🌿Guided Nature Walks & Tours

In Central Park most Saturdays from 12:00 to 1:30 PM at different locations

Select Saturdays and Sundays in New York and Long Island

Come with family, friends, or alone to explore Central Park’s little-known natural treasures! Meet like-minded people and escape New York City for a time in an immersive and enjoyable experience—and see the world in a whole new way!

On New York Wild Walks, we will explore the plants and animals of Central Park’s forested ravine, streams, ponds, and wildlife gardens together—through many lenses: experiential, sensory, artistic, intellectual, and ethnobotanical. We’ll approach the habitats, landscape, and ecosystem as caretakers, storytellers, and scientists, uncovering how human life is intimately connected to plants, fungi, and wildlife in subtle and surprising ways.

We’ll examine the properties and aromas of different species, their anatomy and reproductive structures, their pollination strategies, and their relationships with the pollinators, fungi, and wildlife they have evolved alongside over thousands—and even millions—of years.

By the end of the walk, you’ll have a deeper understanding of Central Park’s natural history, a renewed sense of connection to the land beneath your feet, and an awakened appreciation for the living world.

On every walk, you’ll:

• Smell, taste, and touch plants while learning their edible, medicinal, and cultural uses.

• Observe birds, butterflies, bees, turtles, frogs,and coyotes

• Learn about the park’s rich landscape architecture, history, and art

• Hear folklore, mythology, and stories about the relationships between humans, plants, and animals.

• Learn about Indigenous knowledge, especially the Matinnecock and other tribal nations who once lived on this land.

• Experience nature creatively. Guided nature walks are an art.

• Experience Central Park through poetry, mythology, storytelling and inspired comic relief.

These experiences invite you to slow down, notice details, and leave with a renewed connection to the natural world.

🌿A Different Guided Nature Walk Every Saturday

Our upcoming nature walks shift focus and take place in different parts of Central Park on most Saturdays and on occasionally on Long Island, exploring our most diverse and beautiful habitats and scenic locations and the richest ecological communities and geologic features in the region. Each walk rotates through locations with different themes so participants can gain a completely different experience attending multiple walks. Walks will build upon the past through new observations, surprises, and discovery. By joining weekly, you’ll build familiarity with identifying the park’s flora, fauna, and their aromatic, edible, and medicinal uses!

Our walks reconnect us to nature in a time of widespread nature-deficit disorder, awakening a latent need many of us don’t realize we carry—the need to step into living landscapes and engage with wildlife and soil. David Jakim is the visionary founder of ReWild Long Island 501(c)(3), the NYC Metropolitan Monarch Butterfly Alliance, and is an expert at connecting people to nature in unique and meaningful ways. These walks are fun, immersive, and designed to spark learning, exchange knowledge, and inspire meaningful action. This spirit comes alive as we explore the secret lives of plants, the resilience of urban forests, the deep and ongoing traditions of Indigenous stewardship, and the ecological challenges—both local and global—that shape our shared future.

The Ramble offers a vivid example: though it feels like an ancient Northeastern forest, it is in fact a carefully tended habitat shaped by thousands of hours of human care each year. Rather than attempting to recreate the long-lost old-growth woodlands of New England, it embodies a forward-looking forest—one that responds creatively to our rapidly changing world and climate, offering a living model of resilience, adaptation, and renewal.

Step into landscapes where the natural world and human history are inseparably intertwined. Whether wandering through a cultivated forest that feels older than the city around it, tracing the pathways of Ice Age glaciers, or listening for birdsong along shaded streams, each walk reveals a hidden New York—alive with wildflowers, migratory birds, ancient bedrock, and stories carried by indigenous cultures and eastern and western cultures across centuries. These are places shaped by deep time and by human hands: woodlands tended with care, geologic foundations forged under Himalayan-scale mountains, soils built grain by grain by rivers, storms, and episodic glacial periods. In every step, we encounter the city as a living ecological tapestry, where rocks, water, plants, animals, and people are bound together in ways both beautiful and mysterious.

These walks invite you to experience nature with all of your senses—and with the curiosity of both scientist and storyteller. Through touch, taste, observation, folklore, geology, and studies of water and soil, we learn how the landscapes around us sustain life, inspire art, and connect us to our ancestors across cultures and continents. Whether you join on a Saturday in Central Park or a seasonal walk on Long Island, you’ll leave with a deeper understanding of the land beneath your feet, the vibrant communities that depend on it, and the ways each of us can help protect these habitats for generations to come.

📜 After the Walk – Words from the Woods via Email

Each participant receives a follow-up email report with:

• A full list of plants and wildlife observed.

• Photos and notes from the walk.

• Links to resources for learning more.

Reports are also posted on our Words from the Woods blog, creating a growing archive of NYC nature discoveries.

Monarch butterfly with bee on milkweed

Ceremonial Monarch butterfly release with Children!

Guggenheim Preserve Meadow, in Port Washington, in Full Summer Color

Long Island Walk Location Settings and Hosts

To date, nature walks have been located in Nassau and Suffolk counties. The walks are supported by local organizations and community groups including the Port Washington Monarch Butterfly Alliance, Transition Town Port Washington, ReWild Long Island, Sands Point Preserve, PW Green, Baxter's Pond Foundation, the Unitarian Universalist Church, the Science Museum of Long Island, the Brentwood Public Library, the Port Washington Public Library, and the Coindre Hall Park Community. This virtual map allows the viewer to dive deep into the geography of just a few select locations where walks have been hosted and where we will be hosting more walks. For more detailed information about what Washington's habitats and biodiversity, see ReWIld Port Washington.