Author: CWF

Public invited to hear expert panels on invasive species, wildlife disease, and other threats facing sportsmen and wildlife conservationists

Hunters and birdwatchers alike will come together for the first annual New Jersey Wildlife and Conservation Conference on April 26, 2013 in Eatontown, New Jersey. Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ (CWF) is partnering with the New Jersey State Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs and the New Jersey Division of Fish & Wildlife to host these expert panels at the Sheraton Eatontown Hotel at 6 Industrial Way East in Eatontown, N.J.

“Working together for wildlife was the catalyst that blurred the lines between the Federation camouflage and Conserve Wildlife green, enabling us to partner together and tackle the complex fish and wildlife issues facing New Jersey today,” said Frank Virgilio, President of the New Jersey State Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs.

The inaugural conference will feature panels of wildlife experts from New Jersey Audubon, the New Jersey Outdoor Alliance, and many other organizations, exploring timely and controversial issues ranging from invasive species and wildlife disease to our declining forest health and conservation advocacy.

“The many conservation enthusiasts in New Jersey owe a great deal to sportsmen, who practiced wildlife conservation long before it entered national consciousness,” said CWF Executive Director David Wheeler. “Today our shared interests have led to countless success stories, protecting New Jersey’s valuable habitat and wildlife species during a time when we face more challenges than ever. This conference will tackle those issues with the most timely and meaningful information available.”

Individuals or companies seeking to register should visit www.ConserveWildlifeNJ.org.  Discounted rates for attending are as low as $20 for the all-day panels.

POST #4 ON THE 2013 AMPHIBIAN MIGRATION

by MacKenzie Hall, Amphibian Crossing Project Coordinator

Easter Sunday is a celebration of rebirth, resurrection, springtime, life.  And this Easter Sunday – right on cue – a warm day turned into a mild night, the mild night met with rain, and together they gave rise to lots and lots of life.   The amphibian migration was underway…in a big way!

Our teams were ready.  Despite heavy bellies and a long day with family, at least 50 trained volunteers came out to “guard” the animals at road-crossing hot spots.  From nightfall to around 11:00 pm we escorted, ferried, and tallied more than 3,000 salamanders and frogs across! (Numbers are still coming in from other teams.)

It was a heart-pounding pace, often with multiple animals entering the roadway at once.  They didn’t seem to understand the danger, but we humans were darting in and out, racing against car tires and grabbing up slippery critters as fast as slippery critters can be grabbed…while still being safe, orderly, and polite to passing motorists.  A lot of drivers stopped to see what all the speed-walking was about.  One woman said “God bless!” when I showed her a fat female spotted salamander and told her about the migration.  Another guy must have been a local because he just asked “how many tonight?”

Everyone had an exhilarating night – the kind of migration night we plan for but don’t often get.  It was a lot of fun and we saved a lot of lives.  From the vehicle count, most of those little animals wouldn’t have stood a chance.  A few still didn’t.

Before heading home from the site where I was working, I took a midnight stroll down to the vernal pool.  It’s so neat to watch salamanders swimming around.  Especially the big spotted salamanders.  They spend almost their entire year underground in the woods, yet they are graceful and natural in the water.  They even look excited to be there, swirling around each other in contest and attraction.  I felt lucky to know about this wonderful thing.  It felt great to have made some of it possible.  Look at those gorgeous animals!  And their impossibly bright yellow spots!  They are colors lost in the night, but not by our watchful lights.

POST #3 ON THE 2013 AMPHIBIAN MIGRATION

by MacKenzie Hall, Amphibian Crossing Project Coordinator

Following Monday’s all-night amphibian foray – and the prolonged terror/adrenaline rush of playing real-life Frogger – I drove home through a rainy sunrise on Tuesday.  According to a weather app on my phone, the rain would keep falling all day and end (wouldn’t you know) right around sunset.  “You gotta be kidding me,” I think is what I slurred.

Warm nighttime rain is the simple cue for mass movement, like what we had before dawn that day.  But nature is seldom that simple, so the task of monitoring an amphibian migration can get hairy.  The warm, soaking daytime rain would get the attention of those slumbering frogs and salamanders. Even if it stopped before dark, the wet ground and road would entice some of them to move.  Maybe a lot of them?  And right at the time when nighttime traffic would be heaviest on the roads.

So we sided with caution and rallied the teams to hit the streets at dusk.  I went back to Byram to lead a group of volunteers there while others covered different hot-spots. 

The rain did end early – earlier than expected even – and by nightfall our team was spreading out over a damp road.  It was a relief to see that a migration was happening anyway, albeit at a slower pace.  And the cars were filing through our setup (cones and signs, buffered by police) in threes and fours…99 vehicles in the first hour!  Basically, there was a car for every salamander that dared to cross the white line.

We did our best to stay ahead of the traffic.  By 11:00 pm the temperature was dropping, the road was drying, traffic was slowing, and so were the amphibians.  We paced the road below a starry sky with Orion front and center.  We had tallied another 175 spotted salamanders, 41 Jefferson’s salamanders, and 52 spring peepers.  Despite the heavy car flow early on, more than 85% of those animals made it to the safe side of the road – and eventually to their breeding pool below – with a little help from some friends.

The ingress migration to the pools is probably close to half-over across much of NJ, so we’ll be out few more times yet! 

THANKS to all the dedicated people who have helped so far.  It’s a diverse group of heroes, from long-time amphibian crossers like George Cevera and Carl Bernzweig, to new volunteers like Karen Ruzycki.  We have help from local partners like Margaret McGarrity of Byram Township, and engineering students from NJIT who want to help design solutions to the roadkill problem.  A couple reporters came out this week to cover the story and ended up shuttling amphibians, too.  We thank the Sussex County Division of Engineering for issuing us the permit to assemble on their road.  Thanks also to the Byram Police Department for their willingness to provide traffic control and their respect for our project, which I’m sure seems a little unusual.   And that’s just at one location.  Great job, everyone!

POST #2 ON THE 2013 AMPHIBIAN MIGRATION

by MacKenzie Hall, Amphibian Crossing Project Coordinator

The past week has been like a wild trip through biomes and time zones.  A half-foot of wet snow buried NJ on Friday, but it didn’t stand a chance against a  sunny weekend above 50˚F and the valiant arrival of Daylight Savings Time.  Bam!  Spring.  Suddenly birds were singing, crocuses were blooming, and salamanders were stretching their hamstrings for the journey ahead.

Throughout the day on Monday (March 11) a long wall of rain crept eastward across the US.  It couldn’t possibly miss NJ, and the temperature would hold around 50˚F overnight – excellent predictors for a migration.  The question was when the rain would hit and whether a rainfall starting very early in the morning would trigger many amphibians to move.  There seem to be almost unlimited permutations for how the important factors of ground thaw, temperature, rainfall, date, and time of night can converge, and after almost 10 years with the Amphibian Crossing Project I still learn new and surprising things. 

A handful of us chose to wait out the rain at one of our big road-crossing sites in Byram (Sussex Co.).  At least 3 hours before the rain even started, someone noticed a salamander crossing the dry road.  We spread out to cover more ground and kept counting.  By the time the first raindrops hit we had already tallied (and ferried) 190 salamanders and 20 frogs across the asphalt threshold dividing their forest habitat from the breeding pool below.  We were all pretty surprised and excited by what we were seeing.

The rain came around 2:30 am, and in the 4 hours before dawn the road was swimming with frogs and salamanders.  We did our best to keep up with the count, and the rescue, especially as vehicle traffic picked up toward dawn.  Eight cars per hour around 3:00 am, then 10 cars per hour, then 26.  By 6:15 it was hard for the last of us – Bob Hamilton and I – to keep our feet on the pavement as the vehicle count crested 100 per hour.  We also started to lose the battle against roadkill – as many animals were getting hit as we could save.  Luckily it was just a short period, and at dawn the migration would pause.   Our totals for that night:  1,119 salamanders and frogs, 954 of which made it to their destination!

Our “scouts” all across northern & central NJ had similar reports.  A big migration had happened before dawn, and there was some roadkill as evidence.  But you can listen for a happier kind of evidence – the honking and peeping of those who made it to their pool.  The harbingers of spring are arriving.

POST #1 ON THE 2013 AMPHIBIAN MIGRATION

by MacKenzie Hall, Amphibian Crossing Project Coordinator

For the 98 volunteers signed on to help with this year’s amphibian road-crossing efforts, yesterday brought on the first flurry of excitement.  Forty degrees!  The promise of nighttime rain!  Saturday’s soaker had helped to get the ground thawing, though many of the amphibians’ breeding pools were still capped in ice.  The conditions weren’t going to be perfect, but surely some eager salamanders would be enticed to come out from their winter burrows and set off on migration.  And when their tiny feet hit the pavement of peril, we were gonna be there gosh dernit!

So our “scouts” got ready for night (and rain) to fall, to go check on a dozen or so road-crossing hot-spots in northern and central NJ.  Then, as volunteer Phil Wooldridge of Warren County put it, we experienced a little deja-vu.  The rain started later, the temperature was colder.  North of Route 80, snow and sleet fell instead.  We amphibian crossers have gotten used to the shakiness of weather forecasts, and to the somewhat complex combination of triggers that set an amphibian migration in motion.  At any rate, we basically got skunked last night.

The only sign of life came from Hampton, in Sussex County, where Sharon and Wade Wander found a single Jefferson salamander crossing the road to his ice-covered breeding pool.  Tough little salamanders, those Jeffs.  Our first one of 2012 came out during a wet snowfall, too, around 2:00 am on February 24th. 

The town of East Brunswick was also counting on last night’s forecast when they decided to close Beekman Road – a town road bisecting an amphibian migration path.  The town’s Environmental Commission has coordinated the closure for the past 10 years to protect the spotted salamanders, wood frogs, and other migrants on 4 to 10 nights every spring (read about it here).  Even there, only one male spotted salamander was seen making his way to the pool.

So, we’ll keep doing our best to predict the amphibian migration and to be in the right places when it happens.  Clearly the big long nights are still in front of us.

To learn more about our Amphibian Crossing Project and experience the migration through video, please visit our “Amphibians Crossing!” webpage.

Surveying American Oystercatchers from the Sky

By Stephanie Egger, Wildlife Biologist

If you happened to be taking a stroll on a chilly February afternoon on the beaches of New Jersey and you saw a blue and white Cessna in the sky flying in a not-so-straight pattern, well that was me in the back of the teeny 4-seater plane.  Last Tuesday I helped complete the New Jersey segment of the American oystercatcher winter survey, which is being directed by Shiloh Schulte from the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, in partnership with the American Oystercatcher Working Group. Other staff from the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey and the State’s Endangered and Nongame Species Program were on the beach (or in a boat) “ground-truthing” the survey in order to verify the data that were collected during the flight.

After swallowing a motion sickness pill as a precautionary measure (thanks Shiloh!) our four hour flight took off early afternoon from the Cape May County Airport, starting with a survey of Cape May Inlet.  We continued our flight north, surveying Hereford, Townsend’s, Corson’s, Great Egg Harbor, Absecon, Brigantine, Little Egg, Barnegat, and Manasquan Inlets and finally Sandy Hook Gateway National Recreation Area.  We saw flocks of wintering oystercatchers, from a handful to up to 140 birds, using sand and marsh habitats.  It was quite the first-time experience for me. Surveying from the air is NOT the easiest, but especially if a flock is seen at the last second and the plane has to bank hard. I admit I even glanced around for a sick bag a few times, but stayed strong! I don’t get seasick or airsick, but flying in a Cessna and doing numerous turns and banking was a whole new feeling.  There were many times all I could see from the backseat was water with no horizon to focus on, all while attempting to take good photographs of the flocks for the count. Try doing that when you are sideways!  In the end I managed to do really well at both, taking photos of the flocks and not getting sick during my aerial survey. Go me! Continue reading “Oystercatcher Project in Flight”

A RETURN TRIP TO THE BAHAMAS

By Todd Pover, Beach Nesting Bird Project Manager

Last month marked the third January I have been able to go to the Bahamas in the name of piping plover research. This recent trip was a little different than the others in that it was not an official work funded trip. Still, it wasn’t a traditional vacation either as a good portion of the trip was dedicated to plover surveys and related work. (It’s hard keeping me away from those pipers!)

This being on my own dime, I did make it a point to sample some of the Bahamas other wildlife this time around. At the top of my list was the Bahama parrot. Once found on many Bahamas islands, the parrot is now only present on Abaco and Great Inagua, and is a protected species in the Bahamas. Abaco National Park, overseen by the Bahamas National Trust, encompasses over 20,000 acres, including some of the most critical parrot habitat. Ongoing research of the parrot’s breeding success is being conducted on Abaco as well – it is heartening to see significant conservation effort being put towards parrots in the Bahamas.

I had heard the calls of parrots on previous trips, but since I literally had my “head in the sand” looking for plovers I hadn’t actually seen them. For awhile I didn’t think I would get a glimpse of them this time either – although we were at a parrot hotspot in Abaco known as Bahama Palm Shores, once again I heard them but couldn’t quite get them in my sights.  Parrots can be quite social and their chatter was clearly audible in the trees around us – tantalizingly close – but surprisingly hard to see for a large colorful bird. Our patience paid off as suddenly a flock of at least 100 parrots lifted up and circled over us, temporarily blackening the sky (perhaps “brightening the sky” is more appropriate in this case). What a spectacular sight and later we would see a smaller flock close up foraging in a field. Continue reading “Plovers and Parrots in Paradise”

HELP MAKE OUR WORLD GO ‘ROUND

by MacKenzie Hall, Biologist

The Conserve Wildlife Foundation is a small staff with a lot going on.  If you glance through our conservation projects, you’ll see that volunteers have a role in almost everything we do.  This hardy fleet of dedicated helpers allows us to cover more ground, stretch our dollars, reach wider audiences, and continue our upward and outward evolution as a group.

We’ve featured a handful of people on our Volunteer Profiles page so far, with Robert Hergenrother being the most recent.  We enjoy learning more about their unique backgrounds and interests and hope you’ll check them out, too.  

Thank you to ALL of our wonderful volunteers!

Every spring, vernal pool breeding amphibians migrate from upland wintering habitats to their spring breeding pools.  Many of these ancestral migratory paths are bisected by roads, creating a barrier that not only disrupts natural migration and fragments habitat but often proves impenetrable, limiting gene flow and disconnecting populations.   Our Amphibian Crossing Project works to protect these migration corridors through coordinated volunteer rescue efforts that move amphibians safely across the road during these annual mass migration events.  Currently, our efforts are focused on select sites in northern New Jersey but we want to expand our database to document these migratory paths across the state.

If you would like to report an amphibian crossing near you, please email us with:

-Location of the crossing marked clearly on a map

-List of species seen crossing or DOR (dead on road)

-Date(s) of occurrence and any other pertinent information you may have

*We ask that you only report known crossings and do not attempt to locate more by driving around on rainy spring nights.  Increased vehicular traffic will increase mortality of amphibians during their annual spring migration!

Spring is around the corner and now is the time to plan your garden.  It’s easy to begin with Seed Starting Kits from Back to Nature.  The kit includes the tools you’ll need to successfully grow your own food, starting vegetables from seed.

With their selection of locally sourced plants and organic materials, at Back to Nature, you’ll find everything needed for gardening success. Their store in Basking Ridge, NJ, hosts an array of artisanal gifts including pottery, woodwork, organic soaps and local honey.

Click here for more information.

10% Discount to CWF members available in-store, online, and landscape & construction.  Use the code CWFNJ10.  CWF will receive 5.5% of your purchase.