MANHATTAN, NY It is September in Central Park, a few days before the Eleventh, and the excitement is literally palpable. Along the paths and across the lawns, little kids skip to ultracompetitive kindergartens with visions of Fox News war-on-terror graphics dancing in their heads, counting off the seconds till the next History Channel investigation of the special relationship of steel with burning jet fuel. It's that same kind of morning as well—warm and cool, four-dimensionally blue, girded with arches of towering light—the kind of perfect fall morning that New Yorkers of a certain generation will always associate with disbelief and poor cell phone reception and showstopping acts of mass murder.
And our eyes, again, are on the skies. My guides at this early hour of the morning, ornithologists Chris Filardi and Paul Sweet of the American Museum of Natural History, are frozen in reverence by the sight of what they assure me is a male American redstart, fanning its tail as it hops from branch to branch at the very top of a tree. I work the knob of my binoculars and succeed in perfectly replicating the magnified blur of leaves and sky that would follow every tee shot in the early days of televised golf. Suddenly there it is, though: a bird, fanning its tail and hopping from branch to branch, precisely as advertised.
