TECHNIQUES OF BIRD PHOTOGRAPHY with Scott Whittle - September 8 & 9

Join Warbler Guide author and professional photographer Scott Whittle and take your bird and wildlife photography to the next level. This intermediate workshop will analyze each participants needs, and then focus on developing the skills that will make them better photographers. Composition, being in the right place and right time, stalking, using the right equipment for the job, creative choices and other critical techniques will be discussed and practiced. This School of Birding Workshop is the perfect complement to your outdoor pursuits.

Friday and Saturday, September 8 & 9
8:00-4:30 pm
$150 members/$200 nonmembers

Save your spot now at: CMBO School of Birding

Emil Lundahl - Falsterbo Bird Observatory

We are pleased to welcome and introduce Emil Lundahl to CMBO and the birding community. He is currently taking part in the naturalist orientation provided to our incoming seasonal staff, and will be experiencing all that Cape May has to offer. When you see him in the field, please make him feel at home. In his own words:

My name is Emil Lundahl and I'm visiting Cape May through the newly established youth exchange program of Cape May, Falsterbo and Spurn bird observatories (part of the Friendship Agreement). I will represent the Falsterbo Bird Observatory for three weeks, taking part in all the activities that are taking place here. I'm 20 years old and am at the moment taking two years off from studies doing all kinds of trips, and work mostly connected to birds. Looking forward to this time in Cape May and all there is to learn from each other!  

A presentation and two events you won't want to miss!

Dear friends, members, and supporters, 

In 2014 I travelled to Falsterbo, Sweden, to participate in the first International Bird Observatory Conference (IBOC) hosted by the Falsterbo Bird Observatory and Lund University. It was a fantastic event with over 129 representatives from 40 bird observatories, and it helped solidify my thoughts on bird observatories as a global sensor network to keep our fingers on the pulse of migration, disseminate the most important findings, and ultimately work to conserve our global natural heritage. 

Since then, Cape May Bird Observatory has joined Falsterbo Bird Observatory and Spurn Bird Observatory in an official Friendship Agreement, whereby we exchange information on a monthly basis, co-publish summaries of our seasons, and just this fall have initiated a young professional exchange. On Saturday October 21 Falsterbo’s Björn Malmhagen and Spurn’s Nick Whitehouse will be the keynote speakers at our Cape May Fall Festival: So.Many.Birds. (October 19 - 22). Their presentation, titled “A Tale of Three Peninsulas”, will provide a window into the spectacular birding, research and outreach happening at their respective migration hotspots, as well as an update on our collaborative efforts thus far. I can tell you from working with these two gentlemen over the last three years that you will not want to miss this entertaining and informative presentation! 

L to R: David La Puma, Björn Malmhagen, Andy Clements, Nick Whitehouse (back), Deb Lee, & Michael Lanzone (front)

Registration for the festival and their presentation (available a-al-carte, or at a discount with Saturday daily registration) can be found here:

https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=2015079

Also of note, is that New Jersey Audubon’s Cape May Bird Observatory will be hosting the 2nd International Bird Observatory Conference October 26 - 30, in Cape May. If you are affiliated with a bird observatory, or interested in learning more about bird observatory operations, registration is open here: 

https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?eventid=1940314

Looking forward to seeing you here this fall!

Good Birding,

David A. La Puma

Director, New Jersey Audubon's Cape May Bird Observatory

MORNING FLIGHT starts tomorrow!

It's hard to believe that another fall is fast approaching - a sure sign is the silhouette of birders on the dike or platform at Higbee WMA, counting the passage of migrant songbirds. Tomorrow is the first day of the count, and we're happy to welcome back Glen Davis as the official counter and introduce Melissa Roach as the Migration Count Coordinator. Glen will be manning the count at sunrise, kicking off the 15th year of this exciting project. Warblers, kingbirds, and orioles have already been moving, and we're excited to see what shows up. Come out and join him in the fun, or check out how he's doing online, as Trektellen will once again be the platform we use to tabulate and live stream the count totals - go to our website (birdcapemay.org) and click on Live Data. Migration is underway: So.Many.Birds!!!

BIRDING BY EAR: EARLY FALL MIGRATION with Glen Davis - August 26

When the chorus of spring and summer songs start to diminish, the late-summer mix of sounds from the migratory and local birds of Cape May continues on. The calls of many neotropical and long-distance migrants fill the skies, fields, marshes, beaches, and woods of the Cape May area. Many of the early fall migrants are at their peak in late August and their vocality provides a great opportunity to hone your ears and thoughts toward the particularly exciting soundscape at this time of year. This workshop will help you learn to focus on, describe, and identify these sounds. Warblers, vireos, flycatchers, thrushes, terns, shorebirds and many more groups of birds, in a variety of habitats, will be sought out and given all-ears!

Join Glen Davis on this exciting half-day School of Birding Workshop - sure to take your birding to the next level!!
August 26: 7:00-11:00 AM
Cost: $48 members, $64 nonmembers

Reserve your spot now at: CMBO School of Birding

THE WORLD OF BUTTERFLIES with Pat Sutton - August 22

This is your chance to experience these beautiful and varied creatures from a local expert. Learn about butterfly life cycles, their relationships to the plant world, odd behaviors, survival in a world filled with hungry predators, the spectacular migration of some species and the restricted range of others, and tips for easy identification. There will be an indoor illustrated presentation on butterfly biology, resources, and ID, but most of the day will be spent in the field. Pollinator gardening principals will be seen in action as the group visits private wildlife gardens (including Sutton’s) and natural areas near Cape May Court House and Goshen. Cape May County hosts 107 species of butterflies. If it is a good year for Monarchs, they may be plentiful.
Tuesday, August 22 
9:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Cost: $90 members, $120 nonmembers

Reserve your spot now at: CMBO School of Birding

Field Notes from National Moth Week: The secret life of the Ailanthus webworm moth

Last night we rigged and ran the insect light for the first time at Cape May Bird Observatory's Northwood Center. What we found throughout the night was nothing short of fascinating, but I'm going to focus on one species that caught my attention almost immediately after turning on the light. First, though, I need to back up a few years, to October of 2004.

My wife and I had just moved to Somerset, New Jersey, to begin my PhD research at Rutgers University (she would decide to begin hers the following year). We had just become caretakers of Rutgers's Hutcheson Memorial Forest, a 560 acre research forest with a 64 acre old growth oak-hickory forest fragment. We were provided with a two bedroom house at reduced rent in exchange for caretaker duties including trail maintenance and providing guided tours of the property. It was a sweet deal, and a highlight of my graduate career for sure. I recall a large Ailanthus altissima, Tree of Heaven (Inga, my wife, would commonly refer to it as the Tree of Hell), on the main path through the old gowth section, which struck me because of its immense size. "That tree has been there since we began studying forest succession, at least back into the 50s and likely before" I remember being told by one of the retired professors who frequented the site. This noxious species, superficially similar to Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) but easily separated by the presence of leaf glands at the bases of its leaflets, was present throughout the site wherever disturbance had left an opening, ranging in age from this old vanguard to young seedlings no more than a year old.

Within the same year I can also recall seeing what I mistook for Eastern Tent Caterpillars on a young Ailanthus. A mass of squirming caterpillars in a web fortress mounted between a skinny trunk and a lateral branch of a sapling only few feet tall. There it was; something that would eat Ailanthus! But why? where did it come from? this was a tropical species from Asia...how on earth could this be a host plant for a caterpillar in North America? I admit, I never pursued the question; just pondered it one day, and let it slip into the mental file drawer full of interesting questions that may or may not ever get answered. Until today.

Last night, at roughly 10:30pm, I checked the bug sheet at Northwood to find an assortment of little micro-moths, some beetles, a spider with a freshly caught dragonfly, some interesting wasps, a few larger moths, and this peculiar thing...

Atteva aurea (Ailanthus webworm moth)

...which turns out to be Atteva aurea, commonly referred to as the Ailanthus webworm moth. This is what those caterpillars I had seen over a decade ago metamorphose into; wow! It was gorgeous!! So with the name attached to the beast my mind raced back through my file of interesting-but-yet-to-be-pursued-questions, leading me to do some research on this little bugger. A 2009 paper titled A review of the New World Atteva Walker moths (Yponomeutidae, Attevinae) shed some light on the situation which I will share here (but you can read the entire article here if you'd like). Before I do, I just want to take a moment to note how exciting a time it is to be a naturalist. So many resources are now at our fingertips, and with a little training we can access more information than every before, almost instantaneously. Identifying this bug was done using the iNaturalist app for the iPhone (there are also Desktop and Android versions), literally snapping a photo, uploading it, and checking it against computer-generated suggestions. The app immediately identified the species correctly! Finding the primary literature was done by simply searching the scientific name in Scholar.Google.com. Of course, if you are interested in learning more about this and all bugs, come out to the Northwood Center on Saturday night from 8:30pm - 10:00pm when we'll be running the insect light for the public to commemorate National Moth Week. More info can be found on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/CMBObirds.

Now, here's the answer from the 2009 paper, to my burning question from October 2004:

The presence of aurea in the eastern United States and Canada and its association with Ailanthus altissima (Mill.) (Simaroubaceae) is an interesting subject to be investigated. This plant is an ornamental introduced from Asia and now considered one of the most serious weeds in the United States. It was first planted near the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1784 (W. Thomas, pers. comm.) and from there it spread over the entire country. Once it reached southern Texas, where presumably aurea was already present, the moth started to move north. By 1856 it had reached Georgia, as indicated by the material described by Fitch (1856: 486). Riley (1869: 151) found it common in Missouri, feeding on ailanthus. These records indicate that this showy and common moth was absent in the region before the introduction of ailanthus, and the approximately 70-year gap between the introduction of the host, to the first record of the moth by Fitch, is the time it took the plant to move south and the moth to move north. 

Apart from the hosp-plant records mentioned above, the larvae have been reared on the following Simaroubaceae: Castela peninsularis, C. polyandra and C. emory in the United States (Powell et al. 1973: 177), Simarouba amara in Costa Rica (Janzen, pers. com.) and S. glauca in México (by the present author).

So there is is! The larvae can use other species in the same family as Ailanthus, and the spread of the moth is directly related to the spread of Ailanthus across the US and Canada...very cool!

You can view more of the little critters from our foray last night on our iNaturalist project page here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/njas-cape-may-bird-observatory-northwood-center

Good Birding (and bugging!),

David La Puma
Director, NJ Audubon's Cape May Bird Observatory