by Lanny McDowell on June 20, 2009
The beach drive out to Norton Point on the Vineyard’s south shore is only open for a portion of its length. The rest is closed because Oystercatchers, Piping Plovers and Least Terns have young to feed. And the beach should be closed. One of the Trustees of Reservations‘ “shorebird technicians” was headed out to make her protective rounds and told me there are something like 681 Least Tern pairs in the colony near the tidal cut into Katama Bay. That is a really nice big number of Least Terns, maybe a quarter of the state’s nesting pairs, according to the tech. We wish them all the luck they will need to fledge some youngsters. The odds are stacked against, but we can hope. We can resist recreational vehicles on the beach at the wrong time of the year. We can support the effort. [click to continue...]
by Lanny McDowell on June 17, 2009
Take a course in good water and air, and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
John Muir
Especially when someone looking at bird photography sees a lot of detail in the avian subject, feathers in sharp focus or a shiny glint in the bird’s eye, he or she wonders how it is accomplished. Often the viewer concludes, “Oh, well, the big lens!” “What kind of glass are you using?” is the more camera-savvy question. Guess what? It can be the humongous and fast prime lens on the oversized gimbled tripod … on a bright sunny day … bird posed at the edge of the nest … shot from the sturdy platform of the observation tower in the well-managed nature sanctuary. Nothing wrong with that. Do whatcha gotta do, I say.
Here’s what I go for, though. What I seek out and what rings my avian art bell is: first of all, it almost does not matter what the species is; [click to continue...]
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...]
