Sunny, breezy, and
mid 70s
One day every year, the
Rutgers University Marine Field Station in Tuckerton, NJ opens its doors to the
public to let us see what it is that they are up to out at the end of this long
boardwalk. The Field Station has
been in operation for 40 years now and is now dedicated to studies involving
larval fish sampling, trapping, and otter trawling to help evaluate the status
of fish population in the estuary and the ocean.
The Station is an old Coast
Guard installation at the very end of Seven Bridges Road which we visited
earlier this year. The road, now
known as Great Bay Boulevard, runs through the extensive marshlands of the
Mullica River-Great Bay Estuary.
The birding along the road is quite good, so needless to say, it took us
a while to get out to the open house as we stopped at every pull-off and scoped
out the marsh. Of note today were
several birds which aren’t necessarily rare but that we don’t often see in New
Jersey. The Little blue heron is a
common sight when we are down in Florida, but here it is a treat to find
one. The second sighting of a less
common bird here in the bay was a pair of Tricolor heron. We almost drove right by them, mistaking
them for the much more ubiquitous Great blue heron. As we got the bins on the birds, however, it became obvious
what we had and I managed to get a few definitive shots off.
 |
| Tricolor heron |
As we scanned the horizon for
more avian species, the classic chatter of the Belted kingfisher was
heard. We pulled our gazes away from
the binocular and scope eyepieces to see the bird’s path of flight directly in
front of us. He landed on a telephone
wire (how much longer will those exist?) at some distance but not so far off as
to deny us an documentary quality image.
Well aware of the fact that
the open house at the Field Station did not extend into the evening hours, we
finally agreed that it was time to move on and get to our final destination. When we arrived we were pleased to find
a well planned flow of activities to acquaint us with the everyday goings-on
here. Brief talks and demos
on such topics as the use of otodonts (ear bones) to age fish and determine
such specifics as quality of the water in which these fish were found. Another scientist from Rider University
was studying the Blue claw crab population in the bay while still another was
explaining her research on the impact of commercial vs recreational fishing on
Black sea bass in the bay. All in
all, it was a fascinating couple of hours, hours well spent in learning about this
facility which we have seen for years but had little knowledge of its
importance to the estuary. 
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