Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out about Astoria, the wild turkey who came to Manhattan with a goal in mind. We’ll also get details on the first day of Harvey Weinstein’s new trial in Manhattan.
If Astoria the wild turkey is looking for love on Manhattan’s East Side, Day 3 of her visit did not go well.
Astoria arrived on Sunday after a short flight, only about a thousand feet across the East River from Roosevelt Island, where she had spent the last year. Once she landed in the East 50s, she migrated from one apartment building to another. Living in the one where she spent Monday night is, according to StreetEasy, “like living in a five-star hotel.”
Astoria wouldn’t know. She never even waddled past the doormen. She nosed around in the garden out front before spending the night on someone’s balcony, sleeping.
On Tuesday morning, she fluttered and flapped her way to a nearby park, apparently looking for a late breakfast, preferably bugs. The trouble started when she decided to wade into rush-hour traffic on First Avenue. Someone called 911. The police sent an Emergency Services Unit team.
“They got the idea that they wanted to capture her,” said David Barrett, a birder who runs the Manhattan Bird Alert account on X. “They made an attempt,” he said. But Astoria flew off. The police lost sight of her. A police spokesman, describing the encounter, noted that no injuries to humans or birds had been reported.
Barrett speculated that Astoria had spent the rest of the day hiding out somewhere, terrified.
He also speculated that she had ventured into Manhattan for the same reason many people do: looking for a relationship that might lead to something. Maybe, in her case, she dreams of someone to forage with. Maybe even worth laying eggs for.
“She’s a female turkey,” he said. “It’s mating season for turkeys.”
Astoria went through the same routine last year, wandering around Manhattan from late April through mid-May. Then she went back to Roosevelt Island, where turkey crossing signs were put up.
“She had been living for 11 months in a fairly constrained area, a couple of blocks north and a couple of blocks south of the subway station,” Barrett said. “It made it easy to find her every day.” But last week she wandered south, to the end of the island. “And while she was doing that, she was vocalizing, making her high-pitched clucking sound, which I presume is a way for her to tell another wild turkey that she’s around.”
But there were no other wild turkeys to tell. Barrett said whole flocks cavort on Staten Island, and some frolic in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx.
Manhattan? No, he said. Sadly, Astoria was all alone there.
She touched down near Sutton Place on Sunday. Jefferson Siegel, a freelance photographer who works for The New York Times, saw her outside an apartment building on East 56th Street, with a small crowd and some police officers looking on. Before long, an Emergency Services Unit team arrived and tried to catch Astoria.
“When they got really close, the turkey took flight,” he said. “The cops looked, not frustrated — but the crowd cheered the turkey.”
The next Astoria sighting was a couple of blocks away, outside the building where she spent Monday night. “The doorman said, ‘You’re not going to believe it, but there’s a turkey in the garden,” said Robert Ingram, who pulled out his cellphone, walked to within 10 feet of Astoria and snapped several photos. “I didn’t want to scare it, but it wasn’t afraid.”
Where did she go? Probably not far, Barrett said. But he had a message for people. “If you see Astoria,” he wrote on X, “please just let her be. Admire her from a distance.” He advised against calling the police or an animal shelter. “She does not need a rescue, and rescue attempts put her life at risk, as they frighten her and make her take fast evasive action.”
Weather
Expect a cloudy and breezy day with a high temperature around 53. The cloudy conditions will continue into the evening with a drop to the low 40s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Thursday (Holy Thursday).
The latest New York news
Facing a new charge, Weinstein returns to court
Harvey Weinstein is on trial again, almost a year after New York’s highest court overturned his conviction in a decision that reverberated through the nation, just as the guilty verdict had in 2020.
The jury five years ago found him guilty of rape but acquitted him on three other charges, including allegations that he was a sexual predator. The state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, found that Weinstein had been deprived of a fair trial and ordered a new one. That proceeding began on Tuesday.
Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex. Weinstein has also been convicted in California on sex-crime charges and faces a prison term there. He is appealing the California conviction.
The new trial offers the Manhattan district attorney’s office a chance to reprosecute someone who at one time appeared untouchable. And in the years since Mr. Weinstein was originally found guilty, broader worries have grown that the effects of the #MeToo movement on the nation’s culture and politics, from Hollywood to the White House, have faded.
On Tuesday, prosecutors and Weinstein’s defense team began choosing another jury to decide his fate, a process expected to take several days. Weinstein’s team is being assisted by Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, a jury consultant who has worked on several high-profile cases.
Two groups of prospective jurors were sworn in on Tuesday morning, totaling about 140 people. But after the judge told them how long the trial might run and asked whether they could be “fair or impartial,” their numbers quickly dwindled. At the beginning of the afternoon session, 47 prospective jurors remained. One, a woman, gasped when Weinstein’s name was read aloud as she was sworn in.
Weinstein is again being tried on charges of first-degree criminal sexual act and third-degree rape based on complaints by a former television production assistant, Miriam Haley, and an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann. Both women testified in the 2020 trial and are expected to do so again.
He is newly charged with sexually assaulting an unidentified woman in a Manhattan hotel in 2006. Prosecutors told the court that the new complainant was someone they had known of since 2020, but who was only now ready to come forward.
METROPOLITAN diary
Wild and Free
Dear Diary:
We had been married a year and were living in Kew Gardens Hills when we decided to make a Target run at 9 p.m. with our 3-month-old. We could still live wild and free, right?
We picked out two bright-green lawn chairs that would fill our porch (really just a tiny slab of cement off the kitchen). We were not sure they would fit in our compact car, but we bought them anyway. Somehow, stuff always fits, we figured.
When we got to the parking lot, our baby ran out of his patience, and we realized the chairs would not fit after all.
A man approached us to help. The woman he was with called out to him.
“Stop chatting,” she said. “It’s after 10 o’clock.”
“They have a baby!” he yelled back.
He reached down, took the laces out of both of his sneakers and tied down our trunk.
I tried to pay him for the laces.
“Nah,” he said. “Just drive slow and take Jewel. You’ll make it.”
We did and we did.
— Avi Friedman
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
