by Lanny McDowell on June 6, 2009
Our Pennsylvania-based associate John Patrick Brown arranged a just-in-time house rental which offered us the option of either staying in a nice old farmhouse once owned by Lucky Luciano or using the current owners’ beach house right on Delaware Bay at a place called Highs Beach, which is just south from Cook’s and Reeds beaches, both well known as annual shorebird feeding and resting sites situated up the bay coast from Cape May.
The permits for Global Conservation Alliance (GCA) to conduct research this year specified Cook’s, Reeds, Moore’s and Gandy’s beaches as locations for our work. The procedure to collect Horseshoe crab eggs involved sampling certain marked plots according to protocols developed by Norm Famous, who has the credentials and background to do that sort of thing. Three of the four beaches were associated with the outlets of estuary systems draining out of extensive marshlands emptying into Delaware Bay from the New Jersey side. Two of the beaches were long uninterrupted stretches of sand. Two contained a variety of bayshore surfaces and substrata, including clay and silt layers, sections of peat and areas of mixed sand and pebbles washed by strong tidal currents.
Our objective was to identify places on the beach [click to continue...]
by Lanny McDowell on May 23, 2009
All three of us had pretty much given up on getting to the Jersey shore during spring migration this year. It looked like our non-profit, Global Conservation Alliance, was going to be a blowout for 2009, which , if that did not concern Red Knots and other declining stocks of migrant shorebirds, might not be such a big deal in itself; but wasting a year would have been a real shame in this case.
In order to have a chance of carrying out work on the beaches of Delaware Bay that might result in healthier (and heavier) Red Knots leaving on the last northern leg of their annual journey up to the Arctic, certain scientific requirements need to be met. If anyone wants to access the restricted beaches where the birds feed, or if anyone wants to physically disturb the surface of those beaches, they have to apply for and receive permits from the state powers that be to do that work. You can’t just show up and start digging up the sand.
Norm Famous, one of our number who is a wetlands ecologist by profession, put together GCA’s application to New Jersey Fish & Wildlife to conduct two experiments [click to continue...]
by Lanny McDowell on May 14, 2009
Hot off the presses, straight from the fields of Chilmark to your monitor screen. The phone and email thread went from Keith to Whiting to Manter to McDowell to refinding with Whiting this very elegant and rather casual drop-in.
No frills, just bird photographs:
It is the Vineyard, after all:
I have a list of folks who get an emailed notice from me with a URL to click on when I have posted a new blog. There are also times when I just send out photos to the list without bothering to blog about them or post them to a listserve. Not on the list? Want to be? Just contact me (below right) saying you want to be on the list or, better yet, subscribe to Feedburner above, in the right side column for automatic blog feeds to your email. Getting off the list is just as simple.
These images and Avian Art fine art prints are available for purchase. Contact me or View my gallery.
Birds are cool! Lanny
by Lanny McDowell on May 12, 2009
My friend Pete says that he had White-eyed Vireo, one or two, at this location at least three weeks ago and maybe earlier. The Vineyard Birds II book lists the earliest record for white-eyed as April 29th. That sure sounds late, but who knows, and how many white-eyeds are seen and recorded on Martha’s Vineyard every spring? Not that many. Pete and I were at the pumping station at the head of the Lagoon on the morning of May tenth. We met up there with Sally, who was on her appointed spring birding rounds. Everything looked quite dull at first, although a close look at breeding yellow-rumpeds and yellow warblers should not really qualify as dull. Then we heard the vireo’s call and then the full song. He acted very much like a local, not a transient, to my eyes, as though he were not just passing through. Of course I already knew he had been seen in the same general spot a number of times, which very likely shaded my judgement. We saw no evidence that he was gleaning to feed a mate on a nest. He did sing up a storm, as the photos imply.
The only other migrant of note that we found was a Tennessee Warbler. Pete knew the song. I was trying to make it into some variable of a Winter Wren. We did see it, but mostly we heard its distinctive call and could not relocate it even though all three of us were scanning nearby vegetation for quite a while, trying to get an angle on it. I think it was throwing its song around like a ventriloquist. We would hear the song; but then two of us would point in directions about ninety degrees apart. We also remarked that it was feeding and singing close to the ground, rather than favoring the canopy habitat where you might expect it.
The butter-butt photo is a reminder of how exotic a fully feathered example can be.
I have a list of folks who get an emailed notice from me with a URL to click on when I have posted a new blog. There are also times when I just send out photos to the list without bothering to blog about them or post them to a listserve. Not on the list? Want to be? Just contact me (below right) saying you want to be on the list or, better yet, subscribe to Feedburner above, in the right side column for automatic blog feeds to your email. Getting off the list is just as simple.
These images and Avian Art fine art prints are available for purchase. Contact me or View my gallery.
Birds are cool! Lanny
