WINTERING BRANT GATHERINGS

      New Jersey's barrier islands along the Atlantic Ocean coastline have long been developed into homes and other buildings, except for Island Beach State Park, which is still mostly natural.  By a live camera and our home computer screen, I had daily been watching a small section of the shoreline of Long Beach Island, one of Jersey's developed barrier islands, during November of 2020.  

     Long Beach Island, which is developed from end to end, has only remnant natural areas on the side overlooking Barnegat Bay, which is salt water between that long, lean island and the Jersey mainland.  But a limited number of wildlife species, including a few kinds of waterfowl and gulls, live on those bayside natural areas, whose shores are lapped by Barnegat Bay.

     Every day this November, when I watched our computer screen, I saw brant, in groups of 8 to 180, either swimming or flying across Barnegat Bay to that particular little spot on the Long Beach Island coastline that is within the view of the live camera.  And, sometimes, I saw one or a few pairs of rugged, dark blacks ducks in that same area of shore.  

     Flocks of hardy brant and black ducks are commonly noticed wintering in grassy salt marshes between coastal barrier islands and the mainland from New England to Virginia.  There both species "tip-up" to feed on aquatic plants in shallow water.  Brant also consume the green, grass-like shoots of winter grain crops in fields, while black ducks join mallard and pintail ducks, and Canada geese and snow geese in  ingesting corn kernels in harvested corn fields.               

     During November, too, I almost daily saw a small group of stately Canada geese, a pair or two of attractive mallards and single ring-billed, herring and great black-backed gulls at the little place covered by the live camera.  And I soon figured why all these birds were regularly coming to that tiny section of marsh on Long Beach Island.  They didn't come there to dine on vegetation, but to drink from a fresh water brook that ran through that little, shoestring marsh and into brackish Barnegat Bay.  The geese and ducks, particularly, came there to drink fresh water, which I noticed on our computer screen.  That little waterway was a goose "watering hole".    

     But the wintering brant were THEE species to daily come to that water hole in numbers to drink fresh water.  And while they were in the open, I noticed some of their habits.  The handsome brant are small geese, just a little bigger than mallards.  These fiesty, little geese are always energetic and restless.  They always seem to be quarrelsome and aggressive among themselves.  But they do everything together, as if they are one disjointed bird.  They seem to live by that old saying "you can't live with them and you can't live without them".        

     Brant raise goslings along seacoasts in the high Arctic of North America and Eurasia.  They winter along the Pacific and Atlantic shores of North America and Eurasia, including the wintering population in New Jersey.  

     This is another example of adaptable, beautiful wildlife persisting in remnant habitats, in spite of human activities that change habitats.  Look for adaptable, interesting creatures in human-made habitats right near your homes.     

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