I always envisioned this project as encompassing all five boroughs, but damn, Staten Island doesn’t make itself easy to get to for this sort of thing. It says something that I tossed bottles in New Jersey and Miami before doing it on Staten Island.

 At any rate, I got around to it eventually. In the same way I eventually get around to updating this blog. These Staten Island bottles got tossed in October 2013. That’s a long time ago now. But seeing as one of these bottles was just discovered in France, now seemed a good time to get back on this.

Way to bury the lead, huh?

OK, back to Staten Island: a place of strangeness, pizza, and beauty.

I went there with Nick Stockton. He had heard about the project and was interested in what I was doing, so I decided to finally get out to Staten Island and see what’s what.

Mr. Stockton looking very professional

First stop was Wolfe’s Pond Park. The last time I had been there was about a decade ago. On this day in October 2013, it was still in rough shape post Sandy. Staten Island really felt the brunt of that storm and the parks were certainly no exception.

There were a lot of birds around though. I had wondered if Hurricane Sandy was good for shore nesting birds. A lot of great nesting beaches (Ft Tilden for one) were off limits to people the summer after the storm, so maybe they had a great year? I have no clue. It was a bizarrely freezing day in late October so there were no summer birds to ask about this. Lots of Brandt’s geese, lots of double crested cormorants, lots of gulls. The drawing I tossed here was of a double crested cormorant. This bottle floated right by said birds, and eventually made its way out of the harbor and across the Atlantic, spending over two years at sea. I have no image of the drawing. I think it got lost when my last computer died.

From there we went to Great Kills Park. It was so cold, but the walk to the beach looked straight-up jungle.

Monkeys and everything.

Tossed a drawing of a Northern Gannet here. Again, no record of this one either. But I remember it was drawn in mid-plunge. I think one of the only full-body depiction of the birds, as I’ve stuck to mostly portraits. The plunge dive of the gannet is so distinctive however, and I couldn’t pass it up. Hopefully it gets found, it would look great in somebody’s bathroom.

You can see the bottle bobbing out to sea, a little speck of yellow wax and glinting glass.

It was a beautiful day in a borough with some beautiful parks. And some creepy beach debris.

And some great beach debris.

“It’s all part, of my tropical fantasyyyyyy…” (sung to the tune of “Rock and Roll fantasy”)

 Update on where that double-crested cormorant drawing ended up soon.