Archive for New Jersey
Dunne: Bayshore Summer
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s as presumptuous as I hope it is premature for a reviewer to say that a writer as young and as prolific as Pete Dunne has attained his “mature style”: but I suspect that most readers will agree with me that Bayshore Summer, the second volume in the author’s planned seasonal quartet, is the best so far of the estimable and growing corpus of Dunne’s natural history writing.
Any book about a season brings with it its own chronological structure–Dunne begins at a Memorial Day gas station and ends with a Labor Day fishing trip–but there is a much deeper, much more significant series of symmetries here, too. Leaving aside a couple of the clever set pieces for which the author is justly famous (and by which he is, in too many readers’ minds, unjustly defined), Summer is neatly bookended by symmetrically placed chapters that inform and question each other; the book’s careful architecture invites the reader to think hard about the issues raised in it.
And they are important issues. This is not–notwithstanding constant references to the Delaware Bayshore’s rich birdlife–a bird book, but a book about the history and natural history of a landscape, a marshscape, that has been inhabited by humans for nearly as long as it has by Ospreys and Laughing Gulls. When I lived in central New Jersey in the 1980s, we thought of Cumberland County as an exotic wilderness, far off the beaten parkway path. But the bayshore is also home to people, many of them still pursuing traditional resource-based professions that are as endangered (and for many of the same reasons) as a wintering Loggerhead Shrike or a migrant Red Knot. Dunne treats the baymen with sympathy and respect, acknowledging their expertise borne of hundreds of years on the water and out in the spartina marshes, and pointing out again and again that no landscape can be saved without taking culture as much into account as nature.
Most telling of all is a pair of chapters at the center of the book focusing on young people’s connections to nature. In Chapter 6, “Party,” Dunne relates his encounter with a teenage boy and his father fishing from a party boat on Delaware Bay; grudgingly, the young man rates his experience a 4 out of 10, far lower on the scale than a day spent playing computer games. Compare this with the young angler’s 15-year-old counterpart in Chapter 4, putting up salt hay with his father (and a visiting natural history writer), his plans for the future consisting in “doin’ this…with my father.” There’s sentimentality in the contrast between the salt of the earth with his feet on the ground and the city kid with his head in the clouds, but there’s also an important message about our increasing remoteness from a natural world that increasingly needs our help.
Dunne concludes with a set of recommendations for providing that help, from development restrictions to ecotourism promotion, and, with equal eloquence, he identifies “the biological element that makes the region so colorfully unique”:
The people. Who have, for eight and ten and twelve generations, worked their changes upon and been themselves changed by the environment in which they live. Not as observers but as participants. Not as exploiters but as players in a wonderful, real-life drama, involving people and nature. All set on an extraordinary stage that might be approaching its final curtain call.
Overstated? Not in the least, as south Jersey comes to look more and more like north Jersey a generation or two ago; but the recognition that nature and culture, wildness and humans, must be thought of together can go a long ways towards helping us save both. Pete Dunne’s Bayshore Summer inspires us to do just that.
North Meets South at Sandy Hook
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There are few more beautiful places on the Jersey shore than Sandy Hook, that slender spit of land that pokes up from Monmouth County into the mouth of New York Harbor.
Signaled from afar by the twin lights of Navesink, the Hook and its estuaries, salt marshes, and ponds are one of the best birding sites around, and my fond memories of the place over the years range from my “lifer” Gyrfalcon to such disparate “state birds” as Sandwich Tern and Black-legged Kittiwake.
Friday was a beautiful–if breezy–day to be out. And though the wind seemed to depress bird activity in the tangled woods and thickets, the sea and the sky brought us two nice surprises, one from the north, one from the southwest.
The very tip of the Hook, reached on the sandy Fisherman’s Trail, is often the place to look for gulls. This time I couldn’t find anything but “the big three”–Great Black-backed, Herring, and Ring-billed Gulls–but the water in front of them hosted nice Red-throated Loons (far more abundant at most coastal New Jersey localities than Common Loon)
and, a pleasant surprise even in what is obviously an “invasion” winter for the species, eight Common Eiders.
Two of the birds were white-breasted immature males, the other six brown birds like these (and so presumably females). With flocks of up to 200 (two hundred!) individuals being reported from farther south on the shore, the presence of this little band shouldn’t have been a surprise, I suppose, but it was balm to the eyes of an adoptive Arizona.
Those balmed eyes opened wide a few minutes later when three small swallows appeared low in the sky to our south. They kept coming, closer and closer, and one of them flew right past at eye level: Cave Swallows! They continued north and out of sight, probably into New York waters.
When I first started birding New Jersey, a quarter of a century ago, a sighting of Cave Swallow anywhere, at any season, would have raised eyebrows, maybe even hackles. But for whatever reason, this species now engages in regular November peregrinations to the north and east, and it’s only a matter of time before the first one makes landfall in Iceland–where it will probably fly over the heads of Common Eiders once again.
Mallard Mixes
Posted by: | CommentsAs if I needed another reason to be looking forward to our return to New Jersey, there were American Black Ducks at every site we visited these past days. I’ve always been more than partial to the species, from the first time I saw it 30 years ago (!) this month.
Fond as I am of the bird, and not getting to see it all that often of late, I spent a bit of time looking through the flocks at Brigantine, at Sandy Hook, and at Etra. As usual, it wasn’t long before we started noticing the “mixes,” birds whose ancestry must have included both American Black Ducks and Northern Mallards. Most such birds look simply like Black Ducks with a green cap, silvery tertials, and variably pale tails–and, this one at least, an apparent fondness for a girl just like the girl….
Others are more striking. Yesterday Alison and I found this bird consorting with American Black Ducks at Etra Park, Monmouth County:
This bird is, obviously, much more Mallard-like, but with dark body plumage and a pale head. If it’s true that female “mallards” of all stripes and taxa prefer the studlier “Northern” Mallard drakes, then this one has a better chance, I’d guess, of reproducing than his Black-ish cousin above.
