Photo from the Field
Tag: volunteer
Delaware Bay’s Stranded Horseshoe Crabs Saved by Volunteer Effort
by Stephanie Feigin, CWF Program Coordinator
This marks the third story in Shorebird Week! Our first blog post, on Tuesday, introduced the film “A Race Against Time” and directed you to a free viewing of the film on our website. Our second blog post, highlighted an incredible news story about a resighting of the iconic Red knot B95 on the Delaware Bay! And today’s blog post, will highlight volunteers incredible effort to save stranded horseshoe crabs!
This story illustrates the incredible efforts of volunteers for Conserve Wildlife Foundation and other conservation groups to save the stranded horseshoe crabs on Delaware Bay beaches. Horseshoe crabs can easily be flipped onto their backs by incoming tides, and they are not able to right themselves on their own. They also get trapped easily by tides and man-made obstacles, such as debris, which leaves them unable to return to the water leaving them to eventually die.
Return the Favor, a multi-group effort, has committed to rescuing as many horseshoe crabs as possible from South Jersey’s Delaware Bay beaches by regularly combing designated stretches of beach and helping to flip the crabs back on their bellies and redirect them back to the water. If possible these volunteers go out daily and rescue all of the flipped or impinged crabs. These efforts have been very successful so far, and they hope to continue these efforts and engage more about who want to volunteer.
- To read this full news article click here
- More information on how you can become a volunteer can be found on their website at www.ReturnTheFavorNJ.org.
And make sure to check out the film “A Race Against Time” which highlights CWF’s efforts to restore the Delaware Bay Shore beaches as well!
Terrapins and tires don’t mix!
Get college credit and help protect terrapins!
by Ben Wurst, Habitat Program Manager
Since 2010, Conserve Wildlife Foundation (CWF) has been engaged in the conservation of northern diamondback terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin terrapin) in the Little Egg Harbor area. This year, CWF seeks to continue to protect terrapins through additional conservation and education initiatives that include the installation and maintenance of barrier fencing, road patrols on Great Bay Blvd., and the continuation of this student internship. This year we are attempting to replicate a study conducted in 2004 on the same road, and results will help us to better determine how effective our conservation measures have been.
Interns will conduct field work in the lower Barnegat Bay watershed including hourly road patrols on Great Bay Blvd., volunteer steward scheduling and management, educational related activities, and the best part – save hundreds of female terrapins from becoming road kill!
Currently this is a volunteer student internship, but there is an opportunity for this to be a paid internship through the Barnegat Bay Student Grant Program. Willing students must develop a scientific research project to qualify for the grant. The deadline to apply is April 4th.
2014 NJ Bald Eagle Nesting Season Has Begun
by: Larissa Smith; Wildlife Biologist/Volunteer Manager
Eight pairs of NJ eagles are currently incubating (sitting on eggs). The earliest pair to start incubating was confirmed on January 12th, so the birds been keeping the eggs warm throughout the snow and cold weather. Eagle Project volunteers report that pairs all over the state are busy working on their nests in preparation for egg laying.
Want to see eagles and other raptors and learn all about them? The Cumberland County Winter Eagle Festival is February 8th, 2014.
The following photos were taken by Eagle Project Volunteer Tom McKelvey.
Photo From the Field
by Larissa Smith, Wildlife Biologist/Volunteer Manager
Eagle Project Volunteer Tom McKelvey captured this photo of one of the juveniles that fledged from the Shark River eagle nest in mid-June. So far this nesting season 157 young eagles have fledged from NJ nests. The juveniles will remain in the nest area for the next few months while they develop their flight and hunting skills.
Shorebirds, Horseshoe Crabs and Stewards…
together on the Delaware Bay
by Larissa Smith, Wildlife Biologist/Volunteer Coordinator
Once again migratory shorebirds, including the NJ endangered red knot, have returned to the Delaware Bay to feed on horseshoe crab eggs. This annual phenomenon brings people from around the world to the Delaware Bay beaches.
Beaches are closed during the migration from May 7th through June 7th to protect the shorebirds from disturbance when feeding. Just as the birds return each year so do volunteer Shorebird Stewards who educate the public about the beach closures , shorebirds and horseshoe crabs on nine beaches in Cape May and Cumberland County. Now is a great to come out to the beaches to view shorebirds and crabs and say “hi” to the stewards.
This year the hot spots for shorebirds in Cape May County are Reed’s , Cook’s and Kimble’s Beaches and Fortescue in Cumberland County.
Morning After Migration
POST #4 ON THE 2013 AMPHIBIAN MIGRATION
by MacKenzie Hall, Amphibian Crossing Project Coordinator
Easter Sunday is a celebration of rebirth, resurrection, springtime, life. And this Easter Sunday – right on cue – a warm day turned into a mild night, the mild night met with rain, and together they gave rise to lots and lots of life. The amphibian migration was underway…in a big way!
Our teams were ready. Despite heavy bellies and a long day with family, at least 50 trained volunteers came out to “guard” the animals at road-crossing hot spots. From nightfall to around 11:00 pm we escorted, ferried, and tallied more than 3,000 salamanders and frogs across! (Numbers are still coming in from other teams.)
It was a heart-pounding pace, often with multiple animals entering the roadway at once. They didn’t seem to understand the danger, but we humans were darting in and out, racing against car tires and grabbing up slippery critters as fast as slippery critters can be grabbed…while still being safe, orderly, and polite to passing motorists. A lot of drivers stopped to see what all the speed-walking was about. One woman said “God bless!” when I showed her a fat female spotted salamander and told her about the migration. Another guy must have been a local because he just asked “how many tonight?”
Everyone had an exhilarating night – the kind of migration night we plan for but don’t often get. It was a lot of fun and we saved a lot of lives. From the vehicle count, most of those little animals wouldn’t have stood a chance. A few still didn’t.
Before heading home from the site where I was working, I took a midnight stroll down to the vernal pool. It’s so neat to watch salamanders swimming around. Especially the big spotted salamanders. They spend almost their entire year underground in the woods, yet they are graceful and natural in the water. They even look excited to be there, swirling around each other in contest and attraction. I felt lucky to know about this wonderful thing. It felt great to have made some of it possible. Look at those gorgeous animals! And their impossibly bright yellow spots! They are colors lost in the night, but not by our watchful lights.
Morning After Migration
POST #3 ON THE 2013 AMPHIBIAN MIGRATION
by MacKenzie Hall, Amphibian Crossing Project Coordinator
Following Monday’s all-night amphibian foray – and the prolonged terror/adrenaline rush of playing real-life Frogger – I drove home through a rainy sunrise on Tuesday. According to a weather app on my phone, the rain would keep falling all day and end (wouldn’t you know) right around sunset. “You gotta be kidding me,” I think is what I slurred.
Warm nighttime rain is the simple cue for mass movement, like what we had before dawn that day. But nature is seldom that simple, so the task of monitoring an amphibian migration can get hairy. The warm, soaking daytime rain would get the attention of those slumbering frogs and salamanders. Even if it stopped before dark, the wet ground and road would entice some of them to move. Maybe a lot of them? And right at the time when nighttime traffic would be heaviest on the roads.
So we sided with caution and rallied the teams to hit the streets at dusk. I went back to Byram to lead a group of volunteers there while others covered different hot-spots.
The rain did end early – earlier than expected even – and by nightfall our team was spreading out over a damp road. It was a relief to see that a migration was happening anyway, albeit at a slower pace. And the cars were filing through our setup (cones and signs, buffered by police) in threes and fours…99 vehicles in the first hour! Basically, there was a car for every salamander that dared to cross the white line.
We did our best to stay ahead of the traffic. By 11:00 pm the temperature was dropping, the road was drying, traffic was slowing, and so were the amphibians. We paced the road below a starry sky with Orion front and center. We had tallied another 175 spotted salamanders, 41 Jefferson’s salamanders, and 52 spring peepers. Despite the heavy car flow early on, more than 85% of those animals made it to the safe side of the road – and eventually to their breeding pool below – with a little help from some friends.
The ingress migration to the pools is probably close to half-over across much of NJ, so we’ll be out few more times yet!
THANKS to all the dedicated people who have helped so far. It’s a diverse group of heroes, from long-time amphibian crossers like George Cevera and Carl Bernzweig, to new volunteers like Karen Ruzycki. We have help from local partners like Margaret McGarrity of Byram Township, and engineering students from NJIT who want to help design solutions to the roadkill problem. A couple reporters came out this week to cover the story and ended up shuttling amphibians, too. We thank the Sussex County Division of Engineering for issuing us the permit to assemble on their road. Thanks also to the Byram Police Department for their willingness to provide traffic control and their respect for our project, which I’m sure seems a little unusual. And that’s just at one location. Great job, everyone!
Morning After Migration
POST #2 ON THE 2013 AMPHIBIAN MIGRATION
by MacKenzie Hall, Amphibian Crossing Project Coordinator
The past week has been like a wild trip through biomes and time zones. A half-foot of wet snow buried NJ on Friday, but it didn’t stand a chance against a sunny weekend above 50˚F and the valiant arrival of Daylight Savings Time. Bam! Spring. Suddenly birds were singing, crocuses were blooming, and salamanders were stretching their hamstrings for the journey ahead.
Throughout the day on Monday (March 11) a long wall of rain crept eastward across the US. It couldn’t possibly miss NJ, and the temperature would hold around 50˚F overnight – excellent predictors for a migration. The question was when the rain would hit and whether a rainfall starting very early in the morning would trigger many amphibians to move. There seem to be almost unlimited permutations for how the important factors of ground thaw, temperature, rainfall, date, and time of night can converge, and after almost 10 years with the Amphibian Crossing Project I still learn new and surprising things.
A handful of us chose to wait out the rain at one of our big road-crossing sites in Byram (Sussex Co.). At least 3 hours before the rain even started, someone noticed a salamander crossing the dry road. We spread out to cover more ground and kept counting. By the time the first raindrops hit we had already tallied (and ferried) 190 salamanders and 20 frogs across the asphalt threshold dividing their forest habitat from the breeding pool below. We were all pretty surprised and excited by what we were seeing.
The rain came around 2:30 am, and in the 4 hours before dawn the road was swimming with frogs and salamanders. We did our best to keep up with the count, and the rescue, especially as vehicle traffic picked up toward dawn. Eight cars per hour around 3:00 am, then 10 cars per hour, then 26. By 6:15 it was hard for the last of us – Bob Hamilton and I – to keep our feet on the pavement as the vehicle count crested 100 per hour. We also started to lose the battle against roadkill – as many animals were getting hit as we could save. Luckily it was just a short period, and at dawn the migration would pause. Our totals for that night: 1,119 salamanders and frogs, 954 of which made it to their destination!
Our “scouts” all across northern & central NJ had similar reports. A big migration had happened before dawn, and there was some roadkill as evidence. But you can listen for a happier kind of evidence – the honking and peeping of those who made it to their pool. The harbingers of spring are arriving.
Volunteers Survey New Jersey’s Eagle Population…
…during the 2013 Midwinter Bald Eagle Survey
By Larissa Smith, Biologist/Volunteer Manager
Every January NJ participates in the National Midwinter Eagle Count. Volunteers surveyed for eagles statewide during the weekend of January 12th & 13th. Due to dense fog the visibility was poor in many of the survey areas but despite this the total count was 297 bald eagles. This is 38 less than 2012’s high count of 335 bald eagles. Four golden eagles were also counted during the survey.
2013 Midwinter Eagle Survey Results
- Southern NJ: 264 bald eagles
- Northern NJ: 33 bald eagles
- Total bald eagles: 297
Thank you to all volunteers who participated!
February is a great time to get out and view eagles in New Jersey. So far twenty-one pairs of eagles are incubating (on eggs) while others pairs are busy getting ready for the season. Not only can you spot resident birds this time of year but wintering eagles as well. The Cumberland County Winter Eagle Festival takes place this Saturday the 9th. This is a good opportunity to see eagles and other raptors and learn more about them. I’ll be there at the CWF table so stop by and say “Hi”.
For more information on the festival: http://www.conservewildlifenj.org/events/v/011/2/2013/09/