“CLEARING” – Poem, Day After Storm

Short-eared owl at Pole Farm by Brenda Jones

 

CLEARING

it is evening after storm

–the one entitled “Nor’easter Four”–

I drive with excessive caution

between fields devoted to farms

passing, first, the owl-wood

then harriers’ hunting grounds

 

on my left, hefty cows graze

as though any winter’s day

dark shapes contrasting with silos

gleaming with increasing sunset

 

the ruddy barn to my right

could be bonfire itself

constructed and ignited

by Thor and his henchmen

countering skies the hue

of antique pewter

 

perhaps tonight

short-eared owls will prowl

again, just as returned sun

sinks

 

“Nor’easter Four” having been agent

controlling travel

for short-ears and snowies

destined for the Arctic

 

CAROLYN FOOTE EDELMANN

 

Sunset Harrier, Pole Farm, by Brenda Jones

WHY I RUN AWAY TO ‘THE PINES’

 

EXCURSION TO THE BARRENS

 

I like to watch old farms wake up

ground fog furling within the turned furrows

as dew-drenched tendrils of some new crop

lift toward dawn

 

three solid horses bumble

along the split-rail fence

one rusting tractor pulsing

at the field’s hem

 

just over the horizon

the invisible ocean

paints white wisps

all along the Pinelands’

blank blue canvas

as gulls intensely circle

this tractor driver’s

frayed straw hat

 

from rotund ex-school buses

workers spill

long green rows suddenly peppered

by their vivid headgear

as they bend and bend again

to sever Jersey’s bright asparagus

 

some of which I’ll buy

just up ahead

at the unattended farm stand

slipping folded dollars

into the ‘Honor Box’

 

before driving so reluctantly

away from this region called ‘Barren’

where people and harvests

still move to seasons and tides

 

 

CAROLYN FOOTE EDELMANN

May 30, 2005/July 19, 2006

Princeton Alumni Weekly on Allegra Lovejoy and D&R Greenway’s Capital City Farm

U.S.1 Cover Story on Allegra and the Farm:  https://capitalcityfarm.org/2017/07/21/us-1-capital-city-goes-jersey-fresh-green/ use this to see splendid pictures of this miraculous farm manager and her loyal crew of helpers, employees and volunteers…    cfe    IN case any of you wonder why I continue to work at this advanced age at a non-profit dedicated to preserving scarce New Jersey land, here is but one reason.   Years ago, Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote me, after I’d sent in the poem on Catherine’s graduation, “We love your poem, ‘Hands’ and would like to publish it on the first year anniversary of this ceremony.”  They paid me $100 for the poem, plus seemingly unlimited copies of the issue.  When I read from my first book, Gatherings, on the QEII, in the autumn of 1987, ‘Hands’ was the favorite work of that roomful of listeners and purchasers. Now, Princeton Alumni Weekly superbly evokes the spirit of our wondrous Allegra in her management and inspirational role at D&R Greenway’s Capital City Farm.  Read on…   Marvel.   And support your local land trust! To Trenton’s postindustrial cityscape comes 2 acres of urban farm… Some of Allegra Lovejoy ’14’s  fondest childhood memories are of trips to the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket in Brooklyn, N.Y. Twenty years later, Lovejoy finds herself on the other side of the farm stand as the manager at Capital City Farm, an urban farm in Trenton, N.J. Located less than a mile from the highway (Route 1) in East Trenton — one of the city’s most blighted neighborhoods — Capital City Farm was an overgrown lot before community activists heard about plans to turn it into a junkyard for vehicles. The activists contacted D&R Greenway Land Trust — an organization dedicated to preserving natural areas in New Jersey — which, with other local groups, raised funds to officially preserve the property as an open space. In late 2015, Lovejoy joined D&R as a project fellow and a farm-and-volunteer coordinator to help ready the lot for agriculture and chart its future. The following spring, she was promoted to manager, responsible for transforming the neglected property into a functioning 2-acre farm. Lovejoy was no stranger to farming, thanks to her foray into community gardening the year before with The Food Project in Boston. That job introduced her to all aspects of farm management and even required her to design and build an irrigation system. “There are [so] many challenging aspects to farming, including site planning; water engineering; and fertility, pest and disease, and labor management,” Lovejoy says. “I had to learn all of those on the job. It made for a challenging year.” At Capital City Farm, Lovejoy has made community involvement a priority. She and her staff of two set up shop at farmers markets in Trenton twice a week during the summer and donate about half of the farm’s produce to a nearby food pantry and to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen. The farm also sells its harvest to local restaurants. “We’ve chosen to keep the food in the city as a part of our mission,” Lovejoy says. “We’re not here trying to take resources from Trenton. We want to keep it all here.” “We grow food in solidarity and support of the low-income communities that surround us and are open to any means to get that food into their kitchens.” — Allegra Lovejoy ’14 After two growing seasons, the former abandoned lot has been completely transformed. In the summer, an acre of wildflowers bursting with zinnias, Queen Anne’s lace, and black-eyed Susans can be seen by passersby on the farm’s south side; a greenhouse brimming with green and red tomatoes alongside the farm’s equipment sits farther back from the street; and rows of radishes, beets, and greens fill out the farm’s other acre. Lovejoy, a Woodrow Wilson School major, became interested in urban farming while writing a paper on the effects of climate change in Bangladesh. “It was so striking to learn that globally, there’s a major trend of civil wars being preceded by drought and famines,” Lovejoy said. “I wanted to get firsthand experience of working with people who are doing community-based work with agriculture and reconnecting to the land.” Lovejoy will be doing just that when she heads east at the end of this year to teach sustainability practices at a farming community and retreat center at the foothills of India’s Sahyadhri Mountains. Afterward, she’ll return to New Jersey to start work as a program coordinator for the state’s Northeast Organic Farming Association. Lovejoy says that while the Trenton farm relies on nonprofit funding and sales of its harvest to operate, staff sometimes give away produce to poor and homeless people in the area: “We want people to eat,” she says. “We grow food in solidarity and support of the low-income communities that surround us and are open to any means to get that food into their kitchens.” Both members of her staff are Trenton residents; one was raised across the street from the farm lot. “For people growing up in an entirely man-made environment, developing a connection to nature is no small thing,” she says. “That connection has been very transformative for me, and I’ve seen its impact on others — we set up and manage the farm with that intention.”

Missing Autumn

Where Are the Autumns of Yesteryear?

We’re well along in the second of my two favorite months — September…..   October….   But something’s very wrong.  Green is everywhere.  Unwelcome green!  June and July are well past – but their temperatures and their very colors are with us still.

Essence of Autumn

Someone brought and enormous bucket of purple iris to D&R Greenway this week — iris is a spring herald, not fall’s.

Once I wrote a poem about stubborn autumn leaves:  “They have had their chance.  Now I want them down… since they would not play tapers to our waltz….”

Autumn Frames Canal and Delaware River, Near Prallsville Mills

I don’t want them down in 2017.  I want those colors to flare and flame so that one thinks that level of scarlet and crimson and gold and even purple would put out the night sky itself.

Whatever happened to autumn?

We know the answer, But we are mandated to call its cause a myth.

Where are the autumns of yesteryear?

 

“Mellow fruitfulness” at Russo’s in Tabernacle in the Jersey Pine Barrens:

 

Keats says it for all of us.  He dares counter to spring, telling my favorite season, this autumn manque, “thou hast thy music 

To Autumn

John Keats, 1795 – 1821

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless 
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, 
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees, 
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? 
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, 
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, 
  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep 
  Steady thy laden head across a brook; 
  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? 
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, 
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; 
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; 
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft, 
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Red Cranberry Vines at Chatsworth, New Jersey

 

 

 

 

TRULY RURAL: SELLERSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA

MODERN MALE, SELLERSVILLE, PA, FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND

(A recent Pearl S. Buck pilgrimage took a friend and me also to surrounding towns in very rural Pennsylvania.  Sellersville was a curious combination of past and present.  We had to turn to Wikipedia to learn some of its past.)

EMMA, OUR CHARMING GUIDE TO NEARBY PEARL BUCK ESTATE

Sellersville was founded in the early 18th century. It was centered on a major road known as Bethlehem Pike that connected Philadelphia to Bethlehem and the rest of what was then far Western Pennsylvania.

(Wikipedia is rather voluble about this tiny burg surrounded by farmland, hills and almost-mountains of the appropriate shade of violet.)

(We had begun our Pearl Buck-quest at a delightfully vibrant and lively farmers’ market in Perkasie.  First peaches joined healthy cabbage, vibrant tomatoes and a rainbow, so to speak, of fresh ‘greens’, sold by the farmers themselves.)

The ‘shank of the day’ was spent exploring the Pearl Buck Estate on nearby Dublin Road. 

WELCOME TO SELLERSVILLE

Our finale was a bountiful and gracious late lunch at Sellarsville’s remarkably sophisticated Washington Inn, in what most people otherwise might describe as ‘a backwater’.  The name of that Inn was just part of the constant Fourth-of-July references that peppered our adventure, –none planned and all greatly appreciated–, on our Country’s sacred Birthday weekend.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR AMERICA, FROM SELLERSVILLE

The town was very small and was called Sellers Tavern. Its most notable feature was a large inn. The present Washington House in Sellersville, however, was not Sellers Tavern.

HOW WASHINGTON INN LOOKED FROM MAIN STREET IN ITS PAST

The town grew slowly over the years until the Industrial Revolution. In the 1860s the North Pennsylvania Railroad was built, running parallel to Bethlehem Pike: this stimulated the growth of light textile industries and brought a wave of population growth.

PROUD PAST – SELLSERSVILLE’S MAIN STREET

The East Branch of the Perkiomen Creek runs through the town, connecting it to an adjacent town of Perkasie. This creek was dammed in the early 20th century,  creating a small body of water known as Lake Lenape. (So, even in Pennsylvania, places are named after those who were destroyed — these first settlers — in order that ‘progress’ might take place…)

Along the length of the lake, a park was built on Perkasie and Sellersville lands. In the 1920s and 1930s this park housed a carousel, a roller coaster and several other amusements.

The railroad brought hundreds of people from Philadelphia in the summertime.  It became a well known vacation spot for blue-collar city workers.

SELLERSVILLE THEATER, 1894

The town was also home to the Radium Company of America, which was the largest uranium milling facility in the world at the time.  (There seems to be no notice of the human toll of uranium milling, or the “luminescence” to follow.  At Wheaton Glass Museum in South Jersey, the human toll of luminous glassware is frankly declared.)

TURRETED TOWN OF SELLERSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA

The United States Gauge Company originated in Sellersville in 1904.  It became a prominent manufacturer of gauges for military use, many of which were coated with radium-based paint^[1] for nighttime luminesence. The company later became instrumental in the production of nuclear weapons,^[2] leaving behind a legacy of industrial and radioactive contamination that has been well-hidden by local, county, state, and federal government agencies for decades.  (Ironically, my friend – who had planned this intricate excursion- and I were actively speaking with longing of the healthy air, the healthy lives these fortunate residents must have!)

CLEMATIS EXUBERANCE, WASHINGTON INN

Today the town is still relatively small, sandwiched between a ridge line and the larger town of Perkasie. The center of town still runs along Bethlehem Pike, now called Old Route 309.

THE WASHINGTON INN, 2017

The Washington House still stands and has recently been restored to become an upscale restaurant.

HOTEL AND RESTAURANT: WASHINGTON INN

Next door to the restaurant was a livery stable, which was converted into a theater (later a movie theater) in 1894. It has since been restored.  It was reopened in 2001 as Sellersville Theater 1894 as a live music venue.  (The Washington Inn and the Sellersville Theater cooperate in evenings of food and drama.  My friend and I signed up for chances on “A Big Night in Sellersville — involving gastronomy and theatre and ‘a night in the Tower.’)

PARISIAN CHAIRS, WASHINGTON INN, SELLERSVILLE, PA

The creek is still dammed but only the carousel in Perkasie remains of the amusements.

The textile industry has long moved out of the area.  Sellersville has become mainly a residential town for people working in the many urban centers that are only a short commute away.

The town is surrounded on three sides by open country and spread-out housing developments.

The Teller Cigar Factory was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.

TURRET OF YESTERYEAR, SELLERSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA

 

OUTDOOR MAGIC IN AN INDOOR TIME

Nearing the Delaware River on November’s Last Weekend, 2016

Pleasant Valley Road, New Jersey, just east of the Delaware River

 

Part of me wants to stay indoors, curled up with a book these days — especially my friend Mary Wood’s collection on FDR, ER, Winston and times of excellence and true leadership.  Part of me well knows that the most healing place for this particular person is out in Nature, usually in New Jersey.  A recent nearby journey tied politics, history, liberty, beauty and nature into a perfect package.

 

Carversville Inn, Decorated for Christmas, 2015

In tumult over the recent election, Tasha O’Neill, Alan McIlroy and I journeyed to Carversville, Pennsylvania, in quest of hours of fellowship and the perfect lunch – which we achieved.  We didn’t even need menus.  Fragrant Escargots for the two of them, Mushroom Ragout for me.  Then the handsome Diver Scallop, wrapped in its savory scarf of applewood-smoked bacon, piqued with microgreens, and adorned with the most delicate citrine sauce.  Sunlight dappled onto our shoulders through wavy windowglass of the venerable building, originating in the mid-1800s.  Opulent desserts thrilled.  Timelessness and merry deft service surrounded us.

 

Old Mill Ruin, Fleecydale Road, Carversville, Pennsylvania

 

Then we were out on fascinating roads leading away from our gastronomic haven.  Sometimes, it seems that trekking with friends with cameras is even more exciting than birding.    Can this be?  Is this heresy?

 

Autumn’s Farewell, Carversville

 

Winter Holds Sway in Pennsylvania

 

November’s Farewell, Carversville

Absolute Peace on Fleecydale Road

 

Historic Carversville

 

Remnants of Determined Woodpecker, Carversville, Fleecydale Road Hike

 

Autumn’s Last Gap, Pleasant Valley Road, New Jersey

America The Beautiful, Pleasant Valley Road, New Jersey

My Country, ‘Tis of Thee, Pleasant Valley Road, east of Delaware River, in New Jersey

This Land is Our Land… looking toward the Delaware that Washington Crossed to Victories

Looking Toward Bowman’s Tower Hill, Where Washington Scouted the Delaware River before the Crossing

When men and women pledged their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to bring forth a land devoted to Liberty.

MARTIN MIRACLES — Purple, That is!

First Martins On the Wing, Dark Phragmites Roost Site, Maurice River at Sundown

Would you believe 500,000 to 700,000 purple martins filling the sky, above the phragmites marshes of the Maurice River?  That waterway, literally designated “Wild and Scenic”, is never more dramatic than when the martins gather prior to migration, every August.  If you’re lucky, you have tickets with dear birding friends, aboard watercraft chosen by Citizens United to Protect the Maurice River (and its Tributaries), to carry you toward a sunset miracle.  (https://www.cumauriceriver.org/)  (https://www.cumauriceriver.org/pages/maurice.html)  (http://www.mauricerivertwp.org/purplemartin.html)

There are a couple of more sailing — use the third link above to become martin-dazzled!

My Birding Buddies Board Bonanza II on Purple Martinquest

The Maurice empties into our Delaware Bay.  Recall/realize that New Jersey is the only state with three coastlines — The Shore, The Delaware River, and the Delaware Bay.  Revolutionary Battles were fought in the vicinity of the Maurice — “Peak of the Moon” and the grisly Hancock House massacre. In Greenwich (pronounced Green Witch), there is an actual monument to the tea burners of that town, celebrated for daring to defy the British.  Several trials were mounted, not one of them successful in convicting a single burner of tea.  The names on that stone are the proudest items in Greenwich, right up there with that very early, venerable Quaker Meeting House.

Citizens United to Protect the Maurice River and Its Tributaries

Preservation battles are increasingly being undertaken in the region — for Philadelphia “developers” — let’s face it, they’re destroyers! — would pave over the entire area that earned New Jersey its Garden State honorific.  Think tomatoes.  Think Campbell’s soup and Heinz ketchup.  They put ketchup on their breakfasts down there.  Neighbors realize you’re not local when you look surprised that they bring you Heinz’s glory for your bacon and eggs.

Maurice River Scene

The Maurice and the Cohansey are wide and shimmery, soft, even lazy.  Silence is the norm in either Salem/Cumberland County river.  A few fishing boats mutter along.  Various signs of legendary shipbuilding of yesterday become apparent as your boat carries you martin-ward on the well staffed Bonanza II.

Maurice River Commerce

You’ll have counted 8 mature American bald eagles and more than a few immatures before you’re even settled into your viewing post in the prow.  Great blue herons lift off with dignity.  Black-crowned night herons are already at roost in the heart of dark evergreens and shrubs.  These white football-shaped herons always seem to be scowling, but they’re very happy with the undisturbed habitat provided by the Maurice in August.

Black-crowned Night Heron on Roost for Evening and Night by BRENDA JONES

Your boat is filled with people from many states, and birding experts who specialize in martins.  The birds themselves will float in from four states, but not until the sun has nearly set behind those towering reeds.  We don’t know each other, but birders are never strangers for long.  The air is steamy but not oppressive.  Wavelets whisper and it’s quiet enough to hear them.  Inside the excursion boat, desserts of sweet and fruits await, and plenty of soft drinks and essential cold water.  Binoculars are everywhere.   Expectation high.

American Bald Eagle in Flight by BRENDA JONES

Legendary martin expert, –who modestly disclaims his introduction–, Allen Jackson, speaks on the microphone, then comes down to eager participants on the prow.  All evening long, he softly answers seemingly endless questions.  We learn that these martins eat in those other states, returning nightly now to the Maurice to roost in seemingly endless phragmites.  That the sky will fill with them, as with passenger pigeons long ago.  That their migratory flight could start next week, with the first northwest wind to speed them southward.  That insects are their food of choice and Brazil their 4000-miles-away destination.

Osprey in Flight by BRENDA JONES

The river turns from wet slate to mercury.  The sun goes from yellow to orange to pink tones, then copper.  It resembles a cauldron, spilling molten copper across the water’s dimpled surface.  On the other side of the boat, the half-or-so moon is yellow, then gold, then orange.  Yet its water signature is silver.

Red-Winged Blackbird Singing by BRENDA JONES

Ospreys are everywhere, –young on the nest, matures in the air, skillfully, skillfully fishing.  We don’t see any of legendary competitions between eagles and osprey, perhaps because all have had a good day on the Maurice.  Red-winged blackbirds ripple overhead like avian rivers, males and females together, feeding intensively.  Grackles perch on a complex telephone pole, and we all want them to be martins.

Purple Martin in Flight from Internet

Then Allen softly alerts us to a single martin on high. A handful.  A gathering.  A cluster.  A swarm.  As the river turns the color of smoke from a fresh campfire, phragmites reaches become the color of charcoal.  I must admit, we’re not seeing the purple of the ever increasing circling birds who choose sundown for their autumnal drama.  Charcoal-feathers-to-charcoal reeds, they soar and circle, consider landing, land, then rise again.  No longer can we count birds – until some0ne comes up with the old joke:  “Count the legs and divide by two!”

Sky Peppered with Martins — We had 100s to each one before dark…

Allen is rapt, gently reminding us to look right, look left, look carefully over the reeds, and, above all, gaze at the sky.  Those miraculous birds are as closely packed as pepper on pastrami, and still more are streaming in.  Two tiny boats and ours still their motors.  We are gifted with the musical chatter of the gatherers.  And then the sun seems to drop like toast pulled into a toaster, and it’s all over until tomorrow.

By next week, Allen announces, there could be a million.  They will roost on both sides of the Maurice then, awaiting that weather front, that essential northwest wind that begins their migration, and ends martin miracles in New Jersey for another year.

Never forget, as I remind and remind you re land in our state — neither the martins nor the humans would have had this night’s experience, were it not for dedicated preservationists.  Support Citizens United to Save the Maurice River.  Support your local land trusts, wherever you live.

Nature is paramount.  Nature herself is endangered.  Do everything you can to keep her, and her magnificent creatures. safe.

Preliminaries to the skyful of martins:

Bivalve, where there were more millionaires per block than anywhere in the world, because of oysters

Oyster Heyday Images As We Prepared to Board the Bonanza II

The Oyster Cracker Cafe, Port Norris, NJ

Restored RR Car That Carried the Oysters Very Far from Bivalve, NJ

Trawl Tank at Bivalve/Port Norris

Gulls’ Bivalve Experience

Gull Lift-Off at Bivalve – probably spooked by a raptor

Nautical Still Life: Port Norris/Bivalve Dock

 

Great Blue Heron by BRENDA JONES — The Heron in Winter…

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANOTHER WORLD — THE TRACTOR SUPPLY STORE

Dear friends, knowing my enthusiasm for NJ Farms and most related to these vanishing, eponymous sites in our state, offered to take me to the Tractor Supply Store.

After a sublime (try it, you’ll LIKE it!) breakfast at the Americana Diner on Route 130 — truffles where you least expect them, Kevin McNally drove Judith and me through fields and farms and forests to this store.

I had my trusty camera and extra batteries, because I expected to capture close-ups of tractor wheels, gears, hardware and the like.

Instead, it was like stepping through a gateway to another world.  Somewhat like Alice in Wonderland after the sipping.  Somewhat like the Wizard of Oz when it changed from black and white to color.

Come with me — see what I mean!

(I wanted those t-shirts, but they were all XLarge 3X…)

Born to Fish!

 

Where the Fish Are

 

WRANGLER

 

Boot Central

 

Muck Boots

 

How-Tp Department

In among How to Raise Chickens, and Feeding Your Horse, and Kayak Angler and Food Guide and Grit, on another side of this kiosk, were Marilyn Monroe Magazines.

This turned out to be the reverse of “You’re Not in Kansas Any More…”

And, guess what, there weren’t ANY tractors!

 

SALEM AND CUMBERLAND COUNTY BIRDING – ECSTASY CENTRAL

Land’s End, Delaware Bay, New Jersey:

I could name this post, “Air-conditioned Birding.”

When it’s too hot to hike (as this morning proved, though I completed it, barely…), there are two ideal NJ places to bird in the air-conditioned car:  Brigantine/Forsythe Wildlife Refuge, near Atlantic City; and Salem and Cumberland Counties.

Sunset Bridge, Salem County Winter

Pat and Clay Sutton’s super-complete guide to Birding Cumberland taught me these sites, and will guide you expertly.

Mary Wood and I spent a 12-hour day of coolness, last weekend, in watery reaches near the Delaware Bay, my favorite landscape on earth.

Come with us, to the wide waters, limitless “meadows of grass,” to glint of sun on ever-changing rivers and creeks and spits and bays.

Glide with us along dike roads between impoundments, through woodlands, alongside Dividing Creek to boardwalks at Bivalve’s Strawberry Lane to Pete Dunne’s Turkey Point, site of hidden herons.

Osprey Flight at Nest, by Brenda Jones

Salem and Cumberland are unknown havens, where it seems every black dot in the sky is either an eagle or an osprey!

Majestic Eagle by Brenda Jones

Tides are ever present, altering everything.  When it seems every molecule of water has been withdrawn, and all that is left of the marshes is shimmer, an egret will be doubled in that sheen

Great Egret Fishing, by Brenda Jones

In between lands’ ends, –where the shorebirds hunt–, one moves between fields dotted with the bright faces of the best of summer’s wildflowers.  Marsh mallows quivering near water (not food, but hibiscus-like flowers); sunflowers grinning; Joe Pye Weed reaching for the sky and filling with butterflies.

Cabbage White Butterflies Nectaring, by Brenda Jones

Quirky names enliven the day’s intensive drives — Husted’s Landing, Nibbock’s Pork Store, Bunker and Blood Worms, Clams & Tackle, shedders and oysters.  We’re not in Kansas any more…

Preserved Farm, Salem County

All the farms are prosperous, most of them multi-generational.  There is a strong preservation ethic in the Delaware Bayshores.  Our people at D&R Greenway have been involved literally at the grass roots level.  One of the Intrepids, Bill Rawlyk, can name everyone in most families, and identify their proud crops.  Soybeans are knee-high.  Corn is not to the elephant’s level, but every bit fully tasseled out.  In a distant field, a combine raises archangels of dust as it makes its ponderous way among the rows.  Out behind a venerable red barn, bright laundry snaps in the morning air.

Small town houses are quirky as the signs, narrow and shingled, weathered, survivors with skinny chimneys.  Farmhouses tend toward the palatial, solidity itself.  The American Dream — it’s real, in Salem and Cumberland.

Mannington Farmhouse

Out toward the landings, marinas, and beaches, we are forever treated to the sinuous flight of dark cormorants, the billowing wingbeats of egrets.  At mean low tide, at Strawberry Lane, every tussock resembles and upside-down cast-iron cooking pot.  And each one holds a gleaming, almost blinding, turtle in the sun.  Our feet make hollow sounds on the boardwalk, interspersed with whisper/chatter of darting swallows, the lazy hum of bees.

Cormorant with Lunch, By Brenda Jones

A statue of a Holstein crowns the roof of the Frozen Custard stand.  Nurseries are EVERYwhere, bursting with vibrant stock.  Silver Queen corn is for sale on a broad earthen driveway, honor box for your cash.

Flags are important down here.  They are bought and raised by individual homeowners, who are proud of this land — not to flap ceaselessly in the wind over Japanese car dealers.  There aren’t any car dealers — but many repairers.  WELDING is a normal sign, and PUMPS for sale, and DRILLING.

Welcome to Fortescue

Out of the tiny towns and back at the lands’ ends, we are treated to the rattley chatter of marsh wrens, hovering over marsh shrubs that support their amazing vertical foot-ball shaped nests.  En route to Heislerville and at Strawberry Lane, eagle and osprey nests are everywhere.  Once in awhile, we’re given the Tinkerbell-light voice of a vigilant osprey.  One eagle nest is so enormous, we name it ‘a McNest.’  All are occupied.  At one point we had two eagle nests in one glass, and a slight change in perspective brought the osprey nest into the lens.

Immature American Bald Eagles by Brenda Jones

We’re always glad to get back into the cool car, but we never want to leave those eagles!

Pristine Dunes of Fortescue — where horseshoe crabs congregate in May

Walking through (new, since Sandy) dunes, opening to the Delaware Bay itself, which seems limitless, marvelous tough blinding green holdfasts keep that sand in place.  We don’t know the plant names, but some even bear minuscule white flowers.  [The picture above was taken in spring, before bright green protective spurts emerged.]

Overhead, we hear moan of fish crow and squawk of heron.

Great Blue Heron Take-off, by Brenda Jones

We delight at a tree full of (rare to us) cliff swallows in the Glades, a gossiping crew whose collected voices feel like fresh water droplets cascading over us.  We tear ourselves from swallows, to revere a tri-colored heron, calmly preening as though there were not two intense humans holding something odd to their eyes, fastened on every ruffle of feather.

“Salem and Cumberland”, I find written in my journal:  “Luminosity everywhere!”

But let Mary tell it, with her careful notes:

(this is what avid birders do when they’re NOT driving…

gardens are obviously also important to Mary!)

red-tailed hawk

crows and vultures

unidentified raptor zooming into a yard

crape myrtle

mimosa

“TERMITES!” (sign)

skunk smell

kettle of vultures (‘takes two to kettle’ – swirl of vultures riding thermal air currents)

OYSTERS of Fortescue

houses on stilts

cinder-block house with cinder blocks out front to sit on

immature herring gull

six or seven eagles (we had become this casual)

laughing gulls

3 great egrets

blooming roses

black-eyed Susans

tree swallows

Barn Swallow, Sunset, By Brenda Jones

first swallows ‘lining up’ – preparing for migration, on power line

2 mocking birds

great blue herons, great egrets, snowy egrets, osprey adult and young, tri-colored heron, cliff swallows filling tree, marsh wrens, laughing gulls learning to hover, people crabbing on Turkey Point bridge, squawk of black-crowned night herons hidden in underbrush, and (learned from her birding app, a sound that turned out to be) THE GRUNTING OUTBURST OF A CLAPPER RAIL!

Black-crowned night heron, from web

bald eagle in tree the entire time we were at Strawberry Lane boardwalk; ditto osprey, in a different tree

immature American bald eagle practicing soaring, quite expert, overhead, heading toward ‘McNest’

cacophony of marsh wrens

turtles on tussocks

unidentified shorebirds [on wing, white/black, white/black, extremely determined,beginning migration (!)]

flock of least terns over dike road leading from Heislerville

[ruined] rookery at Heislerville: many double-crested cormorants [in trees, air and water], black-crowned night herons

(mature, immature), and three in water at island edge

Immature Black-Crowned Night Herons by Geoff Coe of Fort Myers, Florida

East Point Lighthouse

East Point Light with Storm Coming

(no sign from approach road — “Bike Trail”)

Forster’s Tern Least Tern  — side-by-side on old dock pilings

single white-rumped sandpiper — [feeding right at our feet!]

single great cormorant, flying low and ponderously

4 red knots, no longer in breeding plumage

flocks of uniform shorebirds [zeroing around the point, intent migrants]

osprey nest with one young and two parents

great black-backed gull at dumpster at Mauricetown Diner !  [these are saltwater birds!]

osprey nest [alongside highway   47?  or 55?  not far beyond diner]

first robin of the day

***

We started this post in dire heat, and I am typing it in same, on the last day of July.  Here’s a picture of intent birder Mary Wood (who even works weekly to rehabilitate birds and hurt animals in the Animal Shelter south of Lambertville.)  It could’ve been 20 that day, on the boardwalk at Strawberry Lane.  Sun was obviously leaving.  But there was always one last bird….!