Serendipity is...

Glancing out the window at work while in the middle of a discussion about bird feeding and seeing this:

The less dramatic but non-seasickness-inducing version:

I have seen far more dead River Otter in Cape May County than live otter. The peninsula isn't, or wasn't, ever truly solid ground; many creeks crossed and criss-crossed the land and in some places they still do. Unfortunately, highways now cross the creeks, and otter are only one of the many victims.

So when I looked out the window and saw a live otter, I perhaps screamed a bit. Not too loudly (I'm trying). I knew this oversized pond had otter although this isn't where I had my one live sighting. But to learn the lake also had American Eel was icing on the cake. (A frantic rush to Wikipedia jogged loose what I had learned a long time ago about eels: I knew that for some part of their life cycle they lived in fresh water and headed out to sea the other half but I couldn't remember which way they went. Adults in fresh; spawn in salt. Catadromous, if you wish to get technical about it.)

We used to occasionally catch small eels in our minnow trap off our dock in Avalon, about a foot long and maybe half an inch in diameter and I remember my great uncle used to catch and eat (blech!) much larger ones. I watched a Double-crested Cormorant swallow an eel about the size of this one (couple of feet and inches around) just a year or so ago, but those eels were all in the brackish tidal zone of the back bay salt marshes, not an apparently land-locked little city lake... Wow.

Apologies for the shaking video (iMovie actually was able to stabilize it a bit) and grainy photos (which I had to screen-capture).

Muckin' in the Marsh...

The only way to navigate the marsh trail at the Wetlands Institute a few weeks ago was barefoot. (I happen to love the smell of marsh mud, but it can really stick with you. Wouldn't have been so bad had I thought to rinse inside the cuffs of my jeans…)

The puddle held its bitty wee tiny minnows (marshland = nursery) and the creeks on a low tide held mud snails. Lots and lots of mud snails, most following the water down the banks to concentrate in what little water was left when the tide ebbed. [Click on photo to see 'em.]

Some beastie had a successful crabbing trip, but after eating out the entire body left the best parts! Guess they didn't have claw crackers. (No need to ask why they are called blue claw crabs, eh?)

A lifetime picking and eating these and I hadn't really paid attention to the two different types of teeth. The one claw looks like it has molars!

A familiar sight in the high marsh: fiddler crab burrow.

Uca pugnax! Okay, so I try not to overwhelm my readers with scientific names but I've loved this one (along with Uca pugilator [sand fiddler] and U. minax [red claw fiddler]) from the moment I learned them. That over-sized claw on male fiddlers helps attract the ladies and fend off other males. (It also means that they have only one claw with which to eat.)

A WALK IN THE WOODS

The weather was fine (okay, it was actually ridiculously hot for an April afternoon, something that is happening far too frequently in recent years if you ask me) and I had the holiday off, so I decided to take a ramble through one of our local parks, Belleplain State Forest, with a local New Jersey Audubon/CMBO program.




Fiddleheads.


Blueberries-to-be! (You may be able to tell I'm shooting over my head = highbush blueberries.)


Pitch pine alive.


Pitch pine (?) dead.


Maple seeds. With many apologies to Charlie Harper, but I think I found something not only “as red as” but perhaps even "redder than a cardinal"… (And when I manage to find the full quote, I'll post it.)


Aaahhhhh.....


Sphagnum moss, in living color! Far cry from the dry brown stuff most of us only ever see if we happen to grow houseplants.


Well, lookee there... Fascinated with the moss, I found someone else who liked it too!


So just how good is that camera in your iPhone? (It was the view screen that was actually giving her trouble.)

WANDERINGS ON A WARM DAY

Everybody was out enjoying a warm and sunny afternoon last week. This cabbage white (?) female Falcate Orangetip [oh now doesn't it just figure? I didn't look it up and it was a special butterfly! The males have the orange tips, by the by] looks like it’s been out and about quite a bit already and on much less congenial days than this one was. (It’s nectaring on some kind of mustard. Think it’s a mustard. No, I didn’t try to ID the plant. More on mustards later.)


Itty bitty not-yet monkey balls!


Well, what do you call the seed cases of the sweet gum tree? I grew up with “monkey balls”… And I’m ashamed and astounded that I have spent twelve years in this place without ever getting out to see the sweet gums flower. (Must remember to check this tree again in a day or two.)


Sweet gum is a pioneer plant—it loves to be the first into disturbed ground. (This one is at the edge of the sand pile left when the house's foundation and septic system were installed.) Given that I live on what was once an agricultural field, I have sweet gum trees. Lots and lots and lots of sweet gum trees. And just look at the swathe of past years’ productivity under this particular one (liberally mixed with leaves, but mostly old seed cases). That’s one thing that makes a plant a good early-successional species: grow fast and prolifically…


A fellow walk-abouter out enjoying the unusually balmy April day. (Eastern box turtle whose amazingly red eyes didn’t show up in any of the photos I took.)


Probably should have cleaned this box out years ago. But someone was enjoying it. Although I do wonder how that side cracked open just so… Hmm.


A basic wild violet (again, do you really want me to key it out? ::whine::) has found it much prefers the richer soil to be had in a couple of my planters over the excuse for topsoil that covers many feet of sand here on the continent’s edge…


More planter volunteers.


No idea what it is* but it is rather pretty. It gets to stay until I find something else to put in this window box.


This is a native, and I know what it is! Blue-eyed grass, just up. This wee little thing is an iris (note the flat leaves in a flat fan-shape). How cool is that???

All in all, quite a lovely way to spend an hour, even if I paid for it with a touch of sun/windburn and enough ticks to keep me busy plucking them off for the next six hours... Having this little piece of paradise surrounding me really isn’t helping my hermit-like ways. Nor does it allow for much housework to be done.

Oh, well.

* ED. NOTE: Common chickweed. Non-native. Whatever... I still like it.

DODGED THE BULLET

Last week, anyway...


Ah, now that's more like it… Just enough snow to frost everything beautifully without any real activity- or safety-hampering accumulation, and not enough ice to cause any trouble despite the overnight precipitation veering randomly among rain, sleet, and various forms of snow with a chaser of South Jersey "breezes" (read: 20mph winds).


Perfect! Hours of morning sunshine added the finishing touch.


My grandmother once covered a short-needled Christmas tree entirely with pulled-apart cotton balls to get this effect. To this day, that tree remains one of the most stunning Christmas trees I've ever seen. (To this day, no one in my family has ever tried to duplicate the look. *lol*)


The snow (sleet, ice) allowed for nearly everything to be coated in sparkling white. (One of these days I really must do something about the multiflora rose--the midlevel bushes seen here--that is overtaking the yard. Alas, the white-throated sparrows were bouncing all around these thickets; the invasive, aggressive plants do provide wonderful shelter throughout the year.)


Luckily, the sweet gum and wild cherry trees are doing nearly as well as the non-native rose in reclaiming what was once an agricultural field.


I hear many people, including fine naturalists--outdoorsy people by definition--fuss about the dreariness and unprepossessing face of Winter. I've done it myself. While allowing that a considerable amount of the season can be rather unpleasant, with vistas like this even the worst complainers surely must admit that there is still much beauty and even color to be had!


And you never know what you may find when you get out into it. I was shooting the rising sun through the young sweet gum forest (not enough rain and not enough mowing over the years to keep once-designated-wetlands easily-viable wetlands) when I happened to glance up at the flowering cherry branch above my head and found it covered in "flowers"!


Fungus is fascinating stuff, and this delicate little specimen is delightful.


More color--an unusually bright green in wintertime. It only takes a bit of moisture to bring out the color in the various sorts of lichens to be found clinging to almost every tree around here. (And other surfaces; there's even one little patch on my roof. Not withstanding some serious droughts in recent years, we typically have a rather humid climate and lichens do very well.)


Mmm, more lovely winter colors courtesy of my neighbor-across-the-highway's house. Cape May's primary reputation is Victorian, but the peninsula was settled well over three hundred years ago. Outside of the City of Cape May, where successive fires left nothing much standing of pre-1870's architecture, you may easily find two hundred plus year old houses scattered about, quite a few of which don't look much different than the during days when they were first occupied. (Admittedly, the utility lines [and the cell tower you can't see in this shot] do detract somewhat from the illusion.)

If I might point out the tracks you may have noticed meandering down my drive in the above photo… Contrary to popular belief, I have not brought inside every stray cat who wanders through my property, as evidenced by those tracks. (A good many of them are actually rabbit tracks.) There is still at least one cat out there, who apparently includes a circumnavigation of my house on his daily rounds. I have set limits on myself: no more boy cats--they may be sweet, but they are, and cause, too much trouble in our house.


I'm very happy that the wildlife tracks far outnumber the housecat tracks!


On most occasions, anyway. I'm not sure if the wild and domestic mammals met up while coming or going out from under the shed or if the cat was merely investigating interesting smells. The cat doesn't stick around, but I did know that a coon or possum (perhaps both? that could get interesting…) had set up house there.


I love possum feet! (The rest of the beasties are pretty neat, too. Except for all of those teeth… Possums have an inordinately large number of teeth, which they know how to bare with incredible menace at anyone who displeases them. And they hiss. And growl. Especially once they've grown up. But even the adults have really cool feet.)


I know some people stumble across my blog because of the key words "Cape May" and "wren" and turn right 'round again when they don't find a birding blog based in one of the most avian-rich areas in the world. One of my intentions was to get out and highlight all that is good about the natural wonders of this county. But with a property like this, I often find it difficult to go beyond my own survey markers.


At least one of the neighbors chose to build his house closer to the highway than to my house, and left the back of his acreage go wild. So far his heirs have done the same. (We were never able to talk him into selling me this bit of ground. If the stars are kind, it will not be subdivided and/or I'll eventually be able to afford to talk somebody out of it.)


I know I am incredibly blessed by all that surrounds me just beyond my doorstep, but most of us needn't go too much farther to see Nature in all of her Winter splendor. So….Get out! Pfff, get cold: it won't kill you, and you just may find a new appreciation for a season that is here to stay for a considerable part of the year whether you like it or not.



*Photos from January 12, 2011. I really need an internet connection at the house...