{"id":333488,"date":"2026-08-31T01:18:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T01:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/333488\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T01:18:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T01:18:07","slug":"the-grasshopper-sparrow-has-lost-97-percent-of-its-new-york-population-and-its-loudest-comeback-is-on-the-capped-2200-acre-fresh-kills-landfill-on-staten-island-where-over-50-pairs-nested-in-one-se","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/333488\/","title":{"rendered":"The grasshopper sparrow has lost 97 percent of its New York population, and its loudest comeback is on the capped 2,200-acre Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where over 50 pairs nested in one season, because a trash mound sealed under plastic cannot grow trees, so it stays grassland forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

The grasshopper sparrow is a bird built for not being noticed. Four inches of buff and brown, flat-headed, short-tailed, it runs along the ground like a mouse and sings a song most people mistake for an insect, one or two chips and a thin, buzzing trill from somewhere down in the grass. To find one in New York State in this century, you would go to the last surviving hayfields and meadows upstate, and you would probably fail; between the state\u2019s breeding bird surveys of the 1980s and 2000s, the species\u2019 New York population collapsed by 97 percent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Or you could take the ferry to Staten Island and stand on top of half a century of New York City\u2019s garbage, where the bird is doing better than almost anywhere else in the state.<\/p>\n

The mountain range made of Mondays<\/p>\n

Fresh Kills was, for the second half of the twentieth century, the destination of New York\u2019s trash, growing into the largest landfill on Earth, four mounds of compacted refuse rising up to 200 feet over the wetlands of western Staten Island. It closed in 2001, reopened briefly for the terrible work of receiving World Trade Center debris, and then began the longest transformation in the city\u2019s parks history: the 2,200-acre site is becoming Freshkills Park, three times the size of Central Park, opening in stages through 2036.<\/p>\n

The engineering under the picnic meadows is the part that matters for the birds. Each mound is sealed under a landfill cap, a sandwich of soil layers, geotextiles and an impermeable plastic geomembrane, plumbed with wells that collect the methane still brewing below. On top of the cap goes planting soil, and on the soil, native grasses, seeded across the mounds by the Department of Sanitation until half the park\u2019s 2,200 acres had become meadow<\/a>. New York City, which spent the twentieth century burying its grasslands under development, spent the start of the twenty-first accidentally building the largest new grassland in the region, on top of everything it had thrown away.<\/p>\n

The sparrows audit the real estate<\/p>\n

Grassland birds found it with the ruthless efficiency of animals that have run out of options. Researchers from the College of Staten Island, led by ornithologist Richard Veit, had been counting birds on the Fresh Kills mounds since the 1990s, and they logged the succession as the caps greened: wintering flocks of savannah sparrows, horned larks and snow buntings first, then, in 2015, the discovery Veit himself found surprising, grasshopper sparrows nesting on the capped landfill<\/a>, a state species of special concern breeding inside New York City limits.<\/p>\n

The colony compounded like an investment. From that first detection to 21 nesting pairs in 2017, and by 2020 the NYC Bird Alliance was reporting the species going gangbusters, with over 50 pairs nesting<\/a> at the park in a single season, one of the healthiest concentrations in a state that has nearly lost the bird. They have been joined by the rest of the grassland guild\u2019s refugees: bobolinks, long absent as city breeders, sedge wrens, savannah sparrows, meadowlarks, with kestrels and harriers hunting over the top. The birds are choosy in ways the researchers can measure; the sparrows nest almost exclusively on the park\u2019s East Mound, whose grass structure suits them, and avoid the North Mound next door, a preference now steering how the park manages its meadows.<\/p>\n

Why the garbage grassland lasts<\/p>\n

Here is the mechanism that turns a feel-good anecdote into a durable conservation asset. Ordinary abandoned grassland in the Northeast is a countdown: leave a meadow alone and shrubs arrive within years, trees within decades, and the grassland birds move out long before the forest moves in. That succession is precisely why the region\u2019s grasshopper sparrows crashed as farms were abandoned or developed; less than one percent of the Northeast\u2019s original grasslands remain, and what remains keeps trying to become woods.<\/p>\n

A capped landfill is the rare exception, and by design rather than intention. The engineered cap cannot be allowed to grow deep roots; trees would pierce the plastic membrane and the drainage layers that keep rain out of the buried garbage, so regulations require the mounds be kept in shallow-rooted herbaceous cover, mowed and managed, essentially forever. The same rule that protects the seal protects the sparrows. Succession, the force that erases every other Northeastern meadow, is legally and structurally forbidden on a landfill cap. The trash below, in other words, is the grassland\u2019s endowment: as long as the garbage must stay sealed, the grass must stay grass.<\/p>\n

Conservationists have taken the hint, and capped landfills across the region are now managed deliberately as grassland bird habitat, an archipelago of permanent meadows on the one kind of land guaranteed never to sprout condos or oaks. It is not the return of the world the grasshopper sparrow lost; it is a strange, engineered substitute, a bird that once followed wildfires and floodplains now following the geomembrane. But the sparrows are not sentimental. They audit grass height, insect supply and safety from foxes, and by those measures a sealed mountain of Staten Island\u2019s discarded decades, buzzing with methane wells below and trilling above, is the best real estate New York has offered them in forty years.<\/p>\n

About this article<\/p>\n

This article is for general information and reflection. It is not professional advice. For your specific situation, consult a qualified professional.<\/p>\n

Standards<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tSpace Daily articles are edited and fact-checked before publication. We use AI tools in the newsroom. See our editorial standards<\/a> and masthead<\/a>.\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The grasshopper sparrow is a bird built for not being noticed. Four inches of buff and brown, flat-headed,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":333489,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-333488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}