Before and After

 

Scherman Hoffman field, October 2024
(Margo D. Beller)

Same field after a controlled burn in 2017
(Margo D. Beller)

Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. Babies are born, they grow, they become adults and have babies of their own. Places where I used to walk often I don't visit for different reasons.

Years ago, working at a stressful job five days a week where I had to rise long before dawn to catch a train that would get me to my 7 a.m. shift, I would rise before dawn on Saturdays and go birding. One of the places I'd visit was the closest New Jersey Audubon center, one county away. I would take the 8 a.m. bird walk with the then-director or with the then-education director. 

Eventually, I overcame my squeamishness at being part of an organization and became a member. I started volunteering by putting plants in the ground. But soon I decided I'd rather write so I suggested running the center's blog. The then-director liked that idea.

The path to the river trail, one of the few areas that hasn't changed
much except for some erosion. (Margo D. Beller)

I wrote that blog for many years. It allowed me to attend various events such as an owl prowl and a program on the American woodcock. (One woodcock landed about a foot from me after doing its high-altitude mating flight during the group's subsequent night walk.)

Unfortunately, the head guy at the NJ Audubon organization decided that to strengthen the "brand message" all the centers should end their blogs and there would be only one, produced by a company that specializes in hiring freelancers to take press releases and turn them into articles. My blog was summarily obliterated, not even archived.

Luckily, I had kept copies of those posts, some of which I have republished on this blog. 

I was damned mad. I stopped going to Scherman Hoffman. There are plenty of other places for me to visit that are within closer driving distance. I did not renew my membership. The then-director, who said he was sorry I had to go, later retired. So have the people I once worked with for the blog. I even stopped buying my bird seed there.

The Passaic River from the river trail. Across is Morris
County. (Margo D. Beller)

One of the times I took my husband (MH) there was just after a spring controlled burn, done to eliminate the overgrown of invasive weeds and other plants. The 2017 picture above is from that walk.

I've written about the gnats that infested my bird seed. Slowly but surely the pail is getting emptied so I will need more seed. I went back to Scherman Hoffman recently to see if it was still selling seed grown by NJ farmers. Like everything else, it isn't doing that anymore.

As long as I was there I decided to take a sentimental journey and hike the trails again. After all, now I have much more time on my hands and I don't have to rise before dawn on a Saturday to get in my birding. What I found here, as I have also found at another place I once visited more often, the Frelingheuysen Arboretum, is things have changed, and not for the better.

At the arboretum, which is off a road that has become four times busier with traffic seven days a week because of the malls that have gone up where there were once woods, trails have been marked, paths have been blocked, other paths have been created and all have been made more "inclusive." It is too stressful to drive there unless I am going to the county library across the road, which I rarely do.

Autumn colors (Margo D. Beller)

Like the arboretum, the center was created from an estate - actually, two estates. The arboretum is a Morris County (NJ) park. The NJ Audubon center is privately run and depends on what funds it can wrangle from members and other sources. So while there are now many, many more plants providing food and shelter for the birds, the hillside paths have become seriously eroded from flooding rains and thousands of feet. Trees have been planted in some areas but some of the paths have become so rocky I was glad I was going uphill so I could steady myself with my stick and walk against gravity.

A bridge over a brook now has handrails, which is an improvement, but the path along the Passaic River - the border between Somerset and Morris counties - is so filled with tree roots as to be dangerous for someone like me who is not always steady. Another path, once marked "vernal pool" is now a "Pond Trail" named after someone I don't know and who has probably been a NJ Audubon benefactor.

Dogwood (Margo D. Beller)

Even the store where I once got my birdseed and some of my feeders has changed. Where once it was run by one woman - now also retired - it has two part-time managers; one woman who knows birds, another who knows retail. Retail is definitely important, tho the seed is relegated to the garage. High-end optics, however, are front and center.

I guess you can sum up my feelings with the old Yogi Berra-ism: Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded. I suppose it has to be that way for parks to survive. The more people who come, the more they will care about the environment. That's a good thing in the abstract. But for me those "popular" parks, even those with a nice number of birds in season, are not where you'll find me now.

Following New Jersey's Passaic River

This post is based on one that originally ran on August 5, 2015, on the blog of New Jersey Audubon's Scherman Hoffman sanctuary. The NJA blog was significantly overhauled since then and the archives were deleted. However, I was able to keep a copy so this can again see the light of day.

Recently, MH and I went to the Great Swamp. It is spring, and I wanted to see what might've been hanging around. I also wanted to get MH out and walking. I took him to a 0.6 mile loop toward the back of the property where the education center named for Helen Fenske is located. (Fenske led the call to keep the area a swamp rather than turn it into the New York metro area's fourth major airport.) This trail was flat and cindered so he could walk it easily.

Passaic River, Bernardsville, NJ, not far from the source. (Margo D. Beller)

I have been on it before and usually take the left fork. With MH we went right, and almost immediately were on the banks of the Passaic River, the natural border between Morris County, where we stood, and Somerset County on the other side.

While I scanned the banks for birds, MH voiced his amazement. "I never knew this was so close to the Fenske Center," he said. "I've lived in New Jersey almost all my life and never knew this was here." MH's nickname is Mr. Map because he uses (and collects) maps and is rarely ever lost, so finding a river someplace unexpected really threw him.

This happened once before, when I wrote a post for the NJ Audubon blog on the Passaic River. One of the Scherman Hoffman sanctuary trails goes along the river. One autumn day, driving to the place, I saw the river through the trees. When I got home I pulled out one of MH's detailed maps and realized that when I passed Liddell's Pond, I was passing the source. I showed MH the map and he was amazed. "I never knew that was the source," he said.

We both learned a lot from the post, as you'll see below:

Every river, even the mighty Mississippi, starts small. Water bubbles to the surface from underground and gravity brings it downhill. As it rains, the waters rise, the flow increases and brooks and streams are created. They feed larger water forms that have become rivers.

Before highways took us from Point A to B, New Jersey and the other original 13 colonies were wooded wilderness. It was hard traveling over the land so people and their goods got from one town to the other via river. If you remove the highways from a map of New Jersey and look at where the state's original towns were located, the importance of rivers becomes more obvious.

For a small state, there are many rivers, among them the Delaware on the state's western coast, the Hudson on the east and, within, the Raritan and the Hackensack.

What these rivers have in common, besides their importance in trade and transportation, is they are natural borders between states and counties.

The border between New Jersey's Morris and Somerset counties is the Passaic River. "Passaic," if you believe Wikipedia, is from the Lenape word "pahsayèk," which has been variously attributed to mean "valley" or "place where the land splits." There are many sources where you can learn more about the river's history, starting with the formation about 11,000 years ago of the Ice Age's Glacial Lake Passaic.

At 80 to 90 miles (depending on which source you use), the Passaic is one of the the longest rivers in New Jersey, starting in Mendham, Morris County, and ending up the much larger river that drops in a giant waterfall at Paterson and flows by Newark before emptying into New York Bay.

The river is very noticeable if you are walking Scherman's yellow-blazed River trail. At this point the Passaic is about the size of a large brook and filled with rocks. Water draws bugs, and the Passaic is no exception. Birders put up with this because bugs draw the birds that feed on them. The movement of the river draws flycatching phoebes and the Louisiana waterthrush, which have nested at Scherman for years.

Passaic River plants (Margo D. Beller)

The river ecosystem encourages such plants as trout lily, Canada mayflower, cinnamon ferns and skunk cabbage, one of the first plants to grow in spring. Rivers are a source of life.

I've heard the distinctive rattling of a belted kingfisher flying back and forth along the river looking for fish. The river provides birds and other creatures a place to bathe and feed. Families come to Scherman's part of the Passaic to sit on the shore and cool off during a hot summer day.

The part of the Passaic at Scherman is clean water. But the part at the Newark end is not and its tortured industrial history reminds us rivers can be killed quickly.

Many of suburban New Jersey's rivers are threatened by too many suburban houses and homeowners who over-treat their lawns with chemicals that not only kill beneficial insects but run off in heavy rains into storm sewers and from there to rivers.

That's nothing compared to the lower Passaic. If the upper Passaic is Dr. Jekyll, the lower Passaic is Mr. Hyde.

It has been a major chemical dumping ground for decades, filled with toxins that have hurt people living downriver. Paterson, for instance, was once known as the Silk City because of its mills. That was a long time ago. More recently it has been a byword for crime, urban decay and, thanks to its many now-closed factories, the creator of the "toilet river" that was the Passaic.

As a 2009 New York Times article put it: "The Passaic begins in the clear trout streams of rural Morris County, provides drinking water to 3.5 million New Jersey residents, reaches a peak at the Great Falls of Paterson and then devolves at the end of 80 increasingly foul and dispiriting miles into a dark, malodorous industrial sink."

Six years later I wouldn't eat any fish caught in Paterson.

(Margo D. Beller)

If you go to Scherman Hoffman to hike the trails you are what has become known as an ecotourist. It is a big business in some parts of the world. Towns in New Jersey have been catching up to the concept. The people running the cities and towns along the Passaic, whose people got sick from the chemicals in their air and water, have been literally trying to clean up their act, promoting ecotourism opportunities such as fishing, kayaking, and in the case of Paterson visiting the Great Falls, which only recently became a federal park.

Environmental groups have used the river as a teaching aid. The Hackensack Riverkeeper, for instance, within the last few years has run an ecotour that takes people up the urban end of the Passaic. As with their trips up the Hackensack - another river trying to recover from nearly being killed by industrial pollutants dumped into the Meadowlands marshes - the idea is to show the importance of the river and and how fragile the river's health is still.

Things are slowly improving for the lower Passaic, despite the long time it takes to get a polluting company to pay for river cleanup and government inefficiency.

At the upper Passaic, along the Scherman Hoffman River Trail, we don't have that problem -- at least not yet. It is easy to forget the clean, Dr. Jekyll, suburban one and the polluted, Mr. Hyde, urban one are the same river. But it is connected. The upper Passaic is healthy because its headwaters are not in an industrial area. But it wouldn't take much - say a farm sold to developers who build a massive condo development in a watershed, as many would like to do in the New Jersey Highlands - to do a lot of harm.

Rivers are fragile and their health shouldn't be taken for granted.