By Kenneth Aaron, Staff Reporter
She cruises down Broadway in a bright green Ford Aerostar, looking for birds. She is dressed in olive drab top to bottom (felt Smokey the Bear hat, too), binoculars around her neck, walkie-talkie on her hip. A bird crosses the windshield: it's a blur to you, a ring-bill gull to her. She is one of New York City's Urban Park Rangers.
"I've been looking at birds since I was a little kid, so I know what to look for," Ranger Shelley Volk said while on patrol Thursday.
Volk and rangers from each of the five boroughs have been looking a lot lately, dispatched on a citywide safari since last Monday to help find the 33 birds escaped from the Bronx Zoo's collapsed aviary.
The rangers, more accustomed to leading nature walks and ecology lectures than stalking quarry in clunky Fords, enjoyed the diversion, but doubted they would find the birds.
"It's been so stormy and windy, some have been blown to New Jersey, Long Island, Connecticut," said Volk, who began working as a Van Cortlandt Park ranger about eight months ago.
As if confirming her statement, a report that an Inca tern turned up in New Jersey came in later that day.
Rangers worry that the birds, who were raised in captivity, will be unable to compete against their rougher, tougher street-bred brethren.
The lost birds are rare South American species, devoid of brilliant plumage or other easily visible marks. The band-tail gull, for example, has only a skinny pair of yellow legs to mark it -- which, inconveniently, it tucks back while in flight.
Volk pointed to the sky near the Botanical Garden. "Here are some flying gulls," she said. "You tell me which one has yellow feet."
Few people can tell the difference. The rangers have been provided with bird-watching training, but only three or four of the 45 who instruct are professional ornithologists; some of the others have degrees in English and history.
Even for Volk, a trained zoologist, sightings are sometimes tricky.
"Is that a hawk?" she wondered aloud at one point, guiding her van along a deserted expanse of Orchard Beach. "Or a kite? Oh, it's an airplane, never mind."
On the beach there were no gulls, just a man with a metal detector.
For now, Volk said that the rangers have suspended their educational activities to give themselves time to search. Though Volk would call the zoo only if she saw one of the fugitive birds -- "As long as it's flying, there's no way you can capture it unless you're flying yourself" -- that doesn't stop her from watching the sky.
Even on her days off, Volk said, "I've looked at every single gull that's flown by my car."