# Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History

Illuminating the multispecies story of New York’s Central Park from the 1850s to the 1970s, Dawn Day Biehler examines the vibrant and intimately connected lives of humans and nonhuman animals in the park. She reveals stories of grazing sheep, teeming fish, nesting swans, migrating warblers, and escaped bison as well as human New Yorkers’ attempts to reconfigure their relationships to the land and claim spaces for recreation and leisure. Ultimately, Biehler shows how Central Park has always been a place where animals and humans alike have vied for power and belonging.

Dawn Day Biehler is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of “Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats.”

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2025
- Runtime: 58 min
- By: Levy, Josh
- Genres: History
- Archive: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/video-10968/)
- Licence or status: Rights statement at the Library of Congress (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Library of Congress
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/loc/video-10968?play=1)