The Meadowlands Commission and Bergen Audubon have two great free guided walks lined up for next week.
On Tuesday at 10 a.m., we are visiting Harrier Meadow in North Arlington for a bird-banding demonstration (not to be missed) and a walk in this 70-acre reserve that is usually closed to the public.
On Thursday is our first annual Earth Day Walk at DeKorte, followed by lots of great programs and giveaways at the Meadowlands Environment Center.
More info on both walks and the Earth Day events follows.
Daily Archives: April 14, 2010
More About Tree Swallows
We wrote this article on Tree Swallows for a recent edition of The South Bergenite, and thought we would share it here.
Waterfront housing in the Meadowlands has been going up at an amazing rate this spring, and occupancy rates are approaching 100 percent.
Welcome to the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission’s Tree Swallow Nesting Box Program, an annual community effort that provides housing for 175 tree swallow couples and their youngest offspring.
“It’s simply amazing to see how readily these little birds adapt to nest in the boxes,” says NJMC Naturalist Gabrielle Bennett-Meany, who has been involved with the program since 1998. “There is an instant satisfaction to putting up a nest box and seeing, within moments, a pair of tree swallows appear. It’s an incredible sight.”
About Those Midges….
As visitors to DeKorte Park and other Meadowlands locales may have noticed, we are getting a lot of Midges these days. The good news is that they don’t bite, and the birds (especially the Tree Swallows) love them. The bad news is they can be annoying if you walk too close to a shrub where they are congregating.
They are amazing bugs of the Chironomid family, and they have long “whiskers” on their heads, as evidenced from the two close-up photos (above and on the “jump.”)
More on Chironomids here.