SUMMER WILDLIFE AT BARNEGAT BAY

      Barnegat Bay is a 42-mile-long, salty backwater off the Atlantic Ocean between the New Jersey mainland and Long Beach Island, a barrier island of sand and housing.  From mid-May to the end of June, 2025, I had been watching a thin, remnant salt marsh on the island along the eastern shore of the bay, and wildlife in that marsh, through a live camera mounted high on an osprey nest and our computer screen.  And, although there is lots of human activities in the marsh and on the barrier island that disrupts wildlife, that little marsh shows the value of every little natural habitat to a variety of wildlife, no matter how small or where the habitat is.  

     Early in April of this year, a pair of ospreys settled on the stick cradle on a built and erected nesting platform some twenty feet high on a pole.  The female laid three eggs in that nursery and the pair took turns brooding those eggs.  But during stormy weather, the male left the marsh for a few days, leaving his mate on her own, and bringing her no fish.  Through hunger, the female finally abandoned her eggs to catch fish from the nearby bay.  A herring gull ate the eggs!  The adult ospreys are still around the Barnegat Bay marsh and both birds are daily catching a flounder or other kind of fish from Barnegat Bay.  But there has been no evidence of another nesting attempt.  

     Every June many female diamond-backed terrapins exit Barnegat Bay to lay eggs in sand  on the barrier island.  Through the live camera, I saw kindly people taking terrapins across a road between the bay and the town on that barrier island and placing those creatures on a sandy lawn where each female digs a hole with her clawed hind feet, drops her eggs in that cavity in the sand and buries the eggs with her back feet.  Then each female is carried back across the same road and is free to retreat to and enter Barnegat Bay again for another year.   

     During May, a few individuals of certain kinds of migrating shorebirds, including least sandpipers, semi-palmated sandpipers, turnstones and oystercatchers, stop along the tiny, sandy shores of the salt marsh I've been watching to rest and fatten-up on invertebrates before continuing pushing farther north.  It's always neat to see these travelers.  

     A variety of fish-eating birds, including common terns, black skimmers, double-crested cormorants, great and snowy egrets and great blue and tri-colored herons, pass through the Barnegat Bay area and stop for a day or more to snare fish from the bay, or the marsh's freshwater streams, depending on the species.  These birds catch fish in different ways.  Herons and egrets wade in the shallows to catch fish by quickly reaching out their long necks and open beaks. Cormorants dive under water from the surface to snare their finny prey.  Skimmers fly low to the water and ply the water with their lower mandibles.  They snap their beak shut when it bumps into a fish.  Terns dive beak-first into the water from the air to seize small fish in their bills.  And ospreys, by the way, drop head-first from the sky to grab larger fish in their eight sharp, curved talons.  

     The many, noisy laughing gulls, and the few herring, great black-backed and ring-billed gulls that summer at Barnegat Bay, like all gulls, are devout scavengers.  All these gulls get scraps from osprey meals.  These gulls also consume dead fish, and anything else edible.  And they also catch live fish.

     Certain species of birds, including a few pairs each of red-winged blackbirds, willets, which is a type of sandpiper, house sparrows, Canada geese and mallard ducks, raise young in the tiny marsh along Barnegat Bay.  The red-wings rear offspring in stands of phragmites and tall grasses.  Male red-wings are seen attacking crows, herons and ospreys that might get too close to red-wing nurseries on plant stems.  Willets hatch young in grassy cradles on the ground.  And the house sparrows seem to be rearing offspring among the lower sticks of the osprey nest.            

     Some other kinds of birds that I occasionally see in this little marsh are boat-tailed grackles, tree swallows, glossy ibis and white ibis.  These birds feed in the marsh, but I saw no evidence of their nesting in it.  But they do add to the variety and beauty of the marsh by Barnegat Bay.

     This little marsh demonstrates how important every natural habitat is to wildlife.  Every little bit of it, wherever it is, helps promote the numbers of many kinds of wild plants and animals.     


 

    

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LATE-SUMMER, ROADSIDE EDGES

      Many sunny, un-mowed edges of country roadsides grow tall with plants by August in southeastern Pennsylvania.  These long, lean, human-made habitats are interesting oases of tall, dense vegetation growth and small creatures.  Lovely bouquets of flowers perch obviously on tall plants adapted to disturbed soil, including white flowers on Queen-Anne's-lace, blue blooms of chicory, yellow ones on evening primrose, Canada goldenrod and velvetleaf, and pink blossoms on red clover and brown knapweed.  There are pink or white flowers on bindweed vines that crawl up the many tall foxtail and redtop grass growing thickly along these same roadsides, and corn stalks on the sunny edges of cornfields.  Goldenrods' innumerable, tiny golden blooms are particularly attractive to bees and other kinds of nectar-seeking, pollinating insects.  And by the second week in September, patches of that wild, ten-foot-tall sunflower, with large, yellow flowers, called J...
Read more

LATE NESTERS

     Three kinds of abundant birds in southeastern Pennsylvania, including mourning doves, American goldfinches and cedar waxwings, nest late in summer for a variety of reasons.  Most "song" birds in this area are done raising young by the middle of July, but these three adaptable species could be rearing offspring into early September as a result of being dependent on certain foods or nesting materials that are most abundant in late summer.       Each pair of handsome mourning doves raises two young per brood, but they "put-out" two young a month, on average, from March into September because they rear two broods at a time through the warmer months. Each pair of doves probably can only feed two young at a time because they regurgitate pre-digested seeds into the beaks of their offspring.  But they compensate for that by hatching chicks in spring and summer.       Each pair of doves starts a brood of young early in March....
Read more

MATS OF WATER PLANTS

     By August, varying-sized, green mats of algae, duckweed and water stargrass float together on the surfaces of certain ponds and still backwaters of creeks in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  Algae grows in long, matted strands, and duckweeds are tiny, flat plants that grow in colonies on water surfaces.  Stargrass colonies root in muddy bottoms.  Each plant's long leaves undulate in currents and the single yellow flower barely emerges from the water's surface to be pollinated.       Together, those mats of algae, duckweed, and stargrass in bloom, look like tiny islands in the water, and remind me of lawns with dandelion flowers flourishing in them.  And, those mats of small, aquatic plants create niches that several kinds of small creatures use for a variety of reasons.      Certain kinds of attractive and entertaining damselflies and dragonflies rest on those mats, after aerial feeding forays on small, flying in...
Read more