TAKE ME TO THE RIVER
A Birder’s Year in the West Village

Text and Photographs by Keith Michael
194 pages, 250 color photographs

In 1609, Henry Hudson, sailing up the newly discovered great river that would later bear his name, could never have imagined the vast metropolis that would grow on these shores.

A small bay along the wooded isle of Mannahatta's west side offered a protected setting for the Dutch colonists' village of Greenwich. Birds, perhaps unaware of the centuries of change that followed, still thrive on these sylvan shores; many are blue-blooded residents and many more migrate through every spring and fall—as they have for millennia.

With wit and wonder, Take Me to the River, enlivens a year of avian goings-on in this historic West Village and while overlooking Henry Hudson's river. By recounting monthly walks with his Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Millie, the feathered rhythms of courtship, homesteading, raising families, and day-to-day survival provide an antidote to the human-imposed stresses of alarm clocks, inboxes, and alternate-side-of-the-street-parking.

Well-trained, Millie looks up, commanding,
“Take Me to the River.”