one of the things that makes collision monitoring so revealing. We’re walking these routes looking for birds that have struck buildings, but we’re also seeing the living migration happening all around us: warblers feeding in street trees, birds dropping into tiny patches of green, and migrants finding their way through a landscape built almost entirely for people.
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- Male Common Yellowthroat in the bushes next to the Newport PATH station
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- Magnolia Warbler in a tree in front of the Newport PATH station
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- Yellow Warbler in the trees next to a building in Newport, Jersey City
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- Downy Woodpecker in a tree in front of the Newport PATH station
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