It is surprising to some that there is anything natural remaining in 21st-century New York City. Surely, what the earliest Americans didn’t hunt to extinction, European settlers finished off — after all, the city was founded almost 400 years ago.

But to any New Yorker willing to look for it, nature is visible around the clock. In fact, it can be incredibly durable and persistent — even downright hard to extinguish — as it emerges from cracked sidewalks, makes its home on balconies, flies out of trees when we least expect it or slowly lumbers across high-density, rush-hour highways. Nature in the city alights on neon signs, holds up traffic, pops up after a rain and can sometimes still be seen — just as it was by those earliest Americans — in ancient migrations through rivers, along primeval flight paths or perched on a rock on its way north to breed.

There is a natural world drifting alongside, burrowing beneath, and flying above the nearly eight and a half million New Yorkers who call the wetlands, uplands and avenues of the city home, at any time of day.

As the great naturalist John Muir said, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”