This past week I spent the day with students and teachers at Bayonne High School (BHS). I was there to help students construct three osprey nesting platforms. The platforms are being placed at the Bayonne Golf Club (BGC) along a portion wetland habitat that was restored by the BGC along New York Bay. This whole project began when I was approached a couple months ago by Tom Tokar, a teacher at BHS, about assisting them with the construction and placement of the platforms with some of his students. Tom and Larissa Drennan, a teacher at the Woodrow Wilson School, have involved their students in many environmental projects in Bayonne, one of which is where they grow mussels and seed them at the BCG. Ron D’Argenio, with BGC has supported their efforts from the beginning not only by offering up the BGC as a location to seed the mussels but also through financial assistance. Ron and the BGC are also fully funding this project as well, with a very generous donation to CWF. Continue reading “Photo from the field”
2011 was a great year for bald eagles in NJ. This season a record high of 118 chicks fledged from nests throughout New Jersey. A total of 111 eagle pairs were monitored of these 95 were active which means that they laid eggs. Seventy-one of these were successful in producing the 118 fledges. This is especially good news after 2010’s less than stellar nesting season where only 69 young chicks fledged.
The success of the NJ Bald Eagle Project is directly due to the dedicated volunteers. Every eagle nest that can be viewed is monitored by a volunteer/s. Volunteers report on important dates such as incubation, hatching and fledging. They also help to protect the nest by reporting disturbance and educating the public about eagles. We can’t thank our eagle project volunteers enough for all the time and energy which they put into this project.
More details on the the 2011 nesting season will be available later this year in the 2011 NJ Bald Eagle Project report.
A banded red knot searches for food on a Delaware Bay beach.
Bandedbirds.org is an effort to collect data on shorebirds throughout their range from the southern tip of Chile to the Canadian arctic. This effort has been underway for many years and has an international network of volunteers reporting re-sightings data on shorebirds.
The following was shared with the shorebird community by Jeannine Parvin, administrator for bandedbirds.org.
The bird being discussed was banded in NJ in May 2005. It seemed to return to NJ each year, having been resighted most years up to 2010. The bird seemed to be heading back up to NJ for the 2011 Spring shorebird season, when it was shot and killed in French Guiana. Illegal hunting is still a big issue for shorebirds. Paired with loss and degradation of habitat, and pollution, these birds face major threats. Read more about CWF’s work to monitor and protect shorebirds here.
A red knot identified as FL(PPM) was shot in French Guiana by a hunter.
The data was submitted by Alexandre Vinot from French Guiana. He regularly reports to bandedbirds.org and is a volunteer with GEPOG.
His comments state: “shot in Mana Ricefield – flag given to Antoine Hausselman, who gave me the data”.
The iconic Space Needle, photographed from the edge of Puget Sound.
Last week – literally moments before Irene began her Garden State smack-down – my plane landed on home ground. I was returning from six days in Seattle, WA, where more than 550 professionals from 21 countries gathered for the International Conference on Ecology & Transportation (ICOET). The conference offered over 170 combined talks and posters on a variety of research, planning, ecology, and engineering topics that, by and large, had to do with animals crossing roads.
The reason I made the trip was our Amphibian Crossing project (ok, and it was also Seattle, birthplace of the counter-culture that fashioned my grungy teenagehood!). Over the last decade we’ve surveyed, mapped, and prioritized hotspots throughout the northern half of NJ where frogs and salamanders have to travel across roads to reach their breeding pools each spring. Enormous numbers are killed in doing so. The hallmark of our Amphibian Crossing project has always been the volunteer-based rescue surveys – at night, in the rain, in traffic; requiring a lot of hands and a maniacal level of commitment to plan and carry out year after year. At this point, we’ve got around 35 “high” and “highest” priority crossings…far too many to manually protect in the short-term, not to mention the long-term. Our long-term solution is to get special under-road culverts installed for these migrating amphibians, and ICOET was a place I could find folks who have done it. Continue reading “Salamanders and…Seattle?”
Crossing into new territory – Todd Pover, CWFNJ, wading across a mangrove inlet in the Bahamas to conduct the Piping Plover survey.
In earlier installments of this series (It’sBetter in the Bahamas – Part 1 & 2), I reported on the results of the winter segment of the 2011 International Piping Plover Census in the Bahamas, in which I participated, and also the partnerships developed along the way. For this final installment I am foregoing the biological results and conservation lessons, the usual story themes, because sometimes our readers just want to hear about the adventurous side of what we do here at the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey.
Having surveyed piping plovers on their breeding grounds in New Jersey for 15 years now, at times it feels like I know every nook and cranny that plovers could possibly be found in our state – to some extent the sense of mystery is gone. I knew that wouldn’t be the case with the Bahamas winter survey. I had never been to Abaco, the island I was assigned to survey along with Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Coastal Waterbird Program, but I knew it had miles of coastline on its main island and numerous offshore barrier islands and cays that needed to be checked as well. Our pre-trip research of the habitat on the islands suggested it was going to be difficult to cover all that ground in one week even with our 4-6 person survey team, but I was excited by the challenge. Continue reading “It’s Better in the Bahamas – Part 3”
The last known Allegheny woodrat population lives at the base of the Palisades in northern New Jersey.
The Allegheny woodrat is a state endangered species. It was added to the endangered species list in 1991. There is one remaining population of these small mammals left in the state and they need our help this winter.
This season we are going to help the woodrat by providing it with food. We will distribute acorns, beech nuts, hickory nuts or any other nuts from native New Jersey trees in the area the woodrats live. By providing them with food we will help them survive the winter.
Collecting nuts while learning about the habits and habitat needs of the Allegheny woodrat is a great service learning project! Have your students collect native tree nuts throughout the community and help to protect one of NJ’s rarest wildlife residents.
We are collecting nuts now through October 31, 2011 to distribute to the woodrat’s location throughout the winter. If you would like to contribute to the woodrat’s winter food pantry, please drop off nuts from native New Jersey trees to ENSP’s office in Clinton, New Jersey. Please call Maria Grace at Conserve Wildlife Foundation at (609) 984-0621 for specific instructions. Nuts will be collected until October 31st.
New Jersey’s Black Skimmers Survive Hurricane Irene
By Todd Pover, CWFNJ Beach Nesting Bird Project Manager
Black Skimmers liftoff at Seaview Harbor Marina where they survived Hurricane Irene.
Most of us spent the weekend worrying about the potential damage Hurricane Irene might inflict on our homes and loved ones. As a biologist, I was also concerned about the impact of the storm on our state’s wildlife, in my case, the beach nesting birds I help manage and protect.
Hurricanes and other severe weather can be a matter of life or death for nesting birds. Young chicks are particularly vulnerable, but even adults are at risk in the most extreme storms. Although most of our state’s beach nesting birds have completed the breeding cycle for the season, the majority of the Atlantic coast population of piping plovers and many least terns are in the midst of migration and would have been in the path of Hurricane Irene. We have no way of knowing for sure what impact the storm had on them, but long distance migration is tough on birds in the best of circumstances. Survival of young during their first year is typically very low so this was not a good start to the post breeding season.
We had two active nesting colonies remaining in New Jersey heading into the storm – a least tern colony at Townsend’s Inlet (Cape May County) and a black skimmer colony at Seaview Harbor Marina (Atlantic County). Residents in this area had a mandatory evacuation order, but our birds didn’t have that option. Today I completed an assessment of our beaches and nesting birds in the southern portion of the coast and I am happy to report that both the skimmer and tern colony escaped the storm largely unscathed.
Going into the storm, the tern colony was almost done for the season anyhow so any losses there would have been minimal. The skimmer colony, on the other hand, still had a number of chicks remaining and about 800 just fledged (able to fly) young. And over 1800 adults! This is the state’s only major skimmer colony representing nearly the entire state breeding population. So you can imagine it was a big relief when I walked out on the beach and heard thousands of raucous skimmers and saw there was no visible reduction in the colony’s size. Like our homes and loved ones, Irene appears to have spared our beachnesters.
New Jersey partners being honored at the Coastal America Award ceremony for the Lower Cape May Meadows restoration project (Stephanie Egger, second from the right).
As a new staff member of the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey (CWF) a blog entry seemed like a good way to introduce myself. So here goes. “The wheel has come full circle,” meaning to go full circle, complete an entire cycle or to return to an original position, is an old adage thought to originate from Shakespeare in King Lear 5:3. Apparently there is some truth to this expression. I really didn’t see it coming though, especially not to my career, my passion, which has focused on endangered species, namely the piping plover, for the last five years.
I actually started working with piping plovers as a monitor for the Beach Nesting Bird Program in 2006. Fresh out of grad school, looking to get my foot in the door, I came across an opening to manage piping plovers on the Jersey shore. Perfect I thought! I can work on my tan while I’m working! Totally kidding! I have to admit at that point in my life I had never even heard of the infamous piping plover (I know, I still can’t believe it myself). How did I miss a bird that’s been protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1986 and nesting on the very same NJ beaches that I spent every summer vacationing since I was a toddler? My previous two years were consumed researching northern diamondback terrapins for my Master’s degree, but this opportunity seemed to be calling me. My then supervisor (CWF’s own Todd Pover, Beach Nesting Bird Program Manager), took a chance on me and little did I know it would set the stage for the next five years of my career and the beginning of that circle.
My job as a plover monitor did not last long, only a few short months, when I had to bid farewell to my life in the field with the birds as a new adventure began for me with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, New Jersey Field Office (USFWS). As luck would have it, the job also focused on plovers. Not so much on the ground, getting down and dirty with plovers, but managing the plovers by helping implement conservation measures to increase their survival and recovery, and minimize or eliminate adverse impacts of numerous beach related projects on the birds. How does one begin to achieve this? Partnering. Continue reading “From Plovers to Partners and Back Again – Coming Full Circle”
Each spring Calling Amphibian Monitoring Project (CAMP) volunteers take time out of their busy lives to drive the dark roads of NJ and listen for the calls of NJ’s amphibians. Not only do these volunteers have to find the time to schedule the three surveys, each in a specific four week period, they need to meet the protocol for the surveys. This means meeting the minimum temperature requirement, which is not the easiest in March, as well as other weather protocol. Once they find a perfect night to survey the volunteers follow a 15-mile route with 10 stops. They stop and listen for 5 minutes at each stop and record the amphibians they hear. This can be a frustrating experience depending upon the route. Noise from cars can make surveying difficult and some of the routes in more developed areas record no amphibians calling on many of the stops. Meanwhile volunteers on the less developed routes can often hear a chorus of frogs and toads that can be almost deafening.
I’d like to thank all the dedicated CAMP volunteers for finding the time to survey this season.
Survey Results
Thirty-one volunteers surveyed 33 routes. Each route is to be surveyed three times during the spring in March, April & June. A total of 77 surveys were conducted. All 16 species of NJ frogs and toads were detected on the surveys. The species that was heard on the most routes was the Northern Spring Peeper which was heard on 31 routes out of 33 that were surveyed. The second most detected species was the Green Frog heard on 22 routes out of the 33 surveyed. The least detected species was the Spade Foot Toad which was only heard on one route.
Would you like to help next year?
Fourteen routes are available for the 2012 season.
For more information on volunteering email Larissa Smith.
Holding a big brown bat during a maternity colony survey. Photo by MacKenzie Hall
It’s hard to believe that it has been two months since the start of my internship with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey. As a rising senior in college (when did that happen?), I can attest to the fact that time flies. Last December I contacted MacKenzie Hall, a Private Lands Biologist with the CWF and bat expert with a proposition. My college had provided me with a stipend after the completion of a long list of requirements for an unpaid internship. Being an avid wildlife lover, biology student and a resident of New Jersey, the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey seemed like the perfect fit. MacKenzie graciously agreed to take me under her [bat] wing.
On June 1, I jumped right into MacKenzie’s work with the bat population of New Jersey. I was quickly contacting volunteers, designing driving routes and delivering acoustic bat detectors. We were working on assessing the bat population of New Jersey with the use of five brand new acoustic bat detectors split amongst forty volunteers.
