South Mountain Reservation and Hemlock Falls

South Mountain Reservation was one of my youthful playgrounds. I rode my bike there and walked the trails without the aid of trail maps or blazes 50 years ago.

Back then, there was a deer paddock that held the deer in check and where families came to feed the deer. Back in the day, deer were an oddity for most urban and suburban kids. The paddock is gone and the progeny of those deer have spread far and wide around that area.

I didn't know the details back then but South Mountain Reservation covers 2,110 acres (8 km2). It is part of the Essex County Park System and portions of it are in Maplewood, Millburn and West Orange. It borders South Orange, between the first and second ridges of the Watchung Mountains.

I liked thinking as I walked along the Washington Rock area that once there were Revolutionary soldiers there guarding a signal fire that would warn General Washington's Army at Morristown that the British were approaching from the east. It was the site of Beacon Signal Station 9 (of 23) built by General Washington to observe British troop movements quartered on Staten Island and New York City.

From this outlook, on June 23, 1780, the Essex County and Newark Militia were first warned that the British had launched an attack westward toward "the Gap," (Hobart Gap), a natural pathway to Washington's troops encamped at Morris Town. 

In what was termed a "pincer movement," Hessian troops fought along Vaux Hall Road, while the British advanced along Galloping Hill Road. The Hessians were stopped at the base of the First Watchung Mountain. The British were defeated in Springfield.

Campbell Pond

There are a number of trails rated easy to moderate. Some are quite rocky and there are a few easy stream crossings that in the heat of summer may be dry creek beds. There is one more significant crossing over the Rahway River. The Lenape and Oakdale trails are probably the most popular.

The Reservation is both north and south of South Orange Avenue with the northern half stretching to Northfield Avenue in West Orange near the Turtle Back Zoo and Orange Reservoir. The southern half extends to Glen Ave. in Millburn and includes Campbell's Pond - where we fished as kids. We referred to it as Diamond Mill and it is near the Papermill Playhouse.

There are several trail maps available and even a Google map that shows the Lenape Trail. This suburban wilderness has several parking areas, formal trails, and some woods roads that can be used.

You can find more information and maps in the New Jersey Walk Book and Hiking New Jersey: A Guide To 50 Of The Garden State's Greatest Hiking Adventures

    

New Jersey Furbearers

American mink

Despite the title of an online article, "The American Mink, one of N.J.’s most common semi-aquatic carnivore," I myself (and I suspect many readers) have never seen a mink in my Jersey travels. The mink (Mustela vison) is native to the state, although it is thought that escapees from mink farms have interbred with wild mink.

The mink is not threatened in the state and has a stable population. Not threatened, unless you consider that The New Jersey Hunting and Trapping Digest lists raccoon, skunk, opossum, weasel, mink, muskrat, red and gray fox, coyote, beaver, otter and nutria as species that have open seasons for trapping in the State of New Jersey. (In New Jersey, a Trapper Education course must be passed and a trapping license obtained to trap in the state - see http://www.state.nj.us/dep/fgw/trapping_info.htm)

Several of these species were not here historically or disappeared and have only returned through re-introductions.

Native to NJ are the river otter (Lontra canadensis), long-tailed (Mustela frenata) and short-tailed ermine (Mustela ermine). Also native are the striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis), raccoon (Procyon lotor) or gray fox (Urocyon cinereorgenteus).

Coyotes, which are now being reported with more frequency in the state, were never present in New Jersey until the past fifty or so years. Their appearance is due to many factors including habitat loss in their previous area of habitation. The current theory is that overall movement (based on DNA sampling) in the last century by the western coyote to the midwest, Great Lake states and through Lower Canada led to some western coyotes mating with gray wolves. Their offspring moved further eastward through Lower Canada and down through the New England states and into the Mid-Atlantic States.

NJ had gray wolves in the state until about the mid-1850s. Today, there are no wolves in New Jersey outside of zoos and preserves. But the eastern coyote appears to be here to stay.

Some of our other furbearing creatures past and present include:

• Marten (Martes americana) historically present but extirpated since the mid-1800s
• The fisher (Martes pennanti) also extirpated but again present in Sussex and Warren counties although few in number. Probably due to re-introduction by New York and Pennsylvania in the last decade
• Beaver (Castor canadensis) had almost disappeared from here by the early 1800s. It is believed that some escapees from the Rutherford-Stuyvesant game preserve in Allamuchy, Warren County established a breeding population. Restocking enabled the beaver to re-establish itself by the mid-20th century. 
• Most common to us is the raccoon which is, was and has always been a native of New Jersey and was a species that the British explorers to this new land reported, since they did not exist in Britain.
• Opossum (Didelphis virginiana) was thought to be numerous in the central and southern part of the state in the late 1860s, but in the last hundred years the range of both opossum and raccoons has extended much further north including into Canada where they historically never existed.

opossum

NJ Webcams

There are a good number of webcams online that let you peek at parts of the state.

You can watch folks on the quiet end of the boardwalk at Seaside Park, or move north to the livelier boardwalk in Seaside Heights, or much further north to the Great Falls in Paterson.

EarthCam and the Friends of Island Beach State Park set up a live streaming look at an osprey who calls Island Beach State Park. Island Beach is one of New Jersey's last significant remnants of a barrier island ecosystem that once existed along much of the Atlantic coast. That webcam has been more off than online this summer, but you can check it out at  earthcam.com/usa/newjersey/islandbeachstatepark/osprey/

Shorebirds Make Their August Return to New Jersey

Baird's Sandpiper (Calidris bairdii) by Dominic Sherony [CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Via the "Seen in New Jersey" column written by Pete Bacinski (New Jersey birder and retired NJ Audubon All Things Birds program director) comes the reminder that shorebirds are now returning from nesting grounds in the high Arctic to the Jersey shore.

Like many NJ people, these birds have found that the late summer and after Labor Day are very nice times to enjoy our state. People think of migrations as an autumn event, but in this case this part of August is the time for neotropic migrant passerines, or perching birds, to migrate and it is the peak of shorebird migration. Pete says that the second half of August has the highest shorebird diversity of the year.

This is a great time to see birds foraging in mudflats, sandy beaches, sod farms and grassy areas. A choice spot is the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. This refuge has 47,000 acres of marshland and forest and the Brigantine Division in Galloway is the place to be for shorebirds at this time of year.

Other locations worth checking:

• Barnegat Impoundments, in Barnegat Township, also part of Forsythe NWR
• TNC Meadows in Cape May
• Stone Harbor
• Island Beach State Park
• Sandy Hook (north end)
• New Jersey Meadowlands, around the DeKorte Environment Center
• Whitesbog cranberry bogs and mudflats (when drained)

Baird's sandpiper (shown at top) and the buff-breasted sandpiper, as well as the rare American golden plover love sod farms and grassy fields in places like Brigantine.These two sandpipers (AKA grasspipers) don't appear here in spring migration because they take a central flyway when they head north. Upland sandpipers, a New Jersey endangered species, is ending its migration through NJ now.

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New Jersey Audubon's All Things Birds will sponsor these birding field trips:

Aug. 23: Forsythe (Brigantine) National Wildlife Refuge
Aug. 30: Forsythe (Brigantine) National Wildlife Refuge
There is a fee for these events: $20 for members and $25 for nonmembers. For more information or to register, call the Scherman-Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuaries at (908) 766-5787.