The paparazzi staked out their turf, elbow to elbow with dozens of other gawkers on their lunch break on an unseasonably warm spring day in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan.
Pétanque balls clanged in the background on Tuesday as one celebrity visitor, an American woodcock, a migratory bird, bopped along in a manner befitting John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.”
An artist, Bird Warde, 28, a former New Yorker who lives in Maine, glanced up from a sketchbook.
“Oh, my God,” Mrs. Warde said. “It’s my first time seeing the dance for more than a second.”
Birders and nonbirders alike have flocked to the park this week to catch a glimpse of the quirky visitors. The birds, which are usually secretive, have made the Midtown green space a temporary home in recent years during their northerly migration.
Videos of the boogieing birds, which are also known as timberdoodles, have flooded social media feeds in recent days, often with musical accompaniment — “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees or “Rock That Body” by the Black Eyed Peas.
“I always think of ‘Pump Up the Jam,’” said Mrs. Warde, who has bird tattoos, referring to the song by Technotronic.
Some have recorded the birds, which are plump and have mottled brown feathers, devouring earthworms. In one widely viewed video, a woodcock appeared to give a rat side-eye.
The park’s planter beds and shrubbery have become an urban refuge from the surrounding glass skyscrapers, which experts said pose a risk to migrating woodcocks.
“They just don’t see the windows,” Scott R. McWilliams, a professor in the Department of Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island. “For some reason, they don’t recognize that and run into things pretty regularly.”
Professor McWilliams, who has studied American woodcocks for nearly 20 years and has written several scientific papers on them, said that the woodcocks in Bryant Park were most likely males that were migrating back to the Northeast after wintering in the Southeast.
“They’re very willing to be in more developed areas,” he said, adding that males won’t wait until they reach their final destination to look for a mate, even if finding one in the big city might not be so easy.
“Females are much more discerning,” he said.
American woodcocks are members of the shorebird family, but “one of the few that has decided not to be true to its name,” said Professor McWilliams, who added that while they are fairly common, their numbers have been declining since the 1960s.
Colby R. Slezak, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture who has worked with the Eastern Woodcock Migration Research Cooperative, said it was possible that some of the birds in Bryant Park were repeat visitors.
“They are really charismatic and, you know, kind of fun to watch, so that’s probably why it’s drawing such a crowd,” he said.
On Tuesday, another woodcock shied away from the cameras, taking cover in a bed of daffodils in the park’s southwestern corner near the Avenue of the Americas. That did not stop a crowd from surrounding the planting enclosure. At least one person stood on a chair. Others craned their necks.
Dan Biederman, president of the Bryant Park Corporation, surveyed the frenzy.
“The public goes crazy,” said Mr. Biederman, 72, a birder himself. “You can see over there. They’re all staring.”
The Bryant Park Corporation, the nonprofit group that operates the park, sells hats with the American woodcock on them and organizes several bird walks a year (there will be one this week and one next week to scout the unusual visitors).
Last year, a combined 300 people attended two bird walks that were held while the park hosted the woodcocks, according to the nonprofit, which emphasized that there was no guarantee the birds would make an appearance for the events.
Park officials said that the crowds have mostly given the birds their space.
“I’ve heard of one person who tried to walk into an ivy bed,” said Liz Riegel, who organizes the walks.
Serious birders are quick to follow etiquette, including discouraging people from flushing the birds out into the open for photos.
John Frelinghuysen, 33, a videographer who lives in Manhattan, crouched near the daffodils with a zoom lens to try to get a view of an elusive woodcock on Tuesday. He said a friend maintains a popular Instagram account called Nickelmeep that is filled with woodcock memes.
“It’s a fairly common bird,” he said. “It’s just so goofy, people have come to love it.”
Male woodcocks have a distinctive, nasally mating call that can be heard at dusk or dawn, referred to as a “peent.”
Austin Kerley, 24, who recently moved to New York from Illinois and enjoys bird-watching, stopped on Tuesday to see what the fuss was about.
“I didn’t realize they migrate through here,” said Mr. Kerley, who works for Lego. “We would get them occasionally when I was younger.”
Katherine Paglione, 28, whose office at Bank of America is next to the park, visited during her lunch break.
“It’s hysterical,” she said. “It’s really cute. TikTok, every third video is the dance.”
There are various theories about why woodcocks shimmy the way they do. Some who have studied the birds have suggested that it is a foraging technique intended to flush worms and other invertebrates out of the soil for feeding, while others speculated that it is a courtship ritual.
“I’m convinced it’s an anti-predator kind of thing,” Professor McWilliams said. “I think it’s actually to be more obvious and basically tell the predator, ‘I pretty much can see you, and I can take off at will, and you’re not going to get me.’”
As traffic rumbled by on Tuesday, onlookers bellied up to a wrought-iron fence on the west side of the park to get a closer look at one of the celebrity visitors.
Mrs. Warde, showing off a homemade bag resembling a woodcock, marveled that the bird seemed to be unfazed by the crowds or the clanging pétanque balls.
“It doesn’t give a crap,” Mrs. Warde said.
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
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