Monday, July 20, 2009

New Jersey Birds Spring 2009


Husted Landing Sunset
Originally uploaded by ammodramus88
The Spring 2009 issue of New Jersey Birds has just been posted online; you can find it here. In addition to the usual seasonal reports and photos, there is also an interesting article laying out a possible future for the journal while sketching the evolution of some birding information networks.

There is also an article by Bill Boyle and Laurie Larson about the various (often hybrid) flocks of cranes that have called NJ home in recent years. One of these flocks is known to hang out at Husted Landing, Cumberland Co. Husted Landing is the location that supplied this post's photo: yes, we "got" the cranes as they came in, calling, at dusk, but low light is not conducive to solving difficult identification problems. The sunset that day was fabulous, though. So, it was "crane sp." and "great sunset to Flickr" for me.

Another feature of the latest NJB (hopefully to be continued) is "50 Years Ago," which reprints snippets of NJ Audubon bird sightings from a half-century ago. The current installment includes "mocking birds," House Finches of unknown origin (the question of western vagrants vs. NY escapes/releases), cranes, and legislation to protect birds of prey, "...except when in the act of killing poultry or livestock."

I will be the first to admit that I prefer doing my research by flinging my back issues of R/NJB all over the floor and rifling through them (then generating more research questions and flinging all my state bird books and N/ABs across the floor on top of the R/NJBs), but if NJB has to be online-only, I hope it will prosper in that format. NJ needs a permanent record of bird sightings. R/NJB has provided that in the past and hopefully can do so into the future.

4 comments:

Rick Wright said...

You've just described not only my desks but my mind.

Jennifer W. Hanson said...

Hee hee! :) I'd probably be better off if I could confine things to a desk! Maybe in another lifetime I'll have A) a "real" home office and B) the discipline to keep it semi-organized. I assume you're familiar with John Perry's web classic, "A Plea for the Horizontally Organized," which can be found at http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~jperry/plea.html .

Jochen said...

Thanks for the link to the crane hybrid article! This is neat and very interesting reading.

And I think your floor approach is the best, wait, only way to do it right! I fully subscribe to that!

Jennifer W. Hanson said...

Hi Jochen,

Thanks for stopping by! I'm glad you liked the crane article; I'd really love to know where that second Common Crane came from. I'm also delighted to have another vote for the "floor method" of doing research. Maybe we can start a movement...