On the wing: birdwatching with the dead

When I die, I don’t want a headstone on a refrigerator-sized lawn to commemorate my existence, but a birdbath or a shallow pool of water. I will always have visitors. That’s what I thought, before the thoughts were put into words, as I passed a stone bath at Green River Cemetery in Springs last week, where I was walking with Irene Silverman, an editor at the newspaper.

We watched birds, so to speak, through the random collection of stones, and each one brought back a memory for Irene. Sparrows chirped and sang. We walked through light and shadow, the sound of gravel kicking up beneath our feet. A turkey vulture was just a black speck, gliding across the high blue sky, swept away by north winds.

Now, I’m not a historian, and while I’m fascinated by the stories cemeteries tell, those are for another article. I walked through our local cemeteries with one goal in mind: to escape the summer crowds and the ego of the place and quietly look at a bird or two. Green River was the fifth cemetery I’d visited, and along with Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, the best place for bird watching.

However, summer is perhaps the worst time of year for birdwatching. Most birds are busy nesting. Their plumage fades and their songs become less frequent compared to April and May. The trees are thick with foliage, so you may hear but rarely see baby birds, and even adult birds are hard to find. You’re birdwatching, but not really. Leave your binoculars at home. Leave your iPhone and the Merlin app in the car. That’s not what this is for. Instead, stroll through the cemetery, become thoughtful, and let the birds, many of which will only live a few years (think about it!), be your soundtrack.

If you know what song is, great! However, instead of breaking the songs down into Bird A, Bird B, and Bird C, try thinking of the birds as just a phonetic alphabet, a word puzzle. Try John Cage and let it all just be music; a song that starts when you get out of your car and ends when you get back in and pick up your damn phone again.

A criminally brief note on the losers: Bridgehampton Cemetery – too loud, too exposed, too well-kept. Sagg Cemetery in Sagaponack – great for flyovers, but small, more of a random stop on the way back from Sagaponack Pond than its actual destination. Holy Trinity Catholic Cemetery in East Hampton has a back lawn that borders the LongHouse Reserve, but it’s too narrow and too well-kept. (However, my daughter and I did observe a Red-winged Blackbird fledging there.) Shaarey Pardes is apparently beautiful and park-like, but not open to the public.

Green River Cemetery is quiet. There are no busy roads nearby and a random atmosphere permeates this non-denominational place. A gravel road in the shape of an incomplete figure of eight frames the grave plots. At the end, you either go back the same way or wind through the stones to complete the figure. Wind. The bonus is that you pass Jackson Pollock’s grave, a large carved boulder on a knoll. He was buried in 1956. After that, something of a cemetery rush ensued and the site, previously a local cemetery with well-known names from Bonacker, also became the underground home of equally well-known artists, actors, writers and poets.

The sky near Mr. Pollock’s stone is wide, offering good views of birds flying by. Sure enough, as Irene and I watched, a Glossy Ibis flew north, probably toward Merrill Lake Sanctuary, just a mile and a half away. There are plenty of signs of birds: two birdbaths, and a Miller family tombstone is engraved with the truth: “We all fly away someday.” Composer Stefan Wolpe’s tombstone has an incomprehensible inscription: “A thousand birds will fly out of my mouth when I die.”

I wasn’t in a reflective mood when I drove through the rusted iron gates of Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, but thick carpets of moss from which giant oak trees grew with gravestones as saplings changed that. This is the best cemetery for a quiet stroll. It’s 26 acres, and if you walk up and down every street and circle it, you can cover a few miles.

Narrow footpaths, just a few meters wide, connect the major arteries and are charmingly poorly maintained. They are full of moss and weeds, which probably means that this place will be home to many sparrows in the fall. A Carolina wren sang near the monument with the broken mast, and there were birdbaths, bird feeders and even a birdhouse (empty) between the graves.

However, it is the back part of the cemetery that offers the most potential for birds. An Eastern Phoebe and a Great Crested Flycatcher sang in a cleared area full of wood chips guarded by towering trees. If you could rise above those trees like a bird, you would look out over Round Pond and beyond to the Long Pond Greenbelt, the Atlantic Ocean and the horizon. It’s not a bad place.