Where to Bird?

Wranglebrook, deep in the woods

Never have I been so happy to have a WMA behind the house as I have been lately. With all state and county parks closed, along with the state forests and many other sites, I'm lucky that I can just walk out the door and get away from the headlines for a while, find some birds, get my steps in.

I see a lot of discussion as to whether this hot spot or that locale is open or not and if so, how crowded is it? My attitude is, if you have to ask, you shouldn't go there. In a way, closing almost everything is counter productive because it just concentrates the joggers, dog walkers, cyclists in the few remaining area, making it not only difficult to socially distance but it ruins the birding as well so as to make it pointless. And the idea is to keep you close to home.

Now I know some roads that I go to where it is unlikely I'll see a soul, but I'm not saying where they are. I may eventually get antsy enough that I'll want to walk there. For the last week or so I have alternated between the WMA and walking the streets of my development over to the power line cut that runs along one edge of it and back around to home. I would suggest power line cuts as a very good alternative to parks and trails. Birds love edges and the cuts have lots of edges, margins, and streams on either side. Lots of varying habitat. Just don't go on my power line cut.

As to the WMA, I have been exploring it more deeply than I ever have in 8+ years we've lived here. A few days ago I took a walk all the way up to Wranglebrook. This is a stream that starts in what I guess is the Crossley Preserve as something of a trickle and winds up behind an industrial park in South Toms River as a large pond-like body of water that is a tributary of the Toms River itself. A few years ago, I figured that if there was a Wranglebrook Road there must be a Wranglebrook itself and set out to find it. Once I did, I rarely went back. It has changed in the intervening years. Where once it was channeled through a culvert under the dirt road, that culvert has cracked and crumbled and now the stream, much more than the thin stream I remember in the summer, floods over the dirt road.

Then yesterday I took a route in the WMA that on a map looked plausible but that I had never done before. I walked a 4 mile loop from my house, past the the pond then, instead of making a right and walking toward the cul de sac on Congasia and turning around (which would be 2 miles out and 2 miles back, I kept going straight and walked on the dirt roads that are the continuations of Wranglebrook and Schoolhouse Road. It is all pine forest except for a few clearings. The clearings tend to produce the more interesting birds, like Field Sparrow, swallows or hunting raptors. Now that I know my way around (literally) I'm more inclined to investigate those bare squares on the map. But yesterday I did have, in one tree, Pine, Palm, and Yellow-rumped Warblers. You take what you can get under the circumstances. I have a life list of 95 species in the WMA, so eventually I will fill in the some of the lacunae on my year list; I keep hoping something really exciting will show up in some unexplored corner of the woods.

Everybody is getting restless. Shari is restless. I know I'm restless. I don't want to be a hypocrite and look askance at some of the lists I'm seeing and then go out and take a drive to Tuckerton, to finally see some shorebirds and terns and waders, but building up my year list in the midst of what Bernie Sanders so eloquently called "a fucking global catastrophe," isn't uppermost in my mind. Maintaining my sanity is and the only way I have ever found to do that is to walk. And walk. And walk. And maybe find a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher in a tree where I thought I saw a titmouse.