The Great Hurricane of 1938

Hurricane 1938
Originally uploaded by UncoveringWestport

On this day in 1938, an unnamed storm blasted through the northeast without warning. In retrospect, it became known as the Great Hurricane of 1938, or the Long Island Express. Over 600 people died because of the storm, and it caused massive damage. It's become routine in this area (i.e., the NJ-tristate-midAtlantic area) to say, "We're overdue for a big storm," but if you read Everett S. Allen's A Wind to Shake the World, and look at the wake of recent hurricanes such as Ike (never mind Katrina), you'll probably wind up begging providence not to send one up this way. At least, I do. On one hand, we have much better advance warning systems in place today. On the other hand, I'm sure many more people live in the places ravaged by the 1938 hurricane today than did then.

When I realized that we were going to see the 70th anniversary of the 1938 storm this year, I started poking around in search of NJ bird records that might be related to it. I didn't have much luck; there were fewer observers then and the storm didn't ramp up to full intensity until it got north of NJ. What storm-related records there were tended to come from other states. The Auk had a good roundup of them (Allen et al. 1939).

But, as is often the case, NJ had a special wrinkle to add to the story. Well after the hurricane had passed and was wreaking havoc on New England, a series of huge waves came ashore in coastal NJ. Although it would seem that these waves were likely associated with the hurricane, it has also been hypothesized that the waves were actually tsunamis. Check out NOAA's page on Tidal Waves and Other Extreme Waves for more information.

The photo that illustrates this post comes from the Westport Historical Society in Westport, Massachusetts, which has posted a collection of hurricane photos on Flickr. An evocative post about the storm and its memory long after the fact comes from Churbuck.com.

Allen, Glover M. 1939. Hurricane aftermath. Auk 176-179. PDF here

Weather: Hanna

Over the weekend, Tropical Storm (currently) Hanna will be tracking through our area. Though the exact track is yet to be seen, Hanna has the potential to be a "bird storm" here in NJ. There are currently discussions about Hanna's birding potential on JerseyBirds and MDOsprey, at least; I'm sure others are happening on other states' lists as well. Just to make things more interesting, Hanna is being followed by Hurricane Ike (already Category 4, yikes!) and Tropical Storm Josephine.

NJ bird storms tend to track to the west of the Delaware River (but not always). Here are tracks of some past NJ bird storms courtesy of the UNISYS historical hurricane data site:

Connie (1955)
Donna (1960)
David (1979)
Bertha (1996)
Floyd (1999)
Isabel (2003)
Ernesto (2006)

Mention "hurricane" and "birds" in the same breath, and one probably thinks of tropical species like Sooty and Bridled terns. But the (blurry) photo that accompanies this post is of a Short-billed Dowitcher I found in a local farm field the day after Ernesto passed in 2006 (not long after I'd gotten my brand-new Canon A620 digital camera, not coincidentally). That puddle also hosted Semipalmated Sandpiper, Wilson's Snipe and Solitary Sandpiper. I probably would've found something really special if I'd checked that puddle during the height of the storm the day before. But, the point I'm trying to make is that while the rarities brought by a passing hurricane may be nice, the grounded migrants may provide equally good birding.

When I was chatting with my hurricane guru Rob Hilton last night, he mentioned Weather Underground's section on tropical weather. This site has such wonderful toys as a display of multiple models for a storm, and historic storm tracks that are (in the case of this one for Hanna) "1851-2006 tracks of all September tropical storms passing within 200 miles of Tropical Storm Hanna." Plus much more. It's a great resource for birders intrigued by weather (which is probably every birder who has a hurricane with the potential to dump good birds on them).

Good birding all, and let's be careful out there.

Frigatebird sp.

On this day in 1926, Mrs. Emlen H. Fisher spotted an odd bird at the beach in Cape May. "The bird hung perfectly motionless facing the wind for fifteen or twenty minutes and did not move an inch in space nor move a feather except to turn his head and look down at the small group of people gathered below," Mrs. Fisher wrote in a letter to Witmer Stone, who published the report in a note in the Auk (Stone 1928). Her account also mentioned a wingspan of at least three feet, a forked tail, and a curved bill. In sum, it added up to a frigatebird (or Man-o'-war-bird, as it was then known). Stone's account in Bird Studies at Old May Cape concludes, possibly a bit regretfully, "The fact that I had been on the beach several times on the day that Mrs. Fisher saw her bird and on every other day for a week or more shows how easily one may miss these rare stragglers to our coast and doubtless many more of this or other species go unrecorded" (Stone 1965).

Of course, Stone had found his own rarity on the Cape May beach the previous day, an Audubon's Shearwater. The frigatebird was believed to be a product of the same storm that had dropped the shearwater in the area, a strong hurricane that blasted through the Bahamas and well inland after making landfall in Florida. Although the shearwater succumbed, the frigatebird was last seen moving southward.

Due to the difficulties of identifying frigatebirds, along with the fact that the expected Magnificent Frigatebird is not the only frigatebird species with North American records, the NJBRC opted for the conservative approach of calling this (and other subsequent records) frigatebird sp. It wasn't until 2005's influx of nine frigatebirds that the documentation for two individuals established that they were Magnificents (Barnes et al. 2006).

Barnes, Scott, Joe Burgiel, Vince Elia, Jennifer Hanson, Laurie Larson, & Paul Lehman. 2006. New Jersey Bird Records Committee - Annual Report 2006. New Jersey Birds 32:66-76. PDF here

Stone, Witmer. 1928. The Man-o'-war-bird (Fregata Magnificens) at Cape May, N. J. Auk 45:367-368. PDF here

Audubon's Shearwater

On this day in 1926, Witmer Stone was out for a swim at the beach in Cape May when he spotted "a bird that was quite unknown" to him (Stone 1926). His account continues, "Upon swimming out I was able to approach near enough to convince myself that it was a Shearwater but I soon lost sight of it as the sea was choppy and the bird was constantly disappearing in the trough of the waves." The shearwater alternated between flying and sitting on the water "beyond the breakers."

As luck would have it, lifeguards in a boat off the beach picked up a moribund shearwater later on; it went to Dr. T. S. Palmer and his wife, who presented the bird (now dead) to Stone. It turned out to be a female Audubon's Shearwater and the specimen went to the collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Stone knew of only one previous NJ report of the species, "...Audubon's vague statement that he had seen them 'off Sany [sic] Hook'" (Stone 1926).

Stone may have been lucky to have a relatively uneventful swim, because the morning he chose for his dip was several days after a hurricane made landfall in Florida (and when another tropical storm was starting its trip up the Atlantic). The unnamed storm, the first of the season, wreaked havoc in the Bahamas before hitting Florida, continued inland as far as Louisiana, then reversed course and wound up at the Great Lakes by 2 August (storm track here).

Storm waifs were found in a number of Eastern states after this storm. South Carolina got White-tailed Tropicbird, Bridled Tern, and Brown Noddy, as well as multiple Sooty Terns and Audubon's Shearwaters (Sprunt 1926, Von S. Dingle 1927, Wayne 1926, Wayne 1927); two Sooty Terns were in North Carolina (Brimley 1926); and a Sooty Tern was in West Virginia (Johnston 1926).

Audubon's Shearwater was a good find indeed, but the storm had one last avian surprise in store for NJ. But that's tomorrow's post.

Anon. 1926. The Nassau Hurricane, July 25-26, 1926. Monthly Weather Review 54:296-297. PDF here
Brimley, H. H. 1926. Sooty Tern in North Carolina. Auk 43:535. PDF here
Johnston, I. H. 1926. Sooty Tern (Sterna fuscata) in West Virginia. Auk 43:535-536. PDF here
Sprunt, Alexander, Jr. 1926. The Sooty Tern (Sterna fuscata) at Charleston, S. C. Auk 43:535. PDF here
Stone, Witmer. 1926. Audubon's Shearwater at Cape May, N. J. Auk 43:536. PDF here
Von S. Dingle, E. 1927. Sooty Tern (Sterna fuscata) and Bridled Tern (Sterna anaetheta) on the South Carolina Coast. Auk 44:93-94. PDF here
Wayne, Arthur T. 1926. The Sooty Tern and Audubon's Shearwater in South Carolina. Auk 43:534-535. PDF here
Wayne, Arthur T. 1927. Two Birds New to the Fauna of South Carolina. Auk 44:94. PDF here

Black-capped Petrel

On this day in 1991, a pelagic trip to the Hudson Canyon found NJ's first Black-capped Petrel. NY also claims this bird, which may have been a result of the passage of Hurricane Bob. NY has the most records of this species for the local region, and most of those are also related to the passage of hurricanes (Levine 1998). One of Massachusetts' records was also during Bob, a bird off Eastham on Cape Cod (Veit & Petersen 1993). Black-capped Petrels regularly range northward in the Gulf Stream as far as North Carolina, so they are to be looked for on pelagic trips, whether or not hurricanes are involved.

NJ's only other record of Black-capped Petrel was a total of eight seen in off the Concrete Ship in Cape May during an afternoon seawatch after the passage of Hurricane Bertha on 13 July 1996 (NJ Hotline of 17 July 1996).

Levine, Emanuel. 1998. Bull's Birds of New York State. Comstock, Ithaca, NY.
Veit, Richard R., & Wayne R. Petersen. 1993. Birds of Massachusetts. Massachusetts Audubon Society, Lincoln, MA.

Brown Noddy

On this day in 1979, NJ got its first (and so far only) record of Brown Noddy. The bird was seen in Cape May by Pete Dunne, Dave Ward, R. Gardner and others in the wake of Hurricane David. Other David birds included nine records of Sooty Terns on 6 September 1979 (stretching from Cape May to Wyckoff in Bergen County) and a Bridled Tern in Cape May on 7 September 1979.