Laura Waterbury, an Educator at Brooklyn Bridge Park, has been with the Park for over ten years – first as a volunteer, then a part-time educator, and finally, in her current position as a full-time Educator.
“I was part of the initial docent class that started to do the public tours in the Park, and then very shortly after that, I started volunteering regularly with the Education department during open hours and fishing and all sorts of other things,” Laura said.
Laura works with a very lively team of educators in the Education Center at 99 Plymouth Street, right under the Manhattan Bridge. If you’ve ever attended Open Hours or participated in a field trip at the Park, you know these environmental experts are a fun crew.
“[Working together] is very collaborative,” Laura said. “Whenever we’re making changes to any of our classes, it’s always done as a team. We tend to have slightly different focuses on which pieces of new materials we’ll be doing … I’m often the one who’s going to make the visual materials or anything tactile that the kids are going to interact with.”
Laura also noted how the whole staff at BBP seem to have different areas of expertise.
“I admire the knowledge that is here at this park, different kinds of knowledge that resides in different people,” she explained. “Just people who have such a fantastic encyclopedic understanding of the what goes on here and how the Park is run.”
One of Laura’s interests turned into an area of expertise that she applies to her work at the Park – birding! Laura runs an Instagram account, @butts.of.a.feather, where she posts her bird photography.
“I got into birding through art, and my bird photography came from that, because I wanted to take pictures of birds that I could then use to draw,” she said. “And then people that I bird with, or in the Birding community were always like, ‘Oh, you know, Laura, we would love to see your pictures,’ so I started an Instagram account.”
“Because any bird photographer will tell you they take a million accidental pictures of bird butts – that’s just the way it is, especially with small birds, because they’re usually up in the trees and you’re below them, so you’re going to end up with a lot of bird butts. So part of the premise of my Instagram account is bird butts, and how to identify birds based only on their butts.”
Laura’s favorite annual tradition at Brooklyn Bridge Park is the International Potluck that precedes Thanksgiving, as she admires how many people at the company are able to cook so well. She loves many areas of the Park, including the salt marsh by Pier 1 – especially in the summer.
“It’s fantastic in winter, because it’s where the ducks are hanging out,” she said. “But also in the summer, when the tide goes out in the salt marsh, if you sit there and you look really closely at the ground of the mud of the salt marsh, you will suddenly notice it is alive with fiddler crabs.”
Follow Laura’s Instagram account, @butts.of.a.feather, and check out her favorite birds below!
