Category Archives: In the neighborhood

In the neighborhood, Snapshots

You can’t get there from here without a lot of trouble

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Click to see the full mess!

All along the route
their patience waned
as the roads turned sandier
down to the Jersey shore
when back ways could not avoid
the open bridge
as one slow thin mast
would paralyze the day
and our front-seating it
pushing crowding forward
“not there yet!”
then racing
who’d see the ocean first
pushing towards its vastness
our young lives stretched out
in unending summer
and in one shell
its mystery

“Before the Parkway” by Jerome Leary

The Highlands-Sea Bright Bridge, a 1240 foot drawbridge that spans the Shrewsbury River, is being replaced with a fixed-span bridge that will rise some 30 feet higher than its predecessor.

Gone will be the occasion to put the car in park and step out for twenty minutes while the bridge is open to watch the sailboats go by underneath. Gone will be that instant of panic when the light on the drawbridge turns from green to yellow to red and you wonder if you should chance it before the bells and gates descend to make you twenty minutes late for wherever it is you’re meant to be on the other side of the crossing. Gone will be the convenient excuse of the bridge being up. Gone will be the pause on a summer day.

In the meantime, we have this mess of cranes and a crazy maze to navigate the way from here to there. I can’t help but be discombobulated by the change.

Are drawbridges in your neck of the woods being replaced, too? Will you miss them?

Birds, In the neighborhood, Pastimes

Birds at Rocky Point

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Susan and Seamus came to their first-ever birdwalk without a pair of binoculars between them. As Field Trip Chairperson, I’m supposed to be prepared for this inevitable oversight on the part of the beginning birder with spare bins to loan out, should anyone need a pair.

Of course I always forget the box of loaner bins that’s buried in a closet somewhere. Luckily someone else in our little group had an extra pair to share. Beginners are such fun and really make these walks for me. They’re enthusiastic about every bird and are curious about everything. I think I’m so used to birding with people that know more than me that it’s nice to feel like an expert once in a while.

We birded in the rain, but did pretty well considering the lousy weather. Rocky Point has an interesting history as a coastal defense site and the views on a sunny day can be dramatic. This morning, the ocean and the river and the sky were all gunmetal gray.

The shrubby fields around Battery Lewis held the expected redstarts and cat birds, a baltimore oriole and lots of vocal carolina wrens, plus some massing tree swallows and a lone chimney swift overhead. We had a nice look at a Peregrine and a couple Osprey, too.

Down at the fishing pier at Black Fish Cove, we found a yellowlegs and a couple oystercatchers, plus a very wet and cranky-looking red tail perched along the river.

Our species count for the couple hour walk was only 35, but for these beginners willing to be out in the rain, each was a small, wet joy.

Birds, Crazy things i do to amuse myself, I like to make lists, In the neighborhood, Pastimes

17

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Juliet’s snared you, little one, perhaps startled you into our nets…

interrupted your song or nest-building to carry you away for a moment…

our temporary prisoner, an object of study.

Tom wants only to fit you with a tiny numbered bracelet…

and to blow gentle kisses among the feathers of your breast…

to measure the distance of your wings and the length of longing in your journey…

to hold you up for a portrait; your bright eye looking to the sky for escape…

to release you, your bit of fire no longer contained; his open palm and our thanks for this moment in your life.

Sandy Hook Bird Observatory and CUNY-CSI are partnering in a banding study of spring/fall migrants, as well as breeding birds, at Sandy Hook. They put out a call for volunteers to help with recording data and running birds from the nets to the banders. Between schedules and poor weather, today was the first chance I had to help out and so I spent the dawn hours today with them, mostly trying to stay out of the way and taking pics.

#17 in my 38 by 39. Time is running short…

Birds, In the neighborhood, Pastimes

World Series Day

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Sandy Hook Century Run Team 2009

(except for the ones who bailed out before 5 pm.) Note Linda in front in dead bug posture.

We had a fantastic day and ended with 134 species! Wow! What I love about Sandy Hook, and what I guess I missed birding in W. Va. is variety and the chance to witness migration as it happens.

There were Palm Warblers in every beach plum

and Clapper Rails that played hide-and-seek all day long

cooperative Cuckoos

and Yellow Warblers willing to pose

and the most spectacular sunset to end the day.

But there were also flocks of shorebirds, and Blue Jays, and a nice little hawk movement when the fog finally lifted, and Fowler’s Toads calling in the dunes, and Nighthawks, and a Mississippi Kite or two, and night herons taking off from North Pond at dusk…

I could go on and on, but I’m tired enough to be delirious. 16 hours of birding will do that, I think.

In the neighborhood, Snapshots, Wildflowers

First beauty

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“April can be lovely, spangled with bloom and the newest of young leaves. It can be, and usually is, melodied with the voice of song sparrow and robin, redwing and oriole. And the call of the Spring peeper is the very voice of April. But April can also be cold rain, raw wind and, on occasion, snow. The cruelest aspect of April’s tantrums, however, lies in the way it sometimes frosts our hopes and expectations. We want to believe in that myth of gentle April. We want May in April. We are tired of Winter’s cold leftovers. Given a taste of Spring in April, we want a full meal of it.” –Hal Borland

Today was a lovely taste of Spring on an early April day.

Birds, In the neighborhood, Seasons

Things unseen

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I’ve no idea how far I walked in the fog today, but long enough that by the time I was back at the parking lot my hair fell wet in ringlets, sticky with salt. The fog had obliterated any landmarks along the beach and it was only my vague sense that hours had passed that caused me to turn back. This was no sunny, invigorating winter beach; it felt neither wide nor expansive. There was no winking promise of spring in the air, either. White-bellied gulls appeared out of the nothingness ahead and the only sound was that of the waves churning the sand.

The edges of things: the shoreline and the horizon were all so soft with the fog that my camera mostly refused to focus. It was pleasant to imagine nothing beyond the couple hundred feet I was able to see ahead of me. Out of the salty haze I finally spotted what I’d come looking for; back for a week or two, a lone piping plover fed along the wrack line at the very limits of my imagination. The harder I tried to see it, the faster it ran and blended into nothingness.

Poof! Gone.

A couple hundred steps ahead and I’d spot it again for an instant, this time running crosswise to me in the dry sand, blending into a driftwood and clam shell background. In and out of my awareness, I think it must have accompanied me quite far, just out of clear view, a bit of fog drifted sand on still winter-black legs. These birds are hard to spot on a clear day even when they’re running; their markings blend so expertly with drift sticks and sand. I like to meet them for the year on this type of day, for whatever reason, when the hot sun and crowds of a June day seem an impossibility.

Birds, In the neighborhood

Skywards

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“It is a most beautiful spectacle although often difficult for us to observe. After catching a fish, the male gains height as he returns to the nesting area and while still several kilometres away he starts his display. To me the display call is very distinctive; it’s a high-pitched ‘pee-pee-pee-pee…pee’ and if I search the skies I will see him soaring majestically, maybe a thousand feet above, as he moves in sweeping circles closer and closer to the nesting site. He climbs several hundred feet upwards with rapidly beating wings, then hovering briefly, with fanned tail, he performs a breathtaking dive showing the fish grasped in outstretched talons. He pulls out of the dive and powers sky-wards to repeat the performance. All the time his calling can be heard by his mate and finally his last stoop takes him in a long power dive right to the eyrie, where the fish is presented to his mate.”

(Ospreys, by Roy Dennis, Colin Baxter Photography Ltd, 1991, p13)

There’s no sweeter sound in late March than an amorous Osprey, save perhaps, the lonely peeplo calls of Piping Plovers. To those of us who love the shore and its birds and who miss them for the months of their absence, both are enough to bring tears to our eyes.

There was a bit of female rivalry taking place at this northernmost nest on Sandy Hook yesterday. A female interloper repeatedly interrupted the male’s courtship flight… whether to steal the fish he meant to present to his mate below or perhaps to steal him away from her.

😉

Click on the pic for a slightly more satisying view. Can anyone name the channel marker thingy for me?

Birds, In the neighborhood, Pastimes

The worst bird walk ever*

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Is February an easy month to find birds anywhere?

Sandy Hook can be something like a wonderland of waterfowl at this time of year, but today it mostly wasn’t. There were a couple of distant loons, a speck raft of red-breasted mergansers, a long-tailed duck or two, an imaginary harbor seal, a nice flock of faraway snow buntings and great looks at the world’s largest gull.

Yawn.

We did get to see this great big boat heading out to sea though.

Despite the lack of birds, it was a beautiful day to be out, with a hint of spring in the air. Not really, but at least the wind wasn’t quite so biting for a change.

*Post title suggested by our field trip leader