Andrew Zhao didn’t live in Staten Island, but he did take the ferry twice a week. He stepped on, early Tuesday morning, and looked for Captain Barber. He spotted the man up on the bridge and waved.
Barber would come out and meet him on the upper deck, Andrew knew. He got to his accustomed place and waited. As they left the dock, he mentally noted the spotted sandpiper, the mallards and one lonely cormorant he had seen that morning.
Andrew Zhao and Captain Michael Barber had the same obsession: Sternberg’s nyctosaur, commonly called nyxies by New Yorkers.
Nyxies could be seen hunting at dawn and dusk along the New York waterway, and every ferry rider knew them. Their graceful six-foot wingspan was a welcome shadow on the water, and watching them dive for fish was a breathtaking delight. Andrew sometimes shot video of them for social media, and had gone viral for steady-handed footage he had gotten of a nesting pair on top of the Brooklyn Bridge tower in the spring, a mound of their freckled eggs clearly visible in the blue-hour light.
Andrew lifted his binoculars and scanned. It was too soon to see the ones who favored the bridge; they’d get over that way in just a few minutes. Instead, he scanned the receding skyline, taking in the city in the clear morning light.
“Did you see that video from Mexico City?” Barber’s accent was straight Bronx, and it made Andrew, who loved all accents with a transplant’s glee, happy to hear it. He turned and gave his friend the hearty hug with the three strong backpats they both preferred.
“I didn’t— what was it this time?”
“It was another capybara. At an aquarium. Kid screamin’ and all. It was rough.”
Andrew nodded. He had followed the story in a couple of different places; pterosaur behavior shifting suddenly, causing concerns. Quetzalcoatlus, the local, much bigger Mexican cousin birds to nyxies, had abruptly started feeding on larger mammals in the last year. Germanodactylus had maybe done the same, but those birds kept to the Alps and the reports of sheep-snatching seemed more like rumors than confirmed sightings. CDMX was full of cell phones, though. Captain Barber was already showing him video.
“Capybara are just so chill,” he said, watching the huge, implacable guinea pig get carried off with hardly a wiggle.
“The zen monks of the animal kingdom,” Michael said, sliding his phone back into his pocket and looking up over the horizon. “I’m hoping to see Leroy this morning.”
Andrew smiled. “I hope to see Leroy every morning,” he said.
Leroy was rumored to be half Quezalcoatlus himself, though there were no confirmed sightings of the two groups interbreeding during their migration periods. He was just bigger than average, almost three meters of wingspan, with an impressive crest. He was breeding again this year, with a female Andrew didn’t recognize. When they spotted Leroy, he was in a deep dive. Leroy’s wings were feathered and scarred, leathery skin showing through and flapping in the breeze. His coloring was grey and brown, though his eyes were famously yellow, visible in black sockets with white false eye spots just below his enormous crest.
“Fish and Game guy told me that the sturgeon are all moving north, mostly up the Hudson.” Michael had his cap to shade his eyes, but at this early hour the sun bounced off everything. He squinted hard.
“They say that every year,” Andrew said, a little ruefully. “They say it’s the water getting warmer, that it’ll displace the big birds of prey, but it hasn’t yet. They get plenty to eat.” He tracked Leroy as he came up, his long beak dripping water, no catch yet.
“Yeah, but the fishermen say it, too.” Michael was tracking Leroy as the big bird circled. “I worry about the big guy up there, I worry about his kids.”
“The nyxies were around long before people,” Andrew said, not looking at the captain. “They’ll be here long after us, too.”
Michael looked at Andrew for a long moment, just at the back of his head. “I gotta get back up to the bridge.”
Only then did Andrew drop his binocs back around his neck. “Oh yeah, ok. Nice to see you!”
“Nice to see you,” Michael called over his shoulder. He went back behind glass, resuming the helm. Watching the nyxies take off from their roosts in Hoboken, he heard them flapping overhead. Something always lifted in his chest when he saw them; they’d been his favorite since he was a boy. He remembered the breeding pair that had nested in Yankee Stadium in 1999, the camera that had been set up to watch their hatchlings emerge the day before they won the series. It was all he could do not to wave to each one, to hail them as he would neighbors or friends. He sipped his coffee, still hot.
Andrew logged his sightings for the morning on the app he had consulted on before it launched. It was his consulting gig that had brought him to New York. The city was too old for his taste, and he spent most of his nights in a large apartment with the windows closed. He found no rest here, and try as he might he could not make it feel like home.
His mindful practice of birdwatching was his secret weapon, he always told his mentees. “It keeps me calm, thinking about things that have nothing to do with all this petty human drama. Find an interest that gets along fine without you. Something ancient. People get fascinated with sharks, people become big space nerds. That’s what you really need in life. Fascination, but also detachment.”
He got off at the South Ferry Terminal and caught the 1 train, editing the footage he had gotten that morning for his Instagram, @fairandfowl.
He didn’t take the ferry again until the following Tuesday, and that was the day after the first dog was taken.
It wasn’t Leroy in the video Michael showed him, Andrew was sure.
“Look at the crest; it’s been damaged in a fight or something. That’s not him.”
“It’s not him,” Michael agreed. “But people are pissed at him, anyway. Like he’s the spokesbird or something.”
The video looped again, revealing the commotion in medias res. The woman on the ground, pulling the leash the way she might wrestle a large kite caught in an updraft. But that was no kite. It was her French bulldog, Trotsky, caught in the jaws of the nyctosaur just above her, its powerful wings blowing the grass all around her. The camera moved messily and they could see the Statue of Liberty off in the distance.
“That’s Battery Park,” Andrew said, orienting himself.
Michael, a lifelong New Yorker, knew that well enough to not have to say it. “The thing is, there’s dogs missing all over lower Manhattan, the news was saying that. They just go missing from everywhere. Lost by the dogwalker or whatever. Now they’re saying it’s the nyxies. That they’ve been feeding.”
Andrew scoffed. “It’s not like they’re out in yards. No way people didn’t see this happening.”
“That’s what I said,” Michael said, nearly yelling.
On the video, the leash snapped, sending the woman sprawling on the grass. Fainter and fainter as the nyxie climbed, the sound of the bulldog’s bawling cry receded into the background. The person with the camera walked forward, reaching out for the woman on the ground.
“Are you ok?”
The video ended with her looking up, her brown eyes giving both terror and fury. The video cycled again, the fight just begun, already lost.
Andrew didn’t say anything. Off the bow of the ferry, Leroy dove and emerged from the water with a bicycle inner tube in his long, bony beak.
“I bet that’s a one-time thing,” Michael said. “Just a nyx wanting to try something new. Or starving, or confused.”
“I bet,” Andrew agreed. “I bet it’s nothing. Just one of those wild things that always goes viral, like a naked guy on the tracks.”
Michael pocketed his phone. Somewhere, high above them, Leroy dropped the inedible rubber from between his jaws and returned to his nest with nothing to feed his brooding mate.
The next dogs were snatched in East River Park. Both of them happened at dawn or dusk, at the known nyxie feeding times. Neither one was caught on video, as the birds seemed to have learned to jerk briskly on the leash rather than steadily pull. Eyewitnesses and bereaved dogmothers gave the story first to the Post and the Beast, but the Times wasn’t far behind. They ran a picture of a snapped leather strap found in the park. No blood, but the story behind it was clear.
“They can’t blame Leroy for this,” Michael said to Andrew when Thursday came around. “They’re just animals, doing what animals do. They don’t know the difference between a fish and a dog. They’re just hungry.”
“I guess,” Andrew said. “Still, I think it’s a good idea to set up deterrents in dog parks, like they’re doing in Brooklyn.”
“I heard about that,” Michael said, shucking off his Yankees cap and rubbing his scalp through his buzzed hair. “The thing is, I don’t think it’s gonna work. They’re not afraid of flashing lights and shiny things, like a lot of birds. They fish on the water.”
“There’s the sound thing, too.” Andrew sounded doubtful.
“That shit’s for scaring the pigeons. Why would nyxies be afraid of hawks?”
“What would you suggest, then?”
Michael fitted his hat back on. The two men did not look at one another. They looked out over the water. As they came closer to the Brooklyn Bridge, they both strained to see whether Leroy’s eggs had hatched yet. They saw only his mate, who the news had started calling Beth. Short for Lady MacBeth. She hunched over her nest, her red-brown feathers buffeted by the wind but not moving. Her crest was smaller and thicker than Leroy’s, and when the two put their bills together they frequently crossed in a tall, gracile X.
“I don’t know that I’d suggest anything,” Michael said quietly. “I don’t think we have the right to change them, or control them at all.”
“Oh, come on,” Andrew said. “We can’t coexist like this. People are terrified to let their pets out.” He lifted his binoculars, scanning the towers. None of the other nesting pairs had new babies, either. He quietly logged that information in his phone.
“They have those vests for dogs, the ones with the spikes on them. To deter raptors.” Michael’s voice was quiet. Andrew hardly heard him over the engine and the water.
“I guess,” Andrew said. “But dogs aren’t the problem, you know. Fish and Game ought to stock both rivers with sturgeon, so that they go back to their normal feeding patterns. Maybe cancel fishing for a week or two.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Michael said, brightening. “You ought to suggest that.”
Andrew smiled, feeling like they really heard one another for the first time in a long time. He often felt like no one listened to him the way they would a real New Yorker. But he was full of ideas. It was his city, too. The way Austin had been, and San Francisco. “Someone is going to do just that,” he said. “I’ve been consulting with a friend of mine who knows people who are high up with the city. I hope they try it.”
The city of New York didn’t ban fishermen, because that was a nightmare of bureaucracy and restriction of trade that not even the most stout-hearted among them would face, but they did indeed stock the river with sturgeon. And for a while, it worked.
But when the sturgeon ran out, eaten too fast to reproduce and gain a foothold, the city and its nyxies were right back where they started. A cartoonist drew Gotham’s famous superhero, Nyxknight, gaunt and showing his ribs from his skyscraper perch. On the distant foreground sidewalk, cartoon New Yorkers walked Afghan hounds and pugs and Pekingese like an Easter parade of hams on a string. Leroy’s babies hatched in the last week of October.
On Halloween, Leroy snatched a four-year-old child dressed as a lion off the streets of the Upper West Side. He was way out of his normal hunting range, clearly desperate. Professional dogwalkers had changed their hours and the parks sat empty, silent without barking. The kid in the costume had been out at dusk, and no one had seen the danger until the nyxie swooped out of the canyon walls of concrete and steel, crest erect, and snatched up the child with huge claws and long beak, not a moment of wasted movement.
Witnesses said the child took the full impact of the Sternberg’s pterosaur, weighing only three kilos but gathering force as he dove. The pair made no sound as they ascended and disappeared. The only sound was the screaming of the child’s parents as reality hit them with full force.
No video of the attack, but two drones got footage of Leroy and his mate feasting on the bloody rags that used to be human child. The news didn’t run it, but everyone saw it just the same.
Michael and Andrew were on the ferry, watching as Fish and Game destroyed Leroy’s nest. He, his mate, and their three hatchlings had moved on as soon as the offensive started. Helicopters hovered day and night, lights shining on the baby nyxies as they shrieked. Shredded remains of the lion costume could be seen, threaded into the nest for insulation. The young were too juvenile to migrate, and the nyctosaurs were protected under the Migratory Bird Act. Despite the carnage, no direct strikes against them would be tolerated.
But Leroy and his family had gotten the hint. They had set out at dawn, on the first day the young could even begin to fly. The smallest one got tired early, plummeting to its death somewhere around Governor’s Island. The remaining two offspring stayed close to their parents, flapping and straining to keep up. Their distinct blue juvenile plumage displayed across their small bellies as they passed overhead. Birdwatchers lost track of them somewhere south of Atlantic City.
After the nyxies moved on, workers from Fish and Game walked out harnessed but unsteady on the tower to kick the nest apart, tearing down the structure the birds had built over thirty years before and returned to every spring. Pieces fell into the water with the eyes of the whole city on them.
“It’s not right,” Michael said, the words caught in his throat and choking him. Somewhere close to his own home, the Yankee Stadium nest, abandoned for over a decade, was being destroyed as well. “It’s just not right.”
“Something had to be done,” Andrew said, trying to sound like the voice of reason, like he always was. “After that kid, we had to… we had to do something. I’ve seen it a hundred times. It’s like when I was living in San Francisco and that encampment under the freeway burned down. If it threatens the safety of the people living around it…”
Michael looked at the man he thought of as his friend, knowing the other man would move on to Portland or Vegas next summer or fall. Michael would be here every spring, driving this boat, waiting to see if Leroy and Beth returned. He wondered if his old friends and new friends could ever safely nest in the same place.
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Meg Elison is an author and essayist. She has been published in McSweeney’s, Slate, Fangoria, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and many other places. Her novella, Foundling Fathers, will be published by Tachyon in June 2026. | |