Conserve Wildlife Blog

Posts Tagged ‘2011’

Photo from the field

Friday, October 7th, 2011
Students help provide homes for ospreys on New York Bay

by Ben Wurst, Habitat Program Manager

Students and teachers from Bayonne High School stand in front of an osprey platform that was built this past week. © Ben Wurst

This past week I spent the day with students and teachers at Bayonne High School (BHS). I was there to help students construct three osprey nesting platforms. The platforms are being placed at the Bayonne Golf Club (BGC) along a portion wetland habitat that was restored by the BGC along New York Bay. This whole project began when I was approached a couple months ago by Tom Tokar, a teacher at BHS, about assisting them with the construction and placement of the platforms with some of his students. Tom and Larissa Drennan, a teacher at the Woodrow Wilson School, have involved their students in many environmental projects in Bayonne, one of which is where they grow mussels and seed them at the BCG. Ron D’Argenio, with BGC has supported their efforts from the beginning not only by offering up the BGC as a location to seed the mussels but also through financial assistance. Ron and the BGC are also fully funding this project as well, with a very generous donation to CWF. (more…)

NJ Bald Eagle numbers soar in 2011

Friday, September 30th, 2011
thanks to the dedicated NJ Bald Eagle Project Volunteers

by Larissa Smith, Biologist/Volunteer Manager

Adult Bald Eagle at East Lake © John fox

2011 was a great year for bald eagles in NJ.  This season a record high of 118 chicks fledged from nests throughout New Jersey.  A total of 111 eagle pairs were monitored of these 95 were active which means that they laid eggs.  Seventy-one of these were successful in producing the 118 fledges.  This is especially good news after 2010’s less than stellar nesting season where only 69 young chicks fledged.

The success of the NJ Bald Eagle Project is directly due to the dedicated volunteers.  Every eagle nest that can be viewed is monitored by a volunteer/s.  Volunteers report on important dates such as incubation, hatching and fledging.  They also help to protect the nest by reporting disturbance and educating the public about eagles.  We can’t thank our eagle project volunteers enough for all the time and energy which they put into this project.

More details on the the 2011 nesting season will be  available later this year in the 2011 NJ Bald Eagle Project report.

News from the International Shorebird Project

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011
Red knot shot while on migration

A banded red knot searches for food on a Delaware Bay beach.

Bandedbirds.org is an effort to collect data on shorebirds throughout their range from the southern tip of Chile to the Canadian arctic. This effort has been underway for many years and has an international network of volunteers reporting re-sightings data on shorebirds. 

The following was shared with the shorebird community by Jeannine Parvin, administrator for bandedbirds.org.

The bird being discussed was banded in NJ in May 2005.  It seemed to return to NJ each year, having been resighted most years up to 2010.  The bird seemed to be heading back up to NJ for the 2011 Spring shorebird season, when it was shot and killed in French Guiana.  Illegal hunting is still a big issue for shorebirds.  Paired with loss and degradation of habitat, and pollution, these birds face major threats.  Read more about CWF’s work to monitor and protect shorebirds here.

A red knot identified as FL(PPM) was shot in French Guiana by a hunter.

The data was submitted by Alexandre Vinot from French Guiana. He regularly reports to bandedbirds.org and is a volunteer with GEPOG.

His comments state: “shot in Mana Ricefield – flag given to Antoine Hausselman, who gave me the data”.

5.651519 -53.670960 approximates this location along NW coast of French Guiana. (more…)

Salamanders and…Seattle?

Thursday, September 8th, 2011
FINDING ANSWERS TO NJ PROBLEMS AT ICOET

By MacKenzie Hall, Private Lands Biologist

Seattle Space Needle

The iconic Space Needle, photographed from the edge of Puget Sound.

Last week – literally moments before Irene began her Garden State smack-down – my plane landed on home ground.  I was returning from six days in Seattle, WA, where more than 550 professionals from 21 countries gathered for the International Conference on Ecology & Transportation (ICOET).  The conference offered over 170 combined talks and posters on a variety of research, planning, ecology, and engineering topics that, by and large, had to do with animals crossing roads.

The reason I made the trip was our Amphibian Crossing project (ok, and it was also Seattle, birthplace of the counter-culture that fashioned my grungy teenagehood!).  Over the last decade we’ve surveyed, mapped, and prioritized hotspots throughout the northern half of NJ where frogs and salamanders have to travel across roads to reach their breeding pools each spring.  Enormous numbers are killed in doing so.  The hallmark of our Amphibian Crossing project has always been the volunteer-based rescue surveys – at night, in the rain, in traffic; requiring a lot of hands and a maniacal level of commitment to plan and carry out year after year.  At this point, we’ve got around 35 “high” and “highest” priority crossings…far too many to manually protect in the short-term, not to mention the long-term.  Our long-term solution is to get special under-road culverts installed for these migrating amphibians, and ICOET was a place I could find folks who have done it. (more…)

It’s Better in the Bahamas – Part 3

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
A Piping Plover Adventure

By Todd Pover, Beach Nesting Bird Project Manager

Crossing into new territory – Todd Pover, CWFNJ, wading across a mangrove inlet in the Bahamas to conduct the Piping Plover survey.

In earlier installments of this series (It’s Better in the Bahamas – Part 1 & 2), I reported on the results of the winter segment of the 2011 International Piping Plover Census in the Bahamas, in which I participated, and also the partnerships developed along the way. For this final installment I am foregoing the biological results and conservation lessons, the usual story themes, because sometimes our readers just want to hear about the adventurous side of what we do here at the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey.

Having surveyed piping plovers on their breeding grounds in New Jersey for 15 years now, at times it feels like I know every nook and cranny that plovers could possibly be found in our state – to some extent the sense of mystery is gone. I knew that wouldn’t be the case with the Bahamas winter survey. I had never been to Abaco, the island I was assigned to survey along with Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Coastal Waterbird Program, but I knew it had miles of coastline on its main island and numerous offshore barrier islands and cays that needed to be checked as well. Our pre-trip research of the habitat on the islands suggested it was going to be difficult to cover all that ground in one week even with our 4-6 person survey team, but I was excited by the challenge. (more…)