New York City from a Whale's Perspective
'twas the beginning of October. The American Princess was doing her last whale watching cruise of the season, in hopes of ending a run of bad luck seemingly associated with the passage of two hurricanes. Marie and I had been sitting on our tickets for weeks and hopped on board on a sunny Sunday, along with some sixty fellow earthlings.
The vessel was a comfortable 95 feet in length, featured a canopy-covered upper deck and a closed main deck with tables and cushioned seating. We left the dock a few minutes past noon from Riis Landing on the Rockaways and headed southwest towards the mouth of Rockaway Inlet. Once the captain had made his customary welcome message and safety announcement, he throttled up and the three engines lazily took us towards open water at about 10 knots.
The plan as explained to us over the loudspeakers was to cross the full width of the New York Harbor approaches to New Jersey's Sandy Hook, skim the long beaches closely in search of birds and maybe dolphins, then head straight out for a while and finally come back towards the Rockaways over the mud gorge, the beginning of an underwater chasm called the Hudson
Broad Channel Jam
Broad Channel, only inhabited island in Jamaica Bay, is an inholding within the Gateway National Recreation Area, a unit of the U.S National Park Service. The small island sits in the middle of much water, with great views of Brooklyn, Queens, the Rockaways and JKF. The MTA's A subway line hops through on its way to ocean beaches.
This is a weird place if I ever saw one. Three thousand souls, full of stray cats, strange small houses all decorated for Halloween months in advance, gardens and backyards full of junk, pick-ups and Mustangs, über-suburban and yet off the grid, strangers unwelcome, home to the seemingly very successful sanitary company Call a Head (We're number one at taking care of number two), and then, the park.
Two ponds, one on each side of the road. Peace. Silence. Trails. Nature. Bliss.
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
Evil Empire State Building
1 WTC already towering the lower Manhattan
So near and yet so far
Let's not forget these are NYC shores
But so peaceful
Monarch
Better here than there
Horseshoe crab skeleton
Osprey
35,000 feet
By 
How close where you?
Well, farther away than the picture hints at. I use a (cheap, sadly) 55-250 mm lens on a cropped sensor, which means I get an actual 90-400 mm zoom lens. I was standing close to the bottom of the tree, which was maybe 20 meters high?