Wild Things in the City

A NATURAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY (428 pp.)--John Kieran -- Houghton Mifflin ($5.75).

In The Bronx, no less than in Shropshire, it is true that

. . . to look at things in bloom Fifty springs is little room . . .

But John Kieran, 67, used the 50 springs well; sportswriter, naturalist and radio fountain of knowledge (Information Please), he was born, raised and schooled in The Bronx (Fordham, cum laude, 1912), all told lived there for the better part of half a century. While few New Yorkers ever notice nature, Kieran's thesis always has been: "Let men build and pave to their hearts' content, there will always be many kinds and untold numbers of wild things in the great city."

Fragile Persistence. Kieran's nature walks have centered on Van Cortlandt Park and the Hudson's shore near Spuyten Duyvil, but he did not stick to the man-made nature spots of parks and reserves. Through the asphalt of a parking lot, Kieran has seen emerge the fragile but persistent mustard plant. The most merciless predator of Wall Street is neither bull nor bear, but the peregrine falcon; the swift diving bird of medieval romance roosts in the towers of office buildings and, with pigeons as prey, makes many a killing in the street. Once, covering a football game at Columbia's Baker Field, Kieran spotted hawks high in the sky; keeping his glasses alternately on the sky and on the field, he got both the story of the game and the score in the sky: 88 hawks, all redtails or redshoulders.

Kieran tells what can be found where and when, how it can be recognized and what it means in the complicated economy of nature. Winter visitors to New York regularly include the bald eagle, who rides the ice floes down the Hudson as far as Dyckman Street. Muskrat houses can be found in the lower end of the Van Cortlandt swamp; the eastern cottontail is common in the fields and thickets of Staten Island; the northern brown snake inhabits Central Park.

Retreating Species. Not only stars but starlings are now native to the lights of old Broadway, which provide heated dormitories for thousands of the birds every winter. And for the city-bound naturalist, nothing is more convenient than the hibernating habits of the big brown bat, who sleeps through the cold months in one wing of the Museum of Natural History. One of the joys of nature study, Kieran's book makes clear, is the fellowship of amateur and professional; most of the professionals in town roost, like the bats, at the museum.

While Author Kieran easily makes his point that nature endures all things, even concrete and steel, he also chronicles the species that have been pushed beyond the city limits--the oyster, the deer, the bobcat and beaver. Among the latest to leave is snowy-thatched, Latin-quoting John Kieran himself. The story on nature in New York is complete and compelling, but the story was filed from Rockport, Mass. His ancient habitat, a rambling Riverdale house where once a flying squirrel was a steady customer at a bird-feeding station, is now a stretch of concrete in the Henry Hudson Parkway.

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