{"id":61,"date":"2014-06-28T01:18:03","date_gmt":"2014-06-28T01:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/?p=61"},"modified":"2014-08-03T19:37:06","modified_gmt":"2014-08-03T19:37:06","slug":"na0411-northeastern-coastal-forests-off-with-a-bang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/2014\/06\/28\/na0411-northeastern-coastal-forests-off-with-a-bang\/","title":{"rendered":"Launching the Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to our blog<\/h3>\n

France and I have launched a plan to visit each of the 109 terrestrial ecoregions of North America (see the overall map of North American ecoregions on the About page). Sixty have already been visited and birded, so 49 to go \u2013 this will take quite a few years\u2026 In this blog, I plan to write sporadically about our travel adventures, about ecoregion birding, ecology, and whatever related subject pops up.\u00a0 All photos posted will be from France Marcoux, unless otherwise stated.<\/p>\n

The site is also a resource center for ecoregion birding. If you want to dig around a bit, you\u2019ll find a page for each of the 109 ecoregions with a nice map, description, and relevant birding information (texts under development).<\/p>\n

Ecoregion birding is the idea of keeping bird records by ecoregions. They have been\u00a0defined by WWF, based on ecological criteria, for the entire world. This seems to make more sense than keeping lists by county, state, province, or country, which have less biological interest.<\/p>\n

Things that go bang in the night!<\/h3>\n

And yes, I mean literally, with a bang! May 24, 2014 was the day we chose to kick things off, with a visit to the Northeastern Coastal Forests Ecoregion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We got to bed early Friday night in our motel near Atlantic City, NJ, in order to make a dawn start, something that is not\u00a0normally in our vocabulary… Bang! About 1:00 in the morning from\u00a0the next room. As one does in the kind of motel we were in, we ignored our neighbors and went back to sleep. But within 30 minutes we were again woken to a parking lot literally teeming with more than 20 police officers and firefighters, flashing police cars, and fire trucks. A few minutes later, a bang on the door \u2013 we were ordered to evacuate our room. There was fear the building’s structure was compromised and the second floor balcony might collapse. A drunk driver, a very drunk driver, had launched his SUV into the corner of\u00a0the motel, about 10 m down from our door, taking out\u00a0the corner support of the building and crushing the external staircase.<\/p>\n

\"Motel1\"\"Motel2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Thus it is, that the dawn start remained out of our vocabulary! Nevertheless we did get to the famed beaches and woods of Cape May Park State Park about 7:00 am. The Northeastern Coastal Forests Ecoregion stretches from 20 km north of our home in Maryland to southern Maine. The typical habitat of this vast ecoregion would be oak\u00a0forests (white oak and northern red oak). Like any ecoregion however, it is a mosaic of interrelated habitats, and this ecoregion includes coastal woodlands and wetlands, now largely lost. Those were our target that day and the bird we particularly wanted to see was the increasingly rare Red Knot, an elegant shorebird.<\/p>\n

Delaware Bay in late May is witness to\u00a0the amazing spectacle of nesting horseshoe crabs. These creatures, having evolved a few hundred million years before birds (!), lay billions of eggs on sandy beaches up and down the eastern coast of the US but\u00a0the largest population by far is in Delaware Bay. A\u00a0minuscule number of the eggs will survive but the rest will be food for famished migrating Red Knots arriving from Tierra del Fuego each May, and tens of thousands of other shorebirds and gulls. The crabs are being over-exploited by people and their numbers are declining. Red Knots were once abundant on the bay in late May but their numbers continue to drop every year, corresponding to the decline in crabs. We saw a hundred or so knots flashing back and forth but this pales even to what we saw in our last May visit here, about 15 years ago.<\/p>\n

\"Horseshoe<\/a><\/p>\n

As part of this effort to see all the ecoregions, I\u2019ve also set out to record all of the 670 regularly occurring bird species of North America. So far I\u2019m 510 species (76%) of my way toward that goal. On this visit, we saw a Blue Grosbeak, a notch in the belt. Reasonably common in the eastern US, but I hadn\u2019t managed to see one before. France and I found one during a Christmas Bird Count in the late 1980s in Qu\u00e9bec City; it was a sensational record at the time as it had never been recorded in the province in the winter, and very rarely even in the summer. So sensational, that the experts eventually decided it had to have been an escaped cage bird, so nobody was allowed to count it. Got it this time!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Welcome to our blog France and I have launched a plan to visit each of the 109 terrestrial ecoregions of North America (see the overall map of North American ecoregions on the About page). Sixty have already been visited and birded, so 49 to go \u2013 this will take quite a few years\u2026 In this… Continue reading Launching the Blog<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1077,"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/1077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/039adfd.netsolhost.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}