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.

New Jersey Birds Winter 2009

I've been remiss here in noting the appearance of the Winter 2009 issue of New Jersey Birds. This is the first online-only issue of the journal. In addition to the normal seasonal reports, it includes an article on NJ's first Long-billed Murrelet. You can find the PDF here.

The decision to make NJB an online journal was, to put it mildly, a controversial one. Personally, I prefer leafing through my stacks of back (print) issues (and do so on a regular basis, between random curiosity, researching a project, and looking up something for NJBRC business). As someone who has written for (and, more importantly, reported sightings to) the journal in the past, I can't help but wonder what the future holds for NJB. I do hope it continues, since it is an essential source of information on the state's birds.

In the Mailbox: New Jersey Birds Summer 2008

Yesterday I got the latest issue of New Jersey Birds in the mail. This issue features an article on the first state record of Lesser Nighthawk by Michael O'Brien, as well as a couple of notes by yours truly (Barnacle Goose added to the full State List, Cave Swallow dropped from the Review List).

I'm not writing this post to toot my own horn, though. If you belong to NJ Audubon, you can receive New Jersey Birds as part of your membership at no extra charge. You have to ask for it, though, and it's easy to overlook on your membership renewal form. I'm not sure that there is any organized way to sign up for NJB when becoming a new member, though I would be more than happy to be corrected and hear otherwise. Please comment, if so.

The articles in NJB usually deal with significant avian events such as first state records, or in another example, NJ's first Royal Tern nesting colony (that article was in the spring issue). NJBRC business is also published in the journal; the fall issue always contains the NJBRC Annual Report, along with color photos of some of the rarities that were voted on during the circulation year.

The real meat of NJB (or RNJB to us old-timers, since the journal's name used to be Records of New Jersey Birds) is the sighting reports. NJ is divided into five regions (which are also used in Boyle's A Guide to Bird Finding in New Jersey), each of which has a regional compiler (here's the current list of compilers). You can also look at NJB issues back to fall 2006 as PDFs on this page, though there are many years of previous issues that have not been digitized (hint: snap them up if you stumble across them).

Although we are in a transitional time when it comes to the technology of sharing bird sightings (eBird, anyone?), the framework of regional compilers found in NJ and other states (and upon which North American Birds is also built) is the traditional means for reporting sightings of interest. Looking at past issues of NJB can give you an idea of what observations are particularly interesting in terms of the state's historical record (and no, Review List species are not the only birds of interest). It's certainly easy to send an e-mail to JerseyBirds or post your photos on Flickr, but you'll make compilers' jobs a little easier if you send your observations directly to them as well.

In the Mailbox

This week, the latest issues of New Jersey Birds (NJB) and North American Birds (NAB) arrived. NJB is published by the NJ Audubon Society. It's a benefit of membership, but you have to request it, so pay attention to your renewal form if you would like to subscribe to the print version. There are also plans to post issues on the web going forward.

NJB's fall issue, as always, contains the Annual Report of the NJ Bird Records Committee (NJBRC). The 2006 Annual Report covers records from 2005 and a few that edge over into the beginning of 2006 (not to mention a Franklin's Gull record from 1993). Disclaimer: yours truly is one of the six co-authors on this year's Annual Report. In addition to the Annual Report, the current issue of NJB contains articles on NJ's first state records of Green Violet-Ear and Brown-headed Nuthatch, plus field notes and photos from the spring 2006 season.

NAB is now published by the American Birding Association; it has had a long history under a number of titles and was originally published by the National Audubon Society. When I started subscribing to it, it was American Birds. The current issue also covers the spring 2006 season. One of the highlights of the season was the White-tailed Hawk at Great Swamp NWR; it receives its own SA sidebar in the Hudson-Delaware column (Veit & Paxton 2006) and the photos appear in the Pictorial Highlights section. The main articles are all extralimitals, as far as Jersey birders are concerned: Streaked Shearwater and Lesser Frigatebird in Wyoming, Kirtland's Warbler in Cuba and Striated Heron in the Greater Antilles.

Veit, Richard R., & Robert O. Paxton. 2006. Spring Migration, Hudson-Delaware Region. North American Birds 60:353-357.