By Scott Etkin
This year, Central Park’s annual New Year’s Eve fireworks display won’t take place due to the ongoing drought that’s affecting most of the Northeast, including New York City.
For the sake of the nearly 10,000 birds that live in Central Park, we should keep fireworks out of our city’s parks for good.
Many pet owners know that dogs and cats can be spooked by fireworks. It turns out this effect is common across different forms of wildlife and birds – fragile animals with strong senses – are especially disrupted.
In fact, studies show they react much as we would if explosions went off in our apartments in the middle of the night: they panic. For birds, this can mean abandoning their nests, flying away and becoming disoriented or exhausted, and colliding with buildings. While counting birds at night can be challenging due to low visibility, research shows that 1,000 times as many birds are in flight on New Year’s Eve as on other nights. This mass panic brought on by fireworks can be fatal for them.
Not all of the city’s fireworks displays take place in parks. Launching fireworks from barges, as Macy’s does on the 4th of July, seems a more sensible way to celebrate while leaving birds alone. Launching them on New Year’s Eve and during the summer in Central Park, home to approximately 200 bird species, seems brazen and even cruel. It’s also ironic given that birds are a main attraction of the Park. The Central Park Conservancy and other organizations often lead birding tours. This month Central Park also hosts the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, a longstanding citizen-science project that allows “researchers, conservation biologists, and other interested individuals to study the long-term health and status of bird populations across North America.”
Beyond disrupting wildlife with sudden bursts of noise and light, fireworks have also been proven to damage the environment more broadly. Last year the Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks show, which exploded roughly 60,000 shells, caused higher levels of air pollution than the smoke from the Canadian wildfires earlier that summer, according to a study by NYU. (Birds are notoriously sensitive to air pollution – hence the old “canary in a coal mine.”) The researchers’ samples of the East River taken after the celebration also found more than double the levels of hazardous metals often used in fireworks, such as lead, nickel, and antimony.
It doesn’t take an ornithologist to know that birds in New York City have a rough go of it. The city’s many dangers to birds include nighttime light pollution, rat poison, and glass windows – between 90,000 and 230,000 migrating birds are killed in NYC each year in collisions with building glass, often due to the disorienting effects of artificial lighting at night, according to the NYC Bird Alliance’s research. This makes Central Park an especially important safe haven.
I admit, being against fireworks is a bit of a Scrooge-like stance. But there are other places to watch fireworks across the city on New Year’s Eve aside from Central Park. The “no fireworks in parks” concept seems like something many New Yorkers would get behind; look no further than the outpouring of support for Flaco, the owl that escaped the Central Park Zoo, and the widespread calls to cancel last year’s drone light show that took place in Central Park due to its harms to birds.
The tradition of setting off fireworks in NYC’s parks dates back more than 100 years. But now that we know the harms, it’s time to change the status quo for the better.
Subscribe to West Side Rag’s FREE email newsletter here. And you can Support the Rag here.
Bravo!
Fireworks definitely a concern for wildlife and dogs.
But if fireworks are curtailed for dogs, then it seems fair to expect that dog parents will be more diligent in: 1) not taking dogs into restaurants and food stores and 2) not letting dogs off leash in parks where not permitted.
Animals and birds should not have to be terrified by fireworks for sure….Terrifying for them.
The city is overwhelmed these days by dogs! of every SiZE often two at once ..On long leads, the horror of them on narrow sidewalks pooping and peeing! ..
They’re everywhere ..Has NYC become the new Major Suburban city of America!? Older New Yorkers gone and Suburbanites moved in ..?! Something’s gotta be done to make NY sane and CLEAN again!! ……!
Thank you for speaking for the birds.
And for the humans
Absolutely! Central Park Conservancy should know better! Fireworks are so anti-environment. Not only does it confuse, harm birds – which is horrible, dogs run from owners in such fear! Some get hit, killed, lost! STOP the fireworks in central park! I will work with you on this! It is always during off-leaah hours! Nobody KNOWS these loud fireworks, that sound like we are in a WAR, are about to go off!
The bombs, bursting in air. Yes, enough.
you might be right about dogs running away but i’m sure it never happens in this city because dogs must be kept on a leash. and, if owners are taking their dogs to the celebrations it is because they know their dogs love the spectacle.
Hard agree. Thanks.
Amen.
This is actually insane. Birds can fly away and will when fireworks would be present. I know we are a liberal city but this article is the kind of nonsense that led many in the country to vote for Trump. Seriously, stop the nonsense.
How anyone can say the hell with the birds is selfish, cruel and stupid. I always say humans are the lowest life form. Selfish and ignorant. And to compare a bird lover to a person that voted for the Felon, is insane.
Great Scott!
Totally agree! It’s time to move forward and protect the wildlife in the park.
Steven, birds don’t just fly away and come back. Some get traumatized and die. It isn’t surprising that some people are insensitive to this as well as other environmental issues, including the drought, wildfires, and many other extreme weather episodes that are costing all of us countless billions as well as causing ongoing devastation.
Animals are everywhere and often have excellent hearing so barges aren’t that much “more sensible” and fireworks set off from them aren’t “leaving birds alone”. They’re also not “leaving birds alone” because of what the author goes on to say, that “fireworks have also been proven to damage the environment more broadly”.
After suffering unbearably loud fireworks in ’24—New Year’s, the Philharmonic’s 1812 concert, the Fourth, the Marathon—my traumatized cat is applauding, along with her owner. Enough already!
Yes, let’s protect the birds! Keep fireworks out of Central Park, for good.
The fireworks are the only thing I still enjoy in the park. Cant even go in there anymore as it smells like skunk weed all the time.
It’s only 20 minutes once a year and birds still pass thru the Park. Midnight run and fireworks are such a joy for so many of us who for many years have spent New Years Eve in the park.
If you are so concerned about avian trauma why not start by ending captivity of birds in C Park zoo. Or focus on more protective windows in high rises that will avoid birds crashing into them.
The Wild Bird Fund has had multiple patients injured or displaced by fireworks in Central Park. I personally picked up three: a mallard duck that had flown off in a panic and smacked into a tree trunk in the dark. It landed at my feet on New Year’s Eve. I also found two nestling kestrel falcons who had jumped from their nest before they were strong enough to fly. They ended up huddled under a bench on Central Park West after the fireworks at the end of the 1812 Overture. I no longer enjoy fireworks because I’ve seen the devastating impact they have on wildlife.
Deep gratitude for the beautiful and tireless work of WBF and all your staff and volunteers.
The fireworks in the river may bother the fish. We should stop those too.
Thank you for this article! As a bird lover and birdwatcher, I completely agree! As I’ve learned more about birds, I’ve come to see Central Park as a vital ecosystem, not just our/human’s “backyard”.
Somewhat separately, I also have a dog – we always observe leash rules and who we always pick up after a you-know-what.
I think the common theme as others point out is to be conscientious to our fellow New Yorkers, regardless of the species.
Firefall in Yosemite is an interesting parallel, albeit it was done much more frequently, on a daily basis in the summers. It was eventually stopped in 1968 because it went against the park’s value.
“The Yosemite Firefall was a summertime event that began in 1872 and continued for almost a century, in which burning hot embers were spilled from the top of Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park to the valley 3,000 feet (900 m) below.”
For so many reasons fireworks should be banned from ALL NYC parks beyond the fire hazard posed by the ongoing severe drought conditions in the city. Fireworks negatively affect birds and other wildlife, including humans, from terrible air & water pollution, negative health and mental impacts, and environmental justice inequities.
Yes, I have evolved! I like fireworks but this convinced me, and when we know better, we should DO better.
And didn’t the fireworks on NYE this past year scare Flaco and cause him to fly to the East Village for a while?! RIP Flaco-Do the right thing.
It’s ideas like this that the majority of Americans are tired of. This city has real problems and most people don’t really spend much time worrying if a sparrow has stress issues.
You should wake up! The “majority of Americans” who are tired of these ideas are selfish, blind, and foolish. We are destroying our own planet. That sparrow is the ;canary in the coal mine of our earth. Keep it up; we’ll go the way of the dinosaur with such ignorance.
Perhaps we can also keep the dogs out of Riverside Park, for the sake of the squirrels.
I totally agree. I’ve been asking for this for the past 58 years.
Even though it does give a nice romantic touch at the end of the show on a summer evening sitting on the Great Lawn listening to The Philharmonic Orchestra, but let’s think of our wildlife on how pressure that is first.
Fireworks are boring, anyway. They create a lot of pollution, too. I vote to get rid of them.
Fireworks are no different from a thunderstorm or lightning and last at most thirty minutes.
Maybe we can compromise: how about a fireworks display that is only lights, laser or drones – no sounds?
I totally agree that fireworks in the summer and holidays are not necessary to celebrate these occasions at the cost of disturbing wildlife sbd pets in NYC
Excellent suggestion! Thank you. Now let us call our elected officials!
Just read that the Nee York Road Runners has switched to a drone light show over Central Park on New Year’s Eve. It will take pace on the 72nd St transverse.
Lighting fireworks on park land is like using dynamite in your living room. Birds and small animals live there. There is a silent contract between the wildlife and the city that the park is their safe place. They live there and we should respect their home.