The Urban Park Rangers run a “Creatures of the Night” series through the fall, and two of the bat walks are on the calendar for October — one on Staten Island, one in Queens. Both are free, both run 6–7:30 p.m., and neither requires registration. You show up in a park at dusk and somebody who knows bats does the rest.
The two dates
- Sunday, Oct. 4, 6–7:30 p.m. — Cedar Grove Avenue and Cedar Grove Court, Great Kills Park, Staten Island. (718) 967-3542
- Sunday, Oct. 11, 6–7:30 p.m. — 215th Place and 33rd Road entrance, Crocheron Park, Queens. Listed as an accessible location. (718) 352-1769
How it works
- Free. No registration. The Parks listings say “registration not required” on both.
- The timing is the point: the walks run through the dusk hours when bats come out of their roosts to feed, which is also the only time most people ever see one.
- Both are ranger-led and categorized under Urban Park Rangers and Hiking, so expect to walk while you look up.
- No equipment, no cost, no age gate listed — it is a free evening program in a public park.
- October is the tail end of the season. Bat activity in the region drops off as it gets cold, so these are late dates before the year closes out.
Great Kills and Crocheron are both ordinary neighborhood parks that happen to have the tree cover and water that bats use. The Crocheron date is the easier one to reach from Manhattan or western Queens; the Staten Island one is worth the trip if you are already out that way, and it is the kind of thing almost nobody knows is on the city calendar.
If you have never stood in a city park at dusk and watched bats work a treeline, put the Oct. 11 date down. It costs nothing, it takes ninety minutes, and it is one of the few genuinely free things left in the city that no one is trying to sell you.