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By Root 7915 0

and so many birds filled the woods “that men can scarcely go through them for the whistling, the noise, and the chattering.” Boats crossing the bay were escorted by schools of playful whales, seals, and porpoises. Twelve-inch oysters and six-foot lobsters crowded offshore waters, and so many fish thrived in streams and ponds that they could be taken by hand. Woods and tidal marshlands teemed with bears, wolves, foxes, raccoons, otters, beavers, quail, partridge, forty-pound wild turkeys, doves “so numerous that the light can hardly be discerned where they fly,” and countless deer “feeding, or gamboling or resting in the shades in full view.” Wild swans were so plentiful “that the bays and shores where they resort appear as if they were dressed in white drapery.” Blackbirds roosted together in such numbers that one hunter killed 170 with a single shot; another bagged eleven sixteen-pound gray geese in the same way. “There are some persons who imagine that the animals of the country will be destroyed in time,” mused Van der Donck, “but this is an unnecessary anxiety.”

IMMIGRANT ICE

The formation of this lush ecosystem had begun seventy-five thousand years earlier, when packs of glaciers crept down from Labrador into the almost featureless plain that then stretched east of the Allegheny Mountains to the Atlantic, and halted in the middle of modern New York City. Approximately fifty thousand years ago, a sheet of ice a thousand feet thick lay across the area. Its immense weight, and the continual flow of ice from the north, crushed and flayed the land beneath, depressing riverbeds, scooping out deep valleys, and dragging along boulders, gravel, sand, and clay like a huge conveyor belt. In parts of Manhattan and the Bronx, it peeled away everything above the bedrock—layers of gneiss, marble, and schist, five hundred million years old, that now lie naked to the passing eye, scarred and battered by their ordeal. So much of the earth’s water was captured in this and other ice sheets that the sea level fell three hundred feet or more and the shoreline bulged out a hundred miles. Arctic gusts blew off its face across a desolate tundra, inhabited only by mosses and lichens, that reached as far south as Philadelphia.

About seventeen thousand years ago, the climate of the northern hemisphere began to warm. As the ice sheet melted back, the line of its furthest advance was marked by a terminal moraine—the still-visible ridge of glacial debris that arcs down from northern Queens through places named Jamaica Hills, Highland Park, Crown Heights, and Bay Ridge (which in turn overlook such neighborhoods as Flatbush and Flatlands, settled on the ice sheet’s sandy outwash plain). Extending across to the south side of Staten Island, the moraine reaches its maximum elevation of 410 feet at Todt Hill (the highest natural point on the Atlantic seaboard south of Maine), then turns north across New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Trapped behind the moraine, runoff from the retreating ice pooled into icy lakes that drowned the region for several thousand years before their waters broke through a mile-wide gap, now called the Narrows, and drained off toward the ocean. Scrubby pines and birches took root in the thawing tundra, then gave way, perhaps twelve thousand years ago, to stands of spruce and fir, interspersed with open meadows. Woolly mammoths, mastodons, bison, musk oxen, bears, sloths, giant beavers, caribou, sabertoothed tigers, and other large animals moved in. Trailing behind them came small bands of nomadic hunters—the region’s first human occupants—who stalked game for a couple of thousand years, leaving behind only flint spear points and heaps of bones as evidence of their presence.

The hunters left nine thousand years ago, when the effects of continued climatic warming drove away the big beasts on which they depended. Hardwood forests of oak, chestnut, and hickory took over from the pines and spruce. Fed by the melting ice packs, the ocean rose again, inundating coastal lowlands and pouring back through the Narrows, creating the commodious