Last fall I received a text from Kelly Scott, Resource Interpretive Specialist at Island Beach State Park about an osprey platform. She was kayaking within the Sedge Island Marine Conservation Zone and noticed one laying on its side – on a sandbar. I knew exactly which nest she was looking at. Later last year, I flew my sUAS to confirm her observation and make plans to get it back in working order before ospreys returned this year.
Three young osprey chicks found themselves without their parents after a utility pole nest caught fire at the National Guard Training Center (NGTC) in Sea Girt, NJ. Osprey often choose utility poles as nesting structures because of the 360° view they offer. Fires caused by the nests, composed mostly of dried sticks and seagrass, aren’t uncommon. Because of the safety hazard imposed by the nest, it was removed from the utility pole at the NGTC with three healthy chicks inside. The chicks were approximately a week to ten days old when removed from the nest and were brought temporarily to The Raptor Trust in Millington by Charles Appleby, Chief of the Environmental Bureau of the NJ Department of Military and Veterans Affairs (NJDMAVA) to be cared for while a new nesting platform could be built. Reuniting the chicks with their parents in a safe nest box would give them their best chance at survival.
Three young osprey chicks were removed from a hazardous nest.
Osprey 52/K. September 5, 2022. Photo by Chris Kelly.
In 2014, we began to band osprey nestlings produced at nests within the Barnegat Bay watershed with auxiliary bands. This was an effort which came about from the interest of Jim Verhagen, a LBI resident and wildlife biographer. He wondered why young ospreys were not banded with color, field readable bands, like some endangered raptors, including bald eagles and peregrine falcons. This spawned Project RedBand, an osprey banding and re-sighting project. The goal of the project was to learn more about ospreys when they are alive while engaging coastal residents in their management. Just under 500 young ospreys were banded with red auxiliary bands from 2014-2020 from nests all along the Barnegat Bay estuary.
‘Tis the season for osprey nest platform repairs — and being thankful for the volunteers who make it happen!
by Ben Wurst, Habitat Program Manager
AmeriCorps Watershed Ambassadors clean out nesting material from a 20-30 year old nest platform.
After migratory birds depart, leaves fall and northwest winds prevail, a small group of dedicated volunteers descend on our coastal saltmarshes. They’re there to maintain osprey nest platforms. Around 75% of our nesting ospreys rely on these wooden structures to reproduce. They were used to help jumpstart the early recovery efforts of ospreys in coastal New Jersey, where much of their native habitat was lost to development in the 1950-60s. Today many of these platforms are reaching their life span or are very close.
Piping plover chick foraging along wrack line in Barnegat Light.
CWF Biologist Todd Pover and the Barnegat Light Habitat Restoration Project are back in the news with a wonderful write-up by Juliet Kaszas-Hoch on TheSandpaper.net.
With major construction wrapping in late-2019, we’re now seeing the project’s positive impact on the local piping plover population. Only time will tell just how successful the restoration truly is, but until then we will continue to chart it’s progress and do what we can to make life better for New Jersey’s beach nesters.
Read an except of article here and remember to check out the video update on the project linked below!
With fall on its way, most piping plovers and other migratory coastal birds have headed south, where they will remain for the duration of the winter months. While they’re gone, other species will happily utilize the new pond feature and habitat site along the inlet in Barnegat Lighthouse State Park created specifically to benefit beach-nesting birds such as plovers.
The Barnegat Light Habitat Restoration Project is a collaborative effort led by Todd Pover, Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey senior wildlife biologist, and Brooke Maslo, Rutgers University assistant professor of ecology, in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the N.J. Division of Fish and Wildlife.
As Pover explained in a recent blog post on conservewildlifenj.org,
the goal of the project, begun two years ago, was to enhance breeding
habitat near Long Beach Island’s north-end inlet “by clearing out the
vegetation and re-grading the sand, because this once important breeding
site had become overgrown and was no longer suitable for piping plovers
to nest. Plans also called for building a shallow pond to create
productive foraging habitat for chicks (to) be protected from human
disturbance.”
NOTE: Handling of piping plovers, as shown in the photo in this post, was done as part of an approved research project and in a manner consistent with established protocols.
Today is designated World Shorebirds Day!
Here at The Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey we are proud of our ongoing conservation efforts with piping plovers and red knots, both imperiled shorebirds. Along with our partners, we are doing our best to keep these species in our future, but our work is not done, as shorebird species all around the world are in steep decline. Habitat across the range, critical for their survival, is under siege from development, commercial uses, and human recreational activity.
Click on the link below to hear what CWF Senior Wildlife Biologist Todd Pover had to say about piping plovers, their success this past season in New Jersey and challenges over the decades, as part of a series of interviews compiled for World Shorebird Day!
A ground nest with three young. photo by Ben Wurst
It’s not very common to see ospreys, a large predatory bird, nest on the ground. Despite the rarity of these sightings, it has become more common and acts as a glimpse into the past (and future), before humans dominated the landscape. Today, more and more ospreys are building nests on the ground and snags over water.
Results from 2019 Osprey Nest Surveys highlight another productive year.
by Ben Wurst, Habitat Program Manager
An osprey nest in a snag on Barnegat Bay. July 2019.
Surveys of osprey nests in New Jersey have occurred annually for the past forty five years. They are conducted to help determine the overall size and health of the population. The first aerial survey over Barnegat Bay counted only five active nests. Ten years earlier there had been over 50. The combined effects of DDT and habitat loss had taken their toll. No osprey nests were productive and the population at risk of being extirpated from the state.
“In 1974 there were only five active osprey nests on Barnegat Bay. Today there are approximately one hundred and fifty.”
After ospreys were listed as endangered an innovative effort to transplant viable eggs from the Chesapeake Bay to Barnegat Bay began. In addition, to help replace natural nest sites that were lost to development, man-made nest platforms were designed and installed away from human disturbance. Slowly osprey pairs became productive thanks to the die hard effort of State biologists like Pete McLain, Kathy Clark and many volunteers and partners. It’s encouraging for us to look back to see how far we’ve come in the statewide recovery of ospreys in New Jersey.
Derelict fishing gear continues to plague the depths of Barnegat Bay. Often lost through storm events or due to boat traffic, lost or abandoned crab pots (ghost pots) become an unintentional deathtrap for a variety of marine species and reduce otherwise harvestable resources. CWF and their partners at MATES, Stockton, and ALS have been working to recover lost pots in Barnegat Bay since 2015.
Over the course of the last three field seasons, 1,300 crab pots have been recovered and their bycatch has been extensively documented. Notably, CWF and MATES have been focusing on how to further help northern diamondback terrapins who often find themselves caught in ghost pots. In 2016, one pot contained the remains of 17 terrapins.
As we enter the fourth field season of pot collections, the project hopes to not only recover as may pots as possible, but also to glean further information on how the pots move in a variety of substrates and under a variety conditions. To bring further awareness to the issue, CWF teamed up with the awesome folks at Citizen Racecar to produce a short informational film about ghost fishing and its effects on Barnegat Bay. Visit our Facebook page to view the video: https://www.facebook.com/wildlifenj/
This project is funded primarily by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with additional support by the New Jersey Corporate Wetlands Restoration Partnership and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Covanta and Schnitzer Steel also support the project by recycling the metal in the retrieved crab pots.
Wakefern Food Corp. interns Niki Tripathi and Nadia Saponara
This summer, we happily traded in our summer intern cubicles, laptops and professional attire for kayaks, clam rakes and bathing suits for a trip to Barnegat Bay. We headed to Sedge Island, off of Island Beach State Park, and kicked off the day with a boat ride to the island. There, we joined fifth grade “Species on the Edge” art and essay contest winners, their parents, and state wildlife biologists with their seasoned interns.
