Strange paradise 4/1/11

Back on May 27, 2012, I rather stupidly deleted the links of many of my older posts -- not understanding why the headlines of the posts were hyperlinked. I've learned a lot since then, such as linking and spacing and captions. 

But when I was trying to find an older post for a newer one, I realized it was time to start republishing the lost posts, and restore the links.  I will be doing this over the next few days, but I am starting with some of the oldest ones.

I took a commuter train to work at jobs in New York City and then Jersey City almost every weekday for 10 years before I noticed the Meadowlands.

Unlike Central Park, this is no man-made wilderness but until the last decade or so it was a man-made disaster. Towns dumped their garbage. Industrial complexes dumped toxic chemicals in the Hacksensack River and the many small creeks. The tallest point, known by some as Snake Hill, was shaved down, as you can see in this photo my husband took. It was a mess.

New Jersey Transit tracks plow through a section of it once it leaves Newark. When I took the train in I read the newspaper. Coming home I read a book or slept.
One afternoon when we passed through the Meadowlands I happened to put down my book and looked out the window to my right. In a tree over a canal was a redtailed hawk. I was stunned. A redtail? Here?

What had I been missing all this time?

Quite a lot, I learned. Since then I always put the paper or book down when we go through this little slice of the Meadowlands and have been rewarded by seeing, among many others, greenwinged teals, shoveler ducks, great and snowy egrets, great blue herons, redtails, assorted sandpipers, osprey and, thanks to the train going very slowly, a least bittern.

You haven't lived until a harrier is flying parallel to your train at the same speed, at eye level.


Robert Sullivan published an excellent book in 1998, "The Meadowlands," about the area's history and the fight to clean it up, bringing back the fish and frogs that in turn drew the birds. Bill Sheehan, the Hackensack Riverkeeper, and his group (www.hackensackriverkeeper.org/) have been working hard to keep the area from further abuse - suing companies found dumping, running eco-tours to highlight the area's beauty. (I've taken one; they're great.)

In Lyndhurst, the Richard W. DeKorte park, part of the NJ Meadowlands Commission, was carved out of several dumping sites, It provides a large, liquid rest stop for migrating waterfowl and shorebirds next to a gas pipeline while raptors, including roughlegged hawks and bald eagles, cruise over the aptly-named Disposal Road. (You can check sightings on the park blog, http://meadowblog.typepad.com/.)

Sometimes it pays to put down the newspaper (or the BlackBerry) and connect with the world around you.

A bird in the bush 3/24/11

Back on May 27, 2012, I rather stupidly deleted the links of many of my older posts -- not understanding why the headlines of the posts were hyperlinked. I've learned a lot since then, such as linking and spacing and captions. 

But when I was trying to find an older post for a newer one, I realized it was time to start republishing the lost posts, and restore the links.  I will be doing this over the next few days, but I am starting with some of the oldest ones.

When Marie Winn wrote about the redtailed hawk nicknamed Pale Male in "Red-Tails In Love" she showcased birding in Central Park, a place that was coming through bad times along with the City of New York.

Central Park couldn't have had better press agents than Marie Winn and Pale Male.


When I got her book from the library I discovered almanac data in the back - what birds have been reported at particular times of year, for instance - and maps of the park. Maps were the key to getting me, and particularly my husband (MH, for short), into the park. I bought the book in paperback and one day MH and I came in from NJ to bird Central Park.

It is a big park, stretching from 59th Street north to 110th Street and from Fifth Ave. on the east to Eighth Ave. on the west. You can walk in anywhere and immediately get lost unless you can keep the tops of the old apartment towers in sight (and sometimes you get lost anyway).
Despite its natural beauty, every single thing in the park - the trees, the rocks, the flowers - were trucked in and placed as per the design of Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux.

About the only things not placed there by man are the birds passing through, drawn by an island of green in the middle of the concrete city after a long flight. Most of those flights are by night, but some birds fly by day. One time MH and I were walking south on 6th Ave. as night was coming on and a black-crowned night-heron was flying north on 6th Ave., obviously headed for some body of water within the park.

We've also found oddities, such as this male wood duck I photographed swimming with the mallards at the Pond in the southern end of the park. Two males spent this past winter here, even when much of the water was iced over.

Marie's book also identified the places where warblers could be found within the wooded area known as the Ramble.

Warblers are a post unto themselves. In spring they flit in the highest parts of the leafing trees or skulk under bushes. Many are brightly colored, having yellow somewhere, and the males look distinctly different from females (not the case in the fall, which presents its own identification challenges).

Warblers bring out the birders in droves, particularly in Central Park. When an unusual warbler shows up in the park, that number goes up exponentially.
A few years ago one of those vistors was a bright yellow bird with a big dark eye and solid gray wings, a prothonotary warbler. When we were in Florida we saw them in the swamps as often as we see white-breasted nuthatches in the backyard. In Central Park it was a big deal.

I don't fly across the country when a rarity is seen but if I am in the area anyway, I'll check it out. A warm spring weekend day was my excuse for the prothonotary.
This one had been seen along the western shore of a body of water known as the Lake, which one passes on the way to one of the entrances to the Ramble. The prothonotary was seen. It was sorta seen. It had just been missed, according to the birding lists. A little golden needle in a big green haystack.

So we weren't expecting much, being new birders. We walked along the water's edge and down to one of the rustic benches. We looked to the north and suddenly the bird flew out of the bushes on the shoreline and onto a rock jutting into the water, almost daring us to take a picture. Of course we had no cameras with us (or even a cellphone with a camera).

Wow, that was easy, MH said. Are they all that easy?

As we now know, no way. But I admit to some pleasure that day when another birder rushed up while we were birding in the Ramble and asked if we'd seen the prothonotary, rushing away when we said we had, and where. He'd sought it for hours. We saw it in minutes.

Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.

I have a little list 3/20/11

Back on May 27, 2012, I rather stupidly deleted the links of many of my older posts -- not understanding why the headlines of the posts were hyperlinked. I've learned a lot since then, such as linking and spacing and captions. 

But when I was trying to find an older post for a newer one, I realized it was time to start republishing the lost posts, and restore the links.  I will be doing this over the next few days, but I am starting with some of the oldest ones.

When I was growing up in Brooklyn and then living in Queens with my husband, New York's Central Park did not have a good reputation - muggers behind every tree, bicyclists and wallets stolen at gunpoint, homeless men and women sleeping (and doing lord knows what else) on park benches.

That was particularly bad in the 1980s when the city had devastating fiscal problems and police couldn't keep up with simple crime like graffiti on subway cars, much less murder.

Things changed as the economy improved and, for better or worse, Rudy Giuliani became mayor in the early 1990s on a platform of, among other things, fighting crime and encouraging tourism. More police were hired and hit the streets as well as Central Park and, slowly, more people started to feel safe going in there.

In the late 1990s, a Wall Street Journal reporter named Marie Winn collected her writings about a particularly light redtailed hawk who'd improbably made a nest on an upper 5th Avenue building facade facing Central Park. The book was "Red-Tails In Love." It not only put the focus on the redtail nicknamed Pale Male (inspiring two movies and at least one song, by Steve Earle) but on Central Park in general and the birders who'd never stopped going there even during the bad times in particular.

I have never met Marie Winn but she is a wonderful email correspondent. Thanks to her website, http://mariewin.server304.com/index.htm, you can find Central Park nature notes and information about Pale Male's story and her other books.

But what I found most valuable about her site when I first went to it was her publicizing the New York City Bird Report. Unfortunately, the site no longer posts active sightings and is now a historical database. But between 2003 and 2007 it told you what visiting birds were in different New York City parks every day. 

A correspondent to this list was Tom Fiore, also featured in Marie's book, whose detailed reports were a major reason I (and no doubt others) started birding Central Park more often.

When nycbirdreport.com ended active reporting, Marie mentioned other interesting sites including ebirdsnyc (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebirdsnyc/) and the NY Birding List, part of www.birdingonthe.net, a service that provides lists of bird sightings by state and by rarity.

One recent mention on the New Jersey list, for instance, sent hundreds of birders from across the state and beyond to a small private lake in Washington Township (Bergen County), NJ, for a sight of a rare pinkfooted goose. Based on subsequent list comments, township residents didn't know what hit them when the birders flew into town. Such is the power of the list.

I enjoy reading the lists, and those who wish to subscribe can post their own sightings and comments. These list services are great when you want to bird beyond your backyard, so check them out.

It started with a woodpecker... 3/17/11

This was my first post. Back on May 27, 2012, I rather stupidly deleted the links of many of my older posts -- not understanding why the headlines of the posts were hyperlinked. I've learned a lot since then, such as linking, pictures, spacing and captions. 

But when I was trying to find an older post for a newer one, I realized it was time to start republishing the lost posts, and restore the links.  I will be doing this over the next few days, but I am starting with some of the oldest ones.



Most likely it was a downy, like this one, but the first entry in my first bird notebook only says "woodpecker." We'd gotten the house-type feeder in the picture above from a relative a month or so before and, after buying some millet, put it in an apple tree outside our screened porch and waited to see what would happen.

First came that woodpecker and then a little gray bird with a crest. Looking it up, I learned to identify the tufted titmouse. That was over a decade ago.

After the birds came the books - we already had Peterson and a Reader's Digest book I called the "idiot's guide" for its simplicity covering the broad swath of nature. Then came, among others, Kaufman, Sibley, Stokes. The more books we got, the more I wanted to see the birds in them. We started buying more feeders, including the suet feeder that drew the downy in the picture. I stopped using millet and started using sunflower seeds. More birds came. I was hooked.

So what started with a woodpecker in the backyard has grown into a fascination with birds across the US. The areas I know best are New York and New Jersey where I've lived and worked, and New England where my husband's family lives. Little by little we have visited different regions including coastal and interior North Carolina and the Florida gulf coast town of Apalachicola and nearby St. George's island. When I visited California for a family party I added 10 new birds just at one place, Ballona Creek at Playa del Rey.

But birding for me is not about numbers, it is about seeing something new and unexpected. A large form in a tree along a highway that turns out to be a redtailed hawk. A bird flying low over a marsh you suddenly realize is a short-eared owl. Your first male bluebird in spring. This is why I enjoy birding, although sometimes the chase makes a fine story.

So as time goes on I'll be writing about the birds, places and what I hope will be interesting stuff. I hope you come along for the ride.

Leave the Woods the Hell Alone

Is there any reason people can't leave the woods alone? Is there a reason why you can't have a park without some sort of "attraction" that defaces a natural area?

Red-tailed hawk (Margo D. Beller)

In a word, no.

Last winter the area at the end of Greystone's Reservoir Rd., where the old ice ponds are, was opened as a park. The ponds drew ducks (ring-necked ducks and hooded mergansers) and the path around the lower pond was pleasant. A trail heading up a hill into the woods provided us access to the upper pond, where there were wood ducks. It was nice to walk in silence except for the occasional scream of a red-tailed hawk aloft. 

Those days are gone. 

MH and I took a walk at this area for the first time in a long time last week. We expected the people fishing - we'd seen them the last time and the county stocks the ponds with trout - but while we were walking an orange Frisbee suddenly wizzed by us and hit a tree. It turns out, there is a "disk golf" course in the works.

Disc golf (Margo D. Beller)

 

Frisbee golf tee area (Margo D. Beller)

Path to the next hole (Margo D. Beller)

The goal - get the disc into the basket. (Margo D. Beller)

This was not our first exposure to using a Frisbee to play "golf" or I'd have been completely confused. We found such a course at a Tyler State Park in Pennsylvania, which had been recommended to me (as a place to find birds) by a friend. Here, too, we were walking along and suddenly a Frisbee went sailing by us. But the Greystone course had no signs warning us of a course (except a small sign with an arrow to the first tee, as shown above). The guy throwing the Frisbee turned out to be one of the people readying the course. Up the hill we found the map of the course. 

The first announcement of this course came this morning from my town's local alert:

 NEW DISC GOLF COURSE TO OPEN AT CENTRAL PARK ON AUGUST 10TH. 

A new recreation activity has been added to the Central Park of Morris County for those of all ages to enjoy.   Beginning Sunday, August 10th, Disc Golf (or frisbee golf) comes to Central Park!   Come out for a fun-filled day beginning with an opening ceremony at 9am followed by a round of disc golf starting at 10am.  There will be awards for various divisions (Pro, Amateur, Recreation, and Ladies).   The event is $15 per player and comes with a custom Opening Day stamped disc.   No pre-registration required, please come out and support the newest addition to Central Park!  Also, for those interested in course news or are looking to become part of the local club please see the course Facebook page.

If you go to the Facebook page you find a list of things that have to be done before the course is officially open:

Hole 2 Weed whack right side beyond log
Hole 3 Needs logs moved from in front of gap 

Hole 7 trimming on left in chute off the tee
Hole 9 Trimming on landing zone.
13and 14 gravel and stone dust for tees.--Russ
Hole 16 Stairs needed up to basket. - future project?
Hole 17 Needs the most work! long tee needs clearing and the green needs more brush removal and whacking.

MH reminds me that if you want to have a park nowadays, you have to bring in some sort of facility to draw people and make it "worth it." So you have the sorry situation where New Jersey Audubon's Scherman Hoffman sanctuary and the Griggstown Grasslands protected area allow "geocaching," the high-tech treasure hunt played with your cellphone. There is a geo-caching association. There is also a Frisbee golf association. There is a professional league.

Greystone used to be a state mental hospital. When the hospital was closed down and moved to be re-opened as a smaller, more modern facility, the bulk of the land became a county park. The old stone wards were pulled down. A dog park went in at one area. Ball fields and a rink were put up elsewhere. Woods were mowed down to become a huge complex of soccer fields.  

Greystone soccer field in progress (Margo D. Beller)

A cross-country running course was put in. Until a smaller trail was put into a corner of the property, this was the only place where someone like me could go hiking aside from the main Central Ave., the road that runs from my town to the front steps of the old administration building, Kirkbride (currently the focus of a preservation battle).

Had this not been put in, the land would likely have become a housing development, to the detriment to the surrounding communities.

Is this the only choice we have now for open land, a housing development or ballfields and Frisbee golf?

No. There are areas near me where there is no geocaching or disk golf or ballfields. They are called wildlife management areas and wildlife natural areas. WMAs allow hunting, WNAs do not. But the woods are left alone.

Elsewhere, the woods are routinely mowed down for shopping centers and housing. The local governments that depend on these for property taxes (because they can't justify anymore taxes on New Jerseyians, with the highest taxes in America) call this "development." I call it appalling.

Leave the woods the hell alone.  

Hiking trail before the disc golf course was created. (Margo D. Beller)

A Visit From Mr. Toad

I had an unexpected visitor today, Independence Day, and he showed up in an unexpected way.

As I wrote last time, once in a while it's a real education to look down instead of up when you are outdoors. There are snakes, dragonflies and, depending on the habitat, frogs and toads. As a birdwatcher, I usually ignore these creatures when I am out hiking, but thanks to MH's enthusiasm and pictures I have been making an effort to study other winged wonders and more terrestrial animals.

Today's lesson was literally in my own backyard.

Over the years MH and I have spooked American toads from the long grass in the backyard as we used the mower, so we know they are around -- at least in those lawns, like ours, where pesticides are not used and the grass is allowed to stay a little longer to protect the roots from summer's heat.

American toad, July 4, 2014 (R.E.Berg-Andersson)

Yes, there is a price to pay for that lush, uniform, green lawn. Chemicals don't discriminate between grubs and beneficial insects or the toads that feed on them. Lawn services, when not cutting the grass down to the nibs whether it needs it or not and disturbing the morning peace with their gas-powered equipment, dump chemicals to kill the weeds and grubs that could mar that uniform appearance. The homeowner then waters - and waters - the grass, only to have the lawn service whack it down again a few days later.

It gives the homeowner something to look at with pride, a vast sea of green -- or a kind of moat that, to some, separates you (at least psychologically) from your neighbors.

But we who keep the grass longer and who let the clippings fall where they may to decay and nourish the lawn, have greener grass and don't need chemicals aside from the occasional dose of grass food. That means bees at the clover, for instance, or the occasional toad in the grass.

And yet, my visitor was not found on the lawn but in my composter.

I'm guessing Mr. Toad -- the name of one of my favorite characters from one of my favorite books, "The Wind in the Willows" --  was looking for a cool, relatively dry place to get out of the heat, humidity and intense thunderstorms that have been plaguing New Jersey this week.

The weather has been so hot, so humid, so abnormal to me that when I could get outside to look at my garden (only early in the day) I discovered mid- and late-summer plants all getting ready to bloom at the same time! Same with my early- and mid-season peppers.

In a life that seems to be getting faster all the time these heightened conditions - this global warming, if you will - is speeding up summer, too.

So if you are a toad and you are faced with heat and too much water to survive, what do you do? You take shelter. And thanks to my having moved what had been in my composter to my corner compost pile for the summer, the composter was lighter than usual and Mr. Toad (I'm guessing) squeezed through the tiny space created by the composter not sitting completely flat on the patio tiles -- all the more remarkable because this was the largest toad I've ever seen, in my yard or in the wild.

So today, doing chores on my day off, I was moving things around on the patio, including the composter. And out popped Mr. Toad.

He was not happy. He hopped into a corner, where MH took his picture. He sat there a long time. Every so often I would come out and he'd be in the same place but had shifted his position. Finally, I came out and he was gone...but not too far. It looked like he was trying to get back under the composter!

I tried to pick him up with my shovel but he hopped away and finally went behind the deer netting and into my back shade garden. He'll be OK there although I doubt he'll stay long. No animal wants to be stuck behind deer netting. His instinct will be to hide beneath the composter again or move back to the yard and be further away from where I might find him...at least until the next time MH or I mow the grass.

Come winter, when I stop walking across the yard to my corner compost pile and use the closer patio composter, I will lift it up first to make sure Mr. Toad has moved on.

Other Winged Wonders

American toad (Margo D. Beller)

Over the years I have so trained myself to listen for songs and spot movement in trees for birds that I miss many other life forms.

Besides handling the camera while I spot things with my binoculars, MH is also very good at pointing out what he sees at eye level or on the ground while I'm busy scanning the skies.

So it is thanks to him I have learned about such dragonflies as twelve-spotted skimmers and common whitetails as well as the American and Woodhouse's toads.

Great spangled fritillary (RE Berg-Andersson)

I can't say I've been completely oblivious. When I look at pretty flowers I can't help but notice the various types of butterflies on them, even if I can't identify many of them. But just as I do with birds I can't identify, MH looks into one of his many references and usually can identify the creature.

Praying mantis (Margo D. Beller)

I also notice the praying mantis, which is a beneficial albeit scary-looking insect, especially when it is flying right at you. I can't say the same about the periodical cicadas that came out in huge swarms last year for the first time in 17 years, its usual cycle, and which have no benefit I can discern.

Periodical cicada (Margo D. Beller)

Kids are very good at finding snakes, frogs and bugs because they are closer to the ground, I think. Usually, these kinds of animals are more interesting to kids than a bird. Maybe it's the "ick" factor, or being able just to see (or photograph) them than a bird moving in a tree.

Wooly bear (R.E.Berg-Andersson)

When I go to the Great Swamp to look for birds, people along the boardwalks are looking down for bull frogs and snakes. On one morning bird hike at Scherman Hoffman, one of the younger members of our group looked down instead of up at the bird the rest of us were watching and found a female wood turtle, a threatened species in New Jersey.

So I have tried to look at more winged wonders at ground level.

Female widow skimmer (Margo D. Beller)

Just the other day I was looking at a wild rose bush that was overgrown with creeper vines and realized I was looking at a striking insect that I photographed and then showed MH, who got out his reference book and discovered it to be the female widow skimmer.

We have gone to the Pinelands and found frogs and insects we've seen nowhere else, and dragonflies and darners in brilliant shades of red, green and blue. We still don't know what that red one was but it was huge.
 
We also can't identify this scary-looking object, which I missed as we hiked and MH, as usual, noticed. It blended in very well with the tree it was on. Just after MH took its picture it came straight at him and then flew off. Perhaps it had a nest nearby.

Mystery insect (RE Berg-Andersson)

As well it should. Survival is key in any creature's life, winged or otherwise. It has to survive to create another generation to perpetuate the species. And the insect world has been enormously successful. As MH reminds me, dragonflies and other insects have been around as species longer than we have.