Nature Done Wright

  This T-shirt features some great birding spots in New Jersey. My photo.

My Bird Watcher column in The Record today resulted from a chance encounter at the State Line Hawk Watch last fall.

 

I met a birder named Robert Francis, who was wearing one of the coolest birding T-shirts I have seen in a while. I based my New Year's resolution on his T-shirt. You can read the column below.

1. Robert has a fascinating website called "Bird History." Highly recommended. You can read it here: https://birdhistory.substack.com/

 

2. The New Jersey Birding T-shirt is from https://www.birdcollective.com/, but alas the design has been discontinued. The website does offer other great birding clothes.

 

The website's Tina A. writes:

 

 

 

 

Without further ado, here's the column:

By Jim Wright

Special to The Record | USA TODAY NETWORK – NEW JERSEY

Starting a new year with a resolution or two always gets the juices flowing. For 2024, I blame my biggest resolution on a T-shirt I saw at State Line Lookout in Alpine during the fall raptor migration.

The shirt, a discontinued item from an online retailer called the Bird Collective, was royal blue with white lettering and artwork. I couldn’t remember what the front said, but the back had a huge, attractive map of New Jersey with several bird silhouettes and what the map’s creator likely considered the top 20 places to go birding.

This is no small matter. My state pride notwithstanding, the Garden State is one of the best places to go birding, and many of the locales are deservedly renowned.

Here are the 20, from north to south, or as close as I could come without a latitude map:

1. State Line Lookout, Alpine

2. Delaware Water Gap

3. Garret Mountain, Woodland Park

4. The Meadowlands, Bergen and Hudson Counties

5. The Great Swamp, Morris County

6. Merrill Creek, Warren County

7. Spruce Run, Warren County

8. Duke Farms, Somerset County

9. Sandy Hook, Monmouth County

10. Mercer Meadows, Mercer County

11. Assunpink WMA, Monmouth County

12. Whitesbog, Burlington County

13. Palmyra Cove, Burlington County

14. Island Beach, Ocean County

15. Barnegat Lighthouse State Park, Ocean County

16. Fort Mott, Salem County

17. Brigantine (Forsythe), Atlantic County

18. Jake’s Landing, Cape May County

19. Heislerville WMA, Cumberland County

20. Cape May

 I’m a bit embarrassed to say that stick-in-the-mud that I am, I’ve visited only 12 out of 20, or 60 percent. 

I could quibble with a few choices. Lumping all the great birding spots in the Meadowlands or Cape May into one big entry each didn’t seem quite right, but a little lumping was no doubt necessary to get everything onto one spiffy map, 

How many of the 20 locales have you been to? What birding spot would you add to the list? 

For instance, I’d try to include the Ocean City Rookery in late May and early June, and I’m sure others could fit on an extra-extra-large T-shirt.

As for my top New Year’s resolution, I want to visit the eight hot spots I’ve never been to – mostly in western or central New Jersey –  in the next 354 days and tell you about some of them. 

January may not be the best month to go birding in the Garden State. The reasons range from low temperatures to low avian abundance. Nonetheless, this month is a favorite of mine because it’s a time of possibilities, a time of thinking about the places I hope to visit and the birds I’d love to see or see again.

      The Bird Watcher column appears every other Thursday. Jim’s latest book, "The Screech Owl Companion," was published in October by Timber Press. Email Jim at celeryfarm@gmail.com