On a road to nowhere in Manahawkin

We had a long day of ups and downs in the greater Cape May area on Saturday, looking for additions to our respective year lists and visiting the reported spots to see the more remarkable rarities that had been reported to be in the area.

As a quick update:

• A report of a king eider hen near a jetty in Cape May Point delivered a common eider for us. (That beach spot also yielded the rare bare-rumped jaybird, but that's another story.)
• A very yellow western tanager revealed himself after a very brief wait on a busy street corner in Cape May Court House.
• And... after what would have been deemed a wild goose chase in other circumstances, we caught a glimpse of a crested caracara (you might remember how rare these are in New Jersey, after our story of seeing one in West Windsor last year.)

All of the roaming around left us kind of spent and ready to call it a day, but Ivan suggested one more stop as we headed back up the Parkway. Dusk wasn't far off, making it a perfect time to stop in Manahawkin to visit the short-eared owls on the marsh.

A confession: whenever Ivan mentions owling, I do a mental eyeroll, especially in pine forests where they might be tucked in broad daylight. Don't get me wrong. I love owls. In fact, our first joint birding experience was a January visit to Wallkill WMA to visit the short-eared owls. He got one in the viewing scope within a few minutes, and it accommodatingly turned to face us just as I was getting my look. Since then, it's been a lot harder to tease them out, but in Ivan's defense, owls of any ilk do their best not to be seen. Finding them takes a certain amount of luck, regardless of how advanced your birding skills are.

This time around, when I started my usual jovial owl rant, Ivan simply said, "You'll like this place. It's the road to nowhere." Say no more. Let's check it out.

We got to Route 72 as twilight was descending. A few turns brought us away from the state highway hubbub and into marsh territory. One more right turn and we were on Stafford Avenue, a lightly-traveled road occasionally marked with a pothole. "This is better than I remembered it," Ivan told me, explaining that the road is rarely maintained and can get heavily rutted and uneven a mile or so in, when it turns to hard-packed sand and dirt.

The road goes first through a forest, adding a little spookiness to the trip, but then the horizon widens to accommodate marshgrass, with no trees to obstruct the view for acres. Harriers ordinarily would have been scouting for their last meals of the day, but we saw nothing in flight. Still, the terrain was incredibly cool, as was the feeling that absolutely nobody was within shouting distance. The only real sign of human progress was the utility poles on the side of the road, though four or five of them were tilted dangerously enough to take the whole system down into the brackish water with a good gust.

The bridge to nowhere. 

Then we got to the really cool part. The road ramped up a little before being blocked by a graffiti-laden Jersey barrier. Whoa. The car had barely stopped before I jumped out and walked up to the barrier to find remnants of an old wood bridge, its near end gone, making it impossible to walk across. It doesn't matter, anyway, as there's no road on the other side.

"Behold!" Ivan exclaimed as he stepped out of the car. "Nowhere!" He had that right. Marsh stretched out almost as far as the eye could see, and it was so quiet, well, so quiet that any of the usual analogies about quiet were useless. That, my friends, is Manahawkin Wildlife Management Area at dusk in January.

How was I not aware of this place? I pride myself on knowing these spots, and from what I can recall, our better-known friends who cover the odder parts of the state haven't featured this Road to Nowhere. It seems that perhaps it's a secret kept by sportsmen (the state DEP maps list the area as the Manahawkin Hunting and Fishing Grounds) and birders, with the occasional spray paint-wielding local teen for good measure. I could see where the hunters and fishing enthusiasts would value the area; the marsh was sparsely crossed by old mosquito-control channels they could use to get to a blind or favorite spot.

Gazing across the marsh from one of its few (maybe only) high spots, I was again reminded of the Meadowlands -- the rickety old abandoned bridges you can see as your train rumbles along to Newark or New York, the ditches dug in the futile hopes of keeping the skeeters at bay, the wisdom of letting a certain amount of marsh just be and be natural.

As for the owls, well, they were keeping to themselves during our visit. We saw none at all before daylight finally surrendered to darkness, though Ivan thought he might have heard a short-ear bark in the distance (some say they sound like terriers). Perhaps next time.

Glassboro Woods: a buzzy summer birding experience

This is a somewhat tough time of year for birders. The birds have gone quiet, for the most part, after putting on their best plumage and singing their hearts out to find the loves of their lives (or at least the season). Many are getting their young to fledge so they can start their second brood, so while you might see some nice young 'uns, Moms and Dads are primarily too busy to make themselves known to humans.

Add to that our recent bouts of 90+ degree heat, and you can see the dilemma. For Ivan it's become less a matter of finding numbers of birds than it is the hunt to spot particular species. A couple of recent out-of-state trips scored a lot of sightings he wouldn't normally have gotten so early in the year, leaving a few stragglers yet to be found. Those birds tend to hang out in places best avoided in the heat of summer.

I knew we were tempting fate when I agreed to his suggestion that we head to Gloucester County and Glassboro Wildlife Management Area. The Guide to Bird Finding in New Jersey suggests it's a premier place to spot the Kentucky, hooded and pine warblers that remained on Ivan's 'wanted' list for 2012, so off we went. Never mind the fact that my internal radar always steers me away from tromping around the Pinelands in mid-summer, lest I be consumed by mosquitoes and green headed flies. Other than one really poorly advised trip to Bivalve a few years ago, I tend to avoid most moist natural spots south of Trenton and west of the Parkway during July and August. They're just too buggy. Glassboro Woods is pretty much the textbook example of deciduous wetland.

We left home base early enough to get us to Glassboro by about 7:30 a.m. The WMA entrance isn't marked by signs; rather you have to find the proper sandy dirt road and drive down a piece, until you reach a pipe gate blocking further transit. Once we got there, we parked in a small clearing to the side of the road, doused ourselves in bug repellent and aimed a few prayers upward for mercy.

The greenheads started circling almost immediately after we left the car, but the sight ahead of us on the broad path immediately distracted me from the pests. Early-morning sunlight streamed through the forest canopy, looking very much like an inspirational poster. We weren't hearing too much bird activity, but perhaps it was farther in.

We continued walking along the wide path, happy not to have to worry about brushing against possibly tick-infested underbrush. The previous night's rainstorm had left the road damp and pocked with puddles in places, but for the most part it was very amenable. When we reached an intersection with another path, we made the turn.

Again, it wasn't all that noisy, but we ran into a white-eyed vireo and eventually a towhee, both singing for attention. A power line cut didn't offer much in the way of spotting -- if memory serves, it was downright quiet.

Perhaps we weren't seeing many birds, but the puddles seemed to be making up for it with frogs. A few surprised us by popping up just before we stepped over some water-filled potholes. Even more amusing, very young ones, barely bigger than my thumbnail, quickly made their way across the path with some impressively long hops. I almost wanted to pick one or two up, they were so cute, but I resisted, letting them continue on their way undisturbed.

After a couple of hours of largely unsuccessful bird wandering, we turned back toward the car. When we got to our original turnoff spot, though, Ivan suggested we check out the area we would have seen earlier, had we not made the detour. Can't hurt, right?

A quarter-mile walk brought us to a relatively open area of mostly underbrush with some trees toward the back, but we heard it before we actually saw it. This is where the birds were hanging out, with several obvious youngsters sharpening their flying skills under their parents' watchful eyes. A beautiful pair of cedar waxwings perched in a dead tree in the distance, and we finally saw the sought-after pine warbler. That one went on my life list and Ivan's 2012 tally, making the buzzing, pesky greenheads tolerable.

Sometimes that extra effort means all the difference. When we're having a less than productive birding day, we'll dedicate another five minutes in an area we haven't explored, even after we've decided nothing will come of it. Those always seem to be the times we see something really spectacular, or something we hadn't expected. Nature is like that, I guess: always offering up something when you don't expect it.

South Branch WMA: a very birdy grassland walk (without the ticks)

Wrong turns uncover a lot of great surprises for us Hidden New Jersey nuts. I guess that's not surprising, as you don't go places you don't usually visit. (I'm feeling a lot like Yogi Berra right about now.)

It was a wrong turn that helped us discover a beautiful grassland birding spot in Hunterdon and Somerset Counties a couple of weekends ago. I won't bore you with the logistical details, but it involved taking 287 in the wrong direction to get to 78 and then wandering around looking for an appropriate ATM. The net was that after driving through some classic Central Jersey former farmland/present subdivision terrain, we found ourselves in open fields, some covered with crops, others laying fallow.

Grassland is in woefully short supply in New Jersey. With so many families getting out of agriculture over the past few decades, a great deal of pasture has been converted to residential use. The farms that do remain are often pushing to get the greatest productivity possible from their acreage, meaning that fewer fields lay fallow to recover after a planting year. Translated to bird talk, there's less room for grassland species to nest and feed, putting them in danger. A large percentage of the birds on the lists of state endangered and threatened species are those who count on this type of habitat.

Always on the lookout for good habitat, we stopped a few times to check for birdage, particularly the grassland species Ivan needs for his year list. Then we came upon a brown plank sign labeling the entrance to the South Branch Wildlife Management Area. This was a new one for both of us, and if the fields we'd just past were any indication of the quality of its habitat, we needed to check it out.

A paved road leads off the road but is blocked by a padlocked gate fifty yards or so in. We parked the car nearby and walked around the gate posts to explore further up the road, which appeared to end at a crest in the hill. To the left was a broad field of assorted grasses and wildflowers, while the clearing to the right was edged by a thick stand of trees. From the music we were hearing, we could tell this was prime territory. Why hadn't we heard about this spot before?

Walking along, we were able to spot most of the usual suspect birds, as well as some of their brighter cousins. Indigo bunting, yellow warbler and goldfinch were regular sights, as were both Baltimore and orchard orioles. The orchards, in particular, were unusually plentiful; we must have seen three or four juvenile males before finding an adult.

We also scared up a fox who'd been obscured by the tall grass. Not wanting to deal with us, he trotted down the road and found refuge in the woods. He might have been the one who'd left the scat I'd noticed at spots on the pavement; we didn't see any deer. Or, perhaps, it might have been the byproduct of whoever left the claw marks I thought I saw in some mud.

In any case, the road kept going once we reached the rise, terminating at an old prefab metal building. Even though the property appeared to stretch far beyond, we chose not to do any bushwacking. We've had more than our share of post-trip tick discoveries so far this season, and we were both relieved to be birding somewhere productive that didn't require us to walk through brush. There was no need, anyway: a connecting road led across the property and was just calling out to us. How could we resist the invitation?

Like the Negri Nepote Grasslands we visited last year, this field hosts a long row of 300kv transmission lines that announce themselves with a buzzy hum as you approach. Also like last year's experience, a red tail hawk was perched about midway up one of the transmission towers, occasionally screaming to warn us away. This one, though, wasn't nesting and didn't appear to have young nearby at all. He seemed to be preening or airing out one of his wings, creating a somewhat cloaklike shape on one side. At first we wondered if he might be injured, but after taking looks from several perspectives as we walked further down the trail, we decided he was fine. Maybe a little wet from the previous night's rain, but fine, nonetheless.

The path continued down a short, gentle incline to a wooded area complete with a tiny brook, and then back up to another field. Finding nothing really different in terms of habitat or birds, we decided to turn back and continue on our road trip travels. Even though we hadn't found Ivan's target birds there, we'd seen enough to know that South Branch WMA was a definite option for future exploration.