Endangered New Jersey Is Nine Years Old

Today this blog is 9 years old. The idea of it is actually 19 years old. It began as a website built in 1999 for the ThinkQuest website competition for students. It was designed to be about endangered and threatened wildlife of the United States with a special focus on New Jersey, and it was built by three sixth grade students (one being my son) and their two teacher-coaches (one being me).

They chose endangered species because it is studied in almost all elementary schools and is popular with kids, but they didn't find any sites online about local New Jersey species. Since I had been a volunteer with the state's Wildlife Conservation Corps for several years, they thought I could help them narrow the website's focus to NJ species.

It went live March 31, 1999, and we notified the State of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection about the site and they provided a link to us on their site. The site was selected by Thinkquest as a Gold Award Winner in the Science and Math category.

The site was featured on New Jersey Search and was included in their search engine database as a "NJ Proud" site. The team presented a program along with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation at their former elementary school and received plaques of appreciation from the association for "promoting wildlife conservation awareness to the citizens of New Jersey."

The team also did a slide presentation on endangered species for the local Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting after a member of the group had seen the site in a newspaper feature and contacted us. The VFW post presented certificates of appreciation to the team members for their "service to the community."

The site was also featured in an article in the magazine New Jersey Outdoors in 2000.

This blog was my attempt to update the mission of the original site, and broaden the scope to include other topics about the diverse environments and species found in New Jersey, the challenges we face and what you can do to enjoy and protect them.

Ou top 5 most read posts over these years are:

1. New Jersey's Two Venomous Snakes
2. Seeing Wolves in New Jersey
3. Is That a Mountain Lion I See Wandering New Jersey?
4. Bobcat Sightings More Frequent in New Jersey     
5. New Jersey's Watchung Mountains

The blog crossed over the half a million visitors mark earlier this year, and I hope that the posts have educated not only New Jersey residents about people outside our state about the tremendous diversity in out wildlife, geography and resources and the challenges we face in protecting them.