Welcome to Spring?

GreenStreets

By Chris Viaggio

Expert naturalist, Jamaica Bay guardian, and director of the Northeast Chapter of the American Littoral Society, Don Riepe, led an “Early Spring Migrant” bird watching tour at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge the morning of Saturday March 28.

He gave a preliminary presentation in the refuge’s visitor center on what attendees might expect to see on the walk, using photographs that had all been shot by him. He explained flight patterns and migratory routes for each bird.

The breadth of different species that should have been present and visible at the refuge during this time of early spring simply were not, but a fair amount of flora and fauna were around to find and talk about nonetheless. When the group ventured outside, it was actually lightly snowing, and although a couple of them have been spotted in recent months, there were no snowy owls in sight.

A few red-winged blackbirds did show promise that spring isn’t just a myth, but the cardinal, whose song is a sure sign that spring has sprung, was not seen nor heard.

Riepe spoke about other common species to the area too, such as mockingbirds, which can perfectly imitate other bird calls and even the sounds of non living things—like the consecutive beeping of a truck moving in reverse; mallards, the males sporting the almost metallic green heads; and the swan, an icon of love but also an invasive species introduced here from Europe in the 1880s. Snow geese flew overhead and he helped to disambiguate the Canada goose and the Atlantic brant; brant have a white collar like marking.

The ubiquitous herring gull, commonly known as the seagull, lingered in flocks at the bay’s shoreline adjacent to West Pond Trail. In hopes of gaining access to food, one repeatedly and futilely attempted to crack open a mollusk, picking up and dropping the shelled creature from a high height on the too soft muddy sand of the beach. Evidence of successful instances of this action was visible on the harder gravel ground of the path. Riepe explained the vicious tendencies of another subspecies of gull native to the area, the great black-backed gull, with a concise statement: “Nature isn’t nice.” They sometimes hunt other, smaller birds. Laughing gulls exist here too, but none were seen during the tour; the first nest was found here in 1978 on loCo marsh.

It was thought beforehand that a resident osprey would likely be seen at its nest, which luckily turned out to be the case. The informational blurb beside the clearing read:

“With blackened eyes to diminish glare, sandpaper-like palms, and hooked talons, the osprey, or fish hawk, is well equipped to fish for a living. Spotting its prey in the muddy waters of Jamaica Bay, it plunges feet first, flying off to a nearby perch to eat its wriggling prey. The platform here substitutes for a dead tree or ‘snag,’ the birds’ preferred nesting site. From this vantage the osprey has a commanding view of the water for spotting prey or predators and room for unobstructed take offs and landings. In New York City as elsewhere osprey populations are recovering from the disastrous use of DDT and other pesticides.”

After spending some time observing the osprey on its nesting platform, the group crossed Cross Bay Boulevard to get to the east side’s woodland trail, which leads to Big John’s Pond, affectionately named after the man who wielded the bulldozer that created it. A few American robins were spotted on the way.

Of the four major North American migration flyways—the Atlantic, Mississippi, Central, and Pacific—the wildlife refuge at Jamaica Bay falls under the Atlantic Flyway and, as a partially freshwater source, acts as a major stopover point for birds traveling along this route. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, more of the birds expected to pass through here will do so, further contributing to the space as a thriving, ecological anomaly
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