For a few days early in June of this year, my wife, Sue, and I visited Cape May County, New Jersey. We mostly explored natural areas, including beaches, and salt marshes between the barrier beaches and the mainland, not by bush wacking, but from people-use areas, as many people would see that region. Anybody who looks for nature a little will see the same obvious creatures we did.
Always abundant, attractive and on the move in search of food, laughing gulls almost undoubtedly will be the first creatures seen and heard in Cape May County. They have a loud, characteristic call that sounds like someone laughing.
Laughing gulls visit beaches, boardwalks and parking lots where they scavenge people food, salt marshes where each pair raises about three young, fields where they eat earthworms and other invertebrates and coastal waters of the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay where they get aquatic food, including live and dead fish. Laughing gulls are THEE gulls of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts from Massachusetts to Texas, including Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and much of Florida.
The extensive, grassy salt marshes between the barrier beaches and the wooded mainland from Cape May north to Ocean City are flat and veined with tidal channels. Salt water surges in and out of these channels along with the ocean tides. Sometimes the channels are full of water and other times they are only half-full, with much exposed mud flats on both sides of each one.
We visited the salt marshes around Cape May, Wildwood and Stone Harbor a few times. The birds we saw mostly in those marshes were the large, white great egrets and snowy egrets, which were there to catch fish, crabs and other critters. Great egrets are twice the size of snowies and both species could be seen from a distance.
We saw other kinds of birds in and over those same salt marshes in those few days in June. We saw a group of nine glossy ibis poking their long, decurved beaks into the mud under the grass to catch crabs, worms and other types of invertebrates. Incidentally, we also saw another gathering of seven ibis poking into a large, fresh-water puddle on somebody's lawn to get food.
We saw several individual ospreys flying, soaring and hovering over the salt marsh channels in their search for large fish to catch and eat, and feed to their young. These ospreys nest on flat platforms erected in the marshes by people to help ospreys increase their populations. When an osprey spots a vulnerable fish it dives headfirst to the water and catches the prey with its curved, sharp talons, splashing on the water's surface in the process. Then it lifts from the water with mighty wing beats and flies to a perch to eat its catch or feed it to its offspring.
We saw several male red-winged blackbirds, that were splendid in their black feathering with red shoulder patches, singing "o-ka-lee" from phragmites and the tops of bushes and trees on the edges of the salt marshes. We only saw a few female red-wings in their brown and black-streaked plumage, but they were busy with nest-building among the phragmites or setting on eggs or small young.
We also saw a few common terns hovering over salt marsh channels to watch for small fish and diving into the water when a finny victim was spotted. We saw a willet snaring invertebrates in the mud of a salt marsh pool. Willets are a kind of large sandpiper that has a nesting population in salt marshes along the east coast. A clapper rail was spotted walking along a mud flat near salt marsh grasses in its search for invertebrates in the exposed mud before the water comes back. And an adult bald eagle was seen over a salt marsh where it probably was searching for fish to catch, or steal from an osprey.
Diamond-backed terrapins are in these salt marshes, but we didn't see any on this visit to Cape May. The Wetlands Institute, located in a salt marsh just outside Stone Harbor, is restoring the terrapin's population by protecting nests of eggs in the sand with wire covers to keep raccoons, gulls and herons from eating the eggs and newly-hatched young. And personnel from that institute get viable eggs from road-killed females and hatch and raise the young until they are big enough not to be readily eaten by predators.
Sue and I saw a few remaining spawning horseshoe crabs, which are not really crabs, on Delaware Bay beaches near where the bay empties into the ocean. A handful of laughing gulls attended those prehistoric critters to eat as many of their eggs as they could. A couple of weeks ago, many thousands of horseshoe crabs were on the beaches of both sides of Delaware Bay to spawn millions of little green eggs. Then thousands of laughing gulls and tens of thousands of sandpipers of at least four kinds, least sandpipers, sanderlings, red knots and ruddy turnstones, were on hand to eat those eggs, creating a unique natural spectacle for several days. The shorebirds used the energy from those ingested eggs to make the last part of their trip from South America and the Caribbean to the Arctic tundra to raise young.
While on Cape May beaches we also saw a few each of flying black skimmers and common terns and one least tern. These related birds nest on beaches and catch small fish from large bodies of water along the coast, the skimmers in a unique way. Skimmers' lower mandibles are longer than their upper ones. They poke the tip of their lower mandible in the water and fly just above the water. When a small fish bumps their mandibles, skimmers snap their beaks shut, thus capturing the prey.
We also saw several surfacing bottle-nosed dolphins from Sunset Beach where Delaware Bay pours into the Atlantic. Those whale relatives are always a treat to see, partly because one doesn't see them every day, though I have seen dolphins from beaches at Hilton Head and Charleston, South Carolina, and the outer banks of North Carolina.
Groups of these dolphins swim along under water, each mammal surfacing about every twelve or more seconds to exhale and inhale air, then diving under again and moving forward. They often travel near coastlines, the reason they are sometimes noticed from beaches.
Bottle-nosed dolphins are the most common of dolphins in North America. They are gray, up to twelve feet long, with a beak about three inches long. They mostly eat fish and squid.
We saw a few each of fish crows and boat-tailed grackles around Cape May and the marshes around it, and a thriving purple martin colony by the parking lot at Cape May Point State Park. Scores of martins were constantly flying toward and away from their grouping of purple martin nest boxes, making an entertaining, inspiring spectacle.
Northern mockingbirds were everywhere in abundance wherever there were thickets of bushes and vines, in the towns and countryside. We would see them on lawns, flying across streets and flitting into jungles of shrubbery. And, sometimes, we would hear them sing.
And we saw a beautiful, healthy female box turtle safely cross a rural road. She probably was looking for a place to lay her three to five eggs in a hole she would dig in the sandy soil since June is turtle nesting season.
All these animals we saw by casually looking for them. Anyone can do the same in Cape May County, New Jersey.
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