Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife Book

Here's my original review sans edits that I wrote for the New York Post (to see, go to ):

When most New Yorkers think about Central Park at night, the headline aliases "Preppie Killer" and "Central Park Jogger" spring to mind. If we weren't old enough to read in the 80s about that tragic tryst and brutal rape, our parents told us all about them. Regardless, an alarm goes off: Bad things happen there under the blanket of darkness. But author and journalist Marie Winn, who coined a couple headline monikers herself, namely "Pale Male" and "Lola," assures us it is not near as dangerous as we think. In fact, she states in her lushly depicted new book, "Central Park in the Dark," that the park's precinct "enjoys the city's lowest crime rate" and if a crime were committed there, it is most likely to happen in broad daylight.

In her last book, "Red-Tails in Love," Winn focused on lovers Pale Male and Lola, a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting on the 12th-story ledge of an elegant Fifth Avenue building, whom Winn had already launched into N.Y.C. superstardom, chronicling their lives in "The Wall Street Journal." Now Winn gently guides us into those creepy crepuscular hours to point out the goings-on in the winding paths and woodsy nooks of our 843 green acres, leading us into the Ramble, "that thirty-seven acre wilderness in the heart of Central Park."

"Night brings out some of nature's most fascinating creatures, and the dramas of their life cycles are enacted in darkness," Winn writes in her lucid, poetic prose. The "owls flying off to hunt, bats calling unheard as they circle at water's edge, spiders spinning elaborate webs . . . 'this is what brought a little group of nature lovers I think of as the Night People into Central Park's nocturnal world." The latter are an affable bunch of birdwatchers, mothers (rhymes with "authors," she let's us know), biophiles, stargazers, insomniacs or all of the above. They include a violinist, teenage actress who speaks feral-cat, rock star, crush-inspiring encyclopedic-minded usher from the Metropolitan Opera House (the "moth guru") and even the ghost of a dearly departed fellow enthusiast. However, the true protagonists are the critters, big and small.

You can see 200-some bird species in Central Park. Some stop over during fall and spring migrations, others winter, such as owls: "With their bark-colored plumage, screech or long-eared or saw-whet owls (the three most common Central Park species) literally blend into the woodwork." But when sunset turns its pinkest, the birdwatchers are there for the pre-nighttime primping and "fly-out." Then begin the comedies and tragedies Winn speaks of, the most riveting involving Project X, the brainchild of a parks commissioner. This "reintroduction of ten plant and ten animal species" begins forebodingly with the release of spring peepers (tiny frogs) that disappear shortly thereafter without a trace. It continues to unfold with an avian murder mystery replete with detailed autopsy report. Winn is on the beat, sucking us in.

Throughout are the multifarious minidramas: the violent nest-building and lovemaking habits of the cicada killer wasp; the fiendish post-coital (or coital) snacking of the female praying mantis; the metamorphosis of the cicada from homely nymph to comely adult; or the "ravishingly beautiful . . . sexual congress of slugs" (yes, it is ballet-like and otherworldly'a BBC nature clip assured me I was reading right).

Winn has compiled 11 years of fieldwork and research bringing it all together in a page-flipping, tear-shedding narrative that teaches us in laymen's terms about that rich, surprising bounty of nature right inside our beloved Gotham, which truly has something for everyone, even the city slicker longing for the more bucolic. The heartening message? Nature's persistence, even in that once artificially created Vaux and Olmsted wonder. But also: Let's do our very best to egg it on as we head out flashlights in hand.