The View
Margaret O'Gorman, Executive Director
In recent weeks I have had some great opportunities to view wildlife in places where you wouldn’t normally expect them. These sightings made me think about adaptability of wildlife in New Jersey and the hope for what these adaptations represent.
At a friend's house recently, Lisa and Harry were welcoming their new baby with a naming ceremony for friends and families. It was a beautiful Saturday in late June, blue skies and no humidity - just perfect for an outdoor gathering. At the party, people hung out in the yard talking and enjoying great food while nearby, a mourning dove sat with two newly hatched chicks on top of a box of garbage bags placed on a shelf 5 feet of the ground, right next to the back door of the house.
Everybody at that party passed within feet of this brave mother and her two somewhat bewildered chicks. Harry and Lisa had discovered the nest some weeks earlier when they went to move the box and the mother refused to move. They were painting their back porch and Harry held the box while Lisa quickly applied a coat of paint to the wall behind it. The photo shows the unusual nest of this mourning dove.
Also in recent weeks, I was privileged to get a "behind the scenes" look at wildlife in Hudson county. Ken Jennings, Assistant Supervisor of parks for the county took me underneath the Turnpike and along abandoned railway lines to view a pair of ospreys nesting right next to an outflow pipe from a coal-fired electricity generating plant. The juxtaposition of these beautiful birds with the industrial scene of a power plant, was a very powerful image.
At the Live Earth concert at the Meadowlands Complex a week later, I was able to tell people near me about the magnificent birds nesting less than a mile from the steel and concrete behemoth that is Giants Stadium.
From bald eagles adapting to car traffic, peregrine falcons living in the heart of the state's financial centers and the southern gray tree frog adjusting to life in detention basins, the state's rare wildlife adapts to our impact on the land and finds ways to exploit manmade habitat and newly created niches.
Not all species are as adaptable. Bog turtles, for example, have very specific needs that make them susceptible to changes in water table and vegetation type and because they cannot move easily, populations can be wiped out because of man made changes to the land. Pine Barrens tree frogs are adapted to a very narrow water chemistry, which when changed creates habitat more suitable for invasive bullfrogs and inhospitable for our native tree frogs.
Adaptable or not, wildlife should be considered when we make changes to our landscape. We should consider wildlife underpasses when designing new roads, vegetation in detention basins when we are building new houses and always think about where our wildlife can move to when we destroy habitat. In and around our homes we can think about creating wildlife habitat by planting native species and installing bird feeders and bird boxes. We can, in many ways, small and large, create habitat that our most adaptable species can use while continuing to protect the habitat all our rare wildlife needs to survive.
Above all, we should keep looking, you’ll never know in New Jersey where you will see an Osprey, an eagle or even a mourning dove.
P.S. If you have seen wildlife in any unusual settings and have photographs to share with us, please send them to Pola Galie, editor of Explorations.
Administrative Staff
Margaret O'Gorman
Executive Director
Patricia Shapella
Contributions and Membership Manager
Maria Grace
Education and Outreach Manager
Pola Galie
Development Associate - Exploration editor
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