A barn owl hatched in captivity in 2008 is among the residents at Woodford Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge in Medford. (Photo: File photo, Courier Post)
The Conserve Wildlife Foundation invites high schools students from across the state to submit an original social media campaign showing the importance of protecting rare wildlife in New Jersey. The “Species on the Edge 2.0” contest is in its fifth year and sponsored by the PSEG Foundation.
Do you have a teen who loves animals and getting out in nature?
You might want to encourage him or her to spend more time on the phone — at least for one specific project.
The Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey is inviting high school students from across the state to participate in a social-media contest to win scholarship money.
The “Species on the Edge 2.0” Social Media Contest encourages teens to leverage their digital knowledge for the chance to win prizes.
To the trained eye, it was clear Kevin Courts and Michael Riff were illegal terrapin harvesters.
The Hatboro, Pennsylvania, men, one shirtless, were parked next to a marsh off Sea Isle Boulevard last July, with six nets and a long pole leaning against their green truck, the state said. A conservation officer who approached them spotted a turtle crawling under the driver’s side seat and found a cooler packed with hatchlings.
Support New Jersey’s ospreys with donations matching a $12,500 challenge to help Conserve Wildlife Foundation purchase a boat.
by Ben Wurst, Habitat Program Manager
Surveying a nest on Long Beach Island in 2017, the last year we were able to utilize a state owned boat. photo by Northside Jim.
Ospreys are living barometers. They symbolize the resilience of life along the New Jersey coast. As a top tier predator who feeds exclusively on fish, their collective health is a direct link to the health of our coastal waters. Anyone can tell you that a healthy coast is essential to life at the shore. Clean water with abundant and healthy wildlife equals a booming shore economy. We have all benefited from actions and policy that have protected our air, land and water since the 1970s. Ospreys are no exception.
Banding osprey nestlings with red auxiliary bands at a nest off LBI. photo by Northside Jim.
If you live along or visit the coast, then it’s no surprise that ospreys continue to thrive in New Jersey. 2018 was yet another banner year for these coastal nesting raptors. Their large stick nests depict our rivers and estuaries while they indicate that we’re doing a good job of protecting our local environment along the coast. Today we’ve published results from last year’s nesting season in the 2018 New Jersey Osprey Project Report.
The Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ in partnership with the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife, Endangered and Nongame Species Program, has released the 2018 NJ Bald Eagle Project Report.
“Two hundred-four nest sites were monitored during the nesting season, of which 185 were documented to be active (with eggs) and 19 were territorial or housekeeping pairs. Thirty new eagle pairs were found this season, 20 in the south, nine in central and one in the north. One hundred-twenty-one nests (66%) of the 182 known-outcome nests produced 172 young, for a productivity rate of 0.94 young per active/known-outcome nest. The failure rate was well above average with 61 nests (33%) failing to produce. The Delaware Bay region remained the state’s eagle stronghold, with roughly half of nests located in Cumberland and Salem counties and the bayside of Cape May County.”
The number of active nests has increased while the number of young eagles fledged has decreased since a high of 216 young fledged in 2016. During the 2018 eagle nesting season there was an abundance of cold, wet, windy and snowy weather which was the cause for a portion of the nest failures. As the eagle population increases, there are more eagles competing for territories. This can also be a contributing factor in nest failures. NJ is still in the range of 0.9 to 1.1 young per nest which is needed for population maintenance with a productivity rate of 0.94 young per known-outcome/active nest in 2018. The 2018 NJ Eagle Project Report has all the details on the project including telemetry, re-sightings and recoveries.
The success of the eagle project is due to the tremendous dedication of the NJ Eagle Project Volunteers. They monitor the nests in all types of conditions and education people about the eagles with enthusiasm.
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.
Lead poisoning continues to be a serious issue affecting Bald Eagles today. CWF and ENSP biologists produced a brochure to educate hunters about this issue and ask for their help. Below is an excerpt from the brochure. Please view the entire brochure and pass along to anyone you know who is a hunter.
One person can make a difference!
Thank you.
Eagle with lead poisoning at Tri-State Bird Rescue@Erica Miller
“Bald Eagles have made an amazing recovery in NJ since the 1980s. Today the eagle population still faces challenges and one of those is lead poisoning. Lead in the environment is dangerous to eagles as well as humans, and is often deadly. Unintentional poisoning of eagles can occur when they scavenge gut piles from deer or other game species shot with lead ammunition. It takes just a tiny fragment of lead to sicken and kill an eagle. Each year avian rehabilitators receive eagles that are diagnosed with lead poisoning and most will die. There is no good treatment for lead poisoning.”
On a brisk November morning, a couple dedicated NJ Osprey Project volunteers joined myself and CWF Biologist Larissa Smith to install an osprey platform on the coastal saltmarsh of New Jersey. The new platform was installed to replace a very old and unstable platform that fell this summer. The new structure is more than twice the size of the old one and will give the nesting pair, who return in the spring, a much more resilient nest site. As you can see from the video above, it takes a bit of strength to raise up a 16′ tall wood nest platform. We decided to slow it down when WCC Volunteer, Wayne R. gives it a final push. Continue reading “Video from the Field: Osprey Platform Install”
That’s the main takeaway from a new report released earlier this week. The 2018 edition of the Living Planet Report, published by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, found that the population size of some of the world’s vertebrate species had shrunk by 60 percent between 1970 and 2014.
Though tropical species have suffered the most, according to the report, the rash of wildlife decline hits home in the Garden State.
“It mirrors what we see in New Jersey,” said David Wheeler, the executive director of the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey.
