A six week old osprey nestling, emaciated with no adults present, stands next to its dead sibling (two fish left at nest during nest check). July 25.
Since my last post on June 25, where I said this year was shaping up to be a “terrible one” for ospreys in New Jersey has held true. Since then I’ve watched as nestlings are abandoned and left to starve by their parents and die from starvation via live streaming cameras. It is heartbreaking. We’re seeing nest failure rates higher than they have ever been in most coastal colonies. Even worse, many others monitoring ospreys in surrounding states are reporting similar outcomes. Atlantic menhaden—typically a staple in the osprey’s diet—are far less abundant this season.
2025 Great Bay Terrapin Project Volunteer Student Intern Maxwell Ferrelli carefully measures an adult female terrapin.
Northern diamondback terrapin nesting season may be coming to end, but Conserve Wildlife Foundation’s Great Bay Terrapin Project volunteers are still hard at work. During the peak of their nesting season, in June and July, they drive up and down Great Bay Boulevard in Little Egg Harbor Township in search of terrapins crossing the road.
Summertime is peak terrapin crossing season, with females coming to shore to lay their eggs in early to mid-summer and hatchlings finding their way back home in August. The problem is, they often end up on the road, where they run the risk of being crushed by passing vehicles. On Great Bay Boulevard, a coastal road with few speed limit signs and a great number of terrapins, this is especially troublesome.
Horseshoe crabs are ancient creatures, having first evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. Since then, they haven’t changed much, but the world around them certainly has. Human activity has taken a toll on horseshoe crabs- for years, people have been harvesting them for use as bait and in medical applications. New Jersey now has a moratorium preventing this from continuing, but their population is still lower than it should be. Luckily, something as simple as flipping a horseshoe crab off of its back can help to restore their numbers. I recently had the privilege of joining Larissa Smith, Senior Wildlife Biologist at CWF, on a trip to the Delaware Bay. In partnership with ReTurn the Favor, she regularly visits beaches that are rife with stranded horseshoe crabs and helps them get back to the water. At the nightly high tide, hundreds of crabs come up to shore to spawn, but when the tide goes out, many of them get stuck on their backs or buried in vegetation, unable to return to their habitats. Rescuing them can be as easy as turning them back onto their legs, but others need a bit more help.
On this day, we started with just a few unfortunate crabs that needed assistance getting off of their backs. We picked them up, flipped them, and off they went. But then, as we turned from the beach to a marshy creek, we were met with hundreds of crabs trapped in the grass. At first, it seemed like we were too late to save them, but as we went along, we found that almost every single one was still alive. So, we wrestled them out of the greenery and carried them back down to the water.
A female horseshoe crab, before and after rescuing
It was a lot of work, but we soon managed to rescue over 100 horseshoe crabs from that section alone. Most of them were females, as evidenced by their large size and pincers. Each one that survived represented a potential new generation of crabs. Female horseshoe crabs can lay around 80 thousand to 100 thousand eggs per year, most of which become food sources for other animals like laughing gulls, which were flocked heavily on the beaches that day. While it’s a bit unfortunate for the crabs, the loss of some of their eggs helps to keep the ecosystem running smoothly.
In just a few hours, we helped 198 horseshoe crabs return to the bay, and we had a lot of fun doing it. The effort to restore the populations of New Jersey’s horseshoe crabs is full of obstacles, but there is also so much hope. Just about anyone can flip an overturned horseshoe crab, and the feeling that comes along with doing so is wonderful. While the horseshoe crabs may not be able to thank us, we can always tell that they greatly appreciate our support.
Only a short boat ride off the coast of Little Egg Harbor Township lies an undisturbed haven for endangered beach-nesting birds. The shorelines of Horseshoe Island and Holgate are fully-stocked with piping plovers, black skimmers, and many signs warning boaters not to land on the protected islands. Members of the public are not allowed into these highly-restricted areas, and the only people allowed to step foot there are a small group of biologists.
Todd Pover, Senior Wildlife Biologist at CWF, and his team travel to these islands throughout the nesting season to keep an eye on nests and collect data on them. They work in partnership with New Jersey Fish and Wildlife and Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge to get access to the refuge and record information.
A day in the field starts with a visit to Horseshoe Island, a new and unique addition to the New Jersey off-shore landscape. What started as a small sandbar less than a decade ago has become a half-mile island that has been growing every year. While the new space is great for birds looking to start a family, the best part of the deal is that the island is free of mammalian predators like foxes, which are common nest destroyers.
The walk around the island takes the team a few hours to complete, even after dividing up the work. They venture from point to point, stopping where nests and mating pairs had previously been observed. Most of the focus for this trip is on American oystercatchers, a special concern beach-nesting species, and piping plovers, which are endangered. At each stop, the researchers look for eggs and chicks at the nesting sites so they can be logged and development can be tracked. Sometimes the nests are destroyed or the chicks don’t survive, and that is also recorded. All of this data is stored in a database so that the success of each generation can be measured over time.
American Oystercatcher on Horseshoe Island.
Occasionally, the team will find a new nest, but the process is tricky. Sometimes, they’ll get lucky and the parents will be nearby, leading them right to the site, but other times, they have to follow tiny, sandy tracks to find the divots in the sand that beach-nesting birds scrape out for nests.
“It’s like being a detective,” said Madison Patterson, one of the biologists.
One of the joys of the work for the crew is finding that a previously unsuccessful pair of birds had renested. Many of the individuals on the island are banded, especially the American oystercatchers, so it makes it easier to identify which bird is which. For the plovers, not only do they get bands, but names, too. On Horseshoe, a male named Secretariat seems to enjoy scurrying around the island, using his camouflage to hide from the researchers. But, the professionals that they are, they find him anyway and add him to their logs.
By noon, it’s time to get back on the boat and head to the next stop: Holgate, a Unit of the Edwin B. Forsythe NWR. Unlike Horseshoe Island, this location does have mammalian predators, as well as a large population of endangered least terns. It also has the largest number of piping plover pairs in New Jersey.
Royal tern eggs.
All across the island, tern, skimmer, and plover eggs abound. Each step must be taken with the utmost care, as one wrong move can destroy a nest and take a toll on the next generation’s population size. That’s pretty serious: these species have been classified as endangered in the state for decades and the constant threat of habitat loss due to human activity makes it even harder for these birds to bounce back.
In the mid afternoon, the team finishes up their final bits of data collection and gathers back on the boat. As they return to the mainland, the sounds of squawking soften and the islands vanish into the distance. But they would not be gone long, for tomorrow would bring a new day, new trails, and new lives for the team to document.
For more information on CWF’s beach nesting birds project, visit our project page.
by Larissa Smith Senior Wildlife Biologist Posted on
photo by Bill Reinert
Shorebird stewards may not wear capes but they are superhero’s to the multitude of shorebirds stopping along the Delaware Bay in the spring. During May, the beaches in New Jersey are an important stopover for these migratory birds who are mainly feeding on the horseshoe crab eggs, deposited during the annual horseshoe crab spawn. The shorebirds, which include the red knot a NJ endangered species, have a short window to reach their ideal weight before leaving on the next half of their journey north to breed. Eight beaches in Cape May County and two in Cumberland County have restricted access during the migration so that the shorebirds can feed undisturbed.
photo by Dom Manalo
Since 2003 Conserve Wildlife Foundation has coordinated the Shorebird Stewards, who help protect the feeding shorebirds by educating the public. This season thirty-one stewards were stationed at beaches between May 10th to May 26th. While most stewards are from New Jersey, we have stewards from Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Some of the stewards volunteer for a day, while others work the entire season and many return year after year. No matter how often someone has been a steward, they have a made a difference and we have definitely seen a positive change in peoples attitudes over the years. Visitors come from all over to view the shorebirds and horseshoe crabs and one of the main questions the stewards get asked is, “where are the shorebirds today”?
photo by Luke Tan
Some days the beach where the steward is assigned has only few shorebirds, while other days the beach is covered with the feeding birds. While the majority of beach goers have a positive attitude about the beach restrictions, there will always be those that want to go on the beach. While these situation aren’t always pleasant, the stewards are trained to handle them calmly and with education.
Earlier today, we joined our partners from Union County and NJDEP Fish & Wildlife to band the four young peregrine falcons produced at the Union County Courthouse in downtown Elizabeth. The four eyases are right around four weeks old and prime age for banding. After ascending to the roof, viewers of the live stream on YouTube watched as we carefully bagged each nestling and brought them inside the building.
Ospreys are migrating north and will soon begin another nesting season in New Jersey. Earlier this year, their conservation status was upgraded from threatened to stable by NJDEP. This marks a tremendous success in the restoration of ospreys, management of their nesting structures, and vast improvements in the health of our aquatic ecosystems, and the efforts of many devoted environmental professionals and osprey lovers throughout the state. Results from 2024, show that ospreys had favorable conditions for their continued growth and success.
To track the health of the osprey population, each year project staff, volunteers, and citizen scientists collect data on nest occupancy and nest success. Most colonies are surveyed by devoted volunteers who use a ladder to access a nest and determine the outcome. Others are surveyed from a distance using optics or other visual aides, including digital cameras and unmanned aerial systems. Citizen scientists, who contribute observations of nest activity online through www.osprey-watch.org play a crucial role in determining the overall size and health of the state population, as many document nest success in areas where previous nest surveys were not conducted. Moving forward, theses passionate volunteers will play a more important role in monitoring ospreys and their continued success.
Three natural osprey nests within Sedge Island WMA. July 2024.
Overall, results from our surveys recorded a total of 729 nests that were occupied. The majority of nests monitored had increased productivity, which is a stark contrast from what was observed in 2022 and 2023, when most colonies had decreased productivity. This highlights how severe weather, specifically nor’easters, can affect the overall productivity of coastal nesting ospreys, where most osprey nests are located in New Jersey. With no severe weather, the average statewide productivity was normal at 1.63 young/active [known outcome] nest.
As reported last year, observations of adult females not laying eggs at prompted us to conduct some early season surveys in some colonies. A survey that we conducted on Barnegat Bay revealed that 40% of the nests surveys had no eggs or young, which normally had young in previous years. Similar findings were reported in the Great Egg Harbor colony and also in areas of the Chesapeake Bay, which is even more alarming. We still don’t know what caused the reduction in egg-laying females and delayed incubation. More investigation and future monitoring is warranted.
In general, ospreys had a productive season, with the outcome being determined in 73% of the nests surveyed in 2024. Those pairs (533) produced a total of 867 young. A total of 101 (12%) nestlings were banded for future tracking, 35 of which with both federal and red auxiliary, field readable bands at nests on Barnegat Bay. 89 nests were determined to have failed to produce young. This means they either had eggs or nestlings and they were lost.
Osprey 26/H, a seven year old male nesting at Sedge Island WMA. July 2024.
Osprey Band Recoveries
Each year a small portion of young ospreys are banded with federal bird bands for future tracking. Encounters with banded birds is infrequent, unless they are found injured or dead, mainly because the bands are very difficult to read on live birds. With Project RedBand, an osprey banding and re-sighting project on Barnegat Bay, we have seen more encounters with live ospreys than those that are injured/dead. This is a direct result of banding birds with red “field readable” auxiliary bands, which can be read from a distance using a spotting scope or a telephoto lens on a digital camera. In 2024, 41 ospreys that were banded as nestlings were encountered. Of those, 30 were identified by their red bands, most during nest surveys conducted by CWF staff. Obtaining re-sightings of red banded ospreys helps track individual birds as they return to New Jersey to nest as adults. We can learn a lot about their life history while engaging the public in osprey conservation. Thank you to everyone who has reported red banded ospreys that they have observed!
With ospreys being listed as stable, it means they’re not at risk of becoming threatened or endangered in the near future. It does not mean we should just forget about them or walk away. Our continued efforts to monitor ospreys will help track their health and any impacts from threats like plastic marine debris to the loss of vital prey, like menhaden shifting northward from the effects of climate change. We have to continue to maintain their nest structures, which the majority of ospreys rely on to successfully reproduce.
Thankfully we have a growing group of volunteer “osprey watchers” who will help keep tabs on them in the future. As one of the largest birds of prey that nests in very close proximity to humans, especially on our heavily developed coast, creating a connection between ospreys and people is resilience. The ability to adapt to a changing landscape is crucial to our shared prosperity in this region. We must protect our open space and habitats that wildlife depend on to survival, while also allowing our human way of life to move forward.
Special thanks to everyone who donates to support our work with ospreys and to all our volunteers who help maintain their nest structures and monitor nest activity throughout the state!
Banding and re-sighting birds is such a rewarding experience. You never know where and when a bird that you banded will show up and what you will learn from that encounter. Banding is a method for biologists to track migratory birds and gain valuable information about them through band re-sightings or encounters. Each year, around 10-20% of young ospreys that are documented during nest surveys in New Jersey are banded with USGS bird bands for future tracking. On Barnegat Bay, through Project RedBand, young ospreys are also banded with red auxiliary, or “field readable” bands. Since 2014, over 600 red bands have been deployed and in recent years we have had more re-sightings of birds that are alive as opposed to those that were found dead. In 2024, we identified 30 ospreys in New Jersey by their red bands.
Partnerships were crucial in the early days of ospreys being listed as endangered in New Jersey in the early 1970s. From public utility companies installing tall nest platforms on coastal saltmarshes to non-profit organizations purchasing land for preservation. Today, they are still the life blood of osprey conservation, fifty years later. One partnership that has been brewing, quite literally, over the past several months was a collaboration and beer from Twin Elephant Brewing Company. They had this small batch beer called: The Osprey and they wanted it to help make a difference for the namesake of the beer, so they decided to partner with Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ to support our osprey conservation efforts. Continue reading “Brewing Partnerships: The Osprey”
I never imagined the rewarding experience of observing adult ospreys that I banded as nestlings. Over the past decade, I have banded six hundred and twelve ospreys with field readable red auxiliary bands. These birds originated from nests throughout the Barnegat Bay watershed, from Point Pleasant to Little Egg Harbor. This year, 29 red banded ospreys were re-sighted along the coast of New Jersey.
