 The first signs of new life are starting to show up around New York Harbor. For the next several weeks of summer, an annual natural ritual will come off, largely unnoticed and overlooked by most modern-day humans in our busy and bustling routine. Many wild animals will be raising a family in a crowded urban jungle. Parents will be vigilant, always watching their young for provoking and pesky people and predators.
It’s an exciting time. New York Harbor is jumping with new life, young of the year that have just recently been born. Courtship displays and mating rituals have finally paid off for many wild animals. It’s time to start raising a family, the next generation of life to call New York Harbor home.
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 Photo from www.wnyc.org http://abcnews.go.com/US/deepdive/disappearing-beaches-sea-level-rise-39427567
DISAPPEARING BEACHESA Line in the SandBy MEGHAN KENEALLY and EVAN SIMON "The forces chewing away at the nation’s beaches are only getting worse as climate change fuels rising seas — not just in Nantucket but also in the Rockaways of New York and other oceanfront communities all along the East Coast of the United States that are being held together through a patchwork of federally funded programs that are inherently temporary." Tom and Jennifer Erichsen bought their family an oceanfront home on Nantucket, Massachusetts, 34 years ago. They were charmed by the sense of community on the small island — and because they loved raising their kids amid so much nature. A decade later, the whole family permanently moved into the gray-shingled 1 1/2 story house that they had named Sea Shell. The whole family would gather at the home, at 34 Rhode Island Avenue, after work and school to head out on adventures along the beach. They’d take their boat out to check on lobster traps and spend all afternoon outdoors. In the evenings, the family would watch the sunset. The house was right on the western edge of the island, and the vibrant blend of orange and pink light would envelope their home. “It was very nice to raise them in such a natural place,” Tom Erichsen said. But nature is what ultimately forced them from their idyllic home. In 2008, after a series of storms battered the land that held up the home, the family was forced to move out.  Shark TalesSatellite tags reveal hidden world of ocean's largest fish
By Gwendolyn Schanker :: Originally published online June 7, 2016 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Like many of his fellow millennials, Camrin Braun often starts his day by going online to see what his friends are up to. But instead of checking in on Twitter or Facebook, he’s tracking updates from blue and mako sharks moving in the middle of the ocean. Braun and the sharks he studies—Johnny, Oscar, and Roland, among others—have a curious relationship. They met in the fall of 2015, with Braun kneeling on the deck of a boat off the coast of Nantucket, holding down each of the 300-pound animals as he carefully attached a high-tech tag onto their dorsal fins. They only spent a few moments together, but Braun now knows intimate details of the sharks’ daily lives, and he’s followed them as they’ve traveled up to 10,000 miles across the North Atlantic since October. The tags record the sharks’ movements as well as conditions of the seawater they are swimming through. When the tags relay their data via satellite back to Braun’s laptop, he gets some of the world’s first views into where sharks go and what they are doing. The sharks themselves also act as scouts: they provide insights into an ocean frontier where they routinely travel, but Braun can't. “It's baffling that we know so little about the ocean's biggest and most important animals,” said Braun, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI-Joint Program in Oceanography.  Most likely this is the same whale that people have been recently observing off the coast of Long Branch and Deal in New Jersey, not far from the entrance of New York Harbor. http://www.nj.com/ocean/index.ssf/2016/06/
whale_dazzles_onlookers_just_off_the_jersey_shore_video.html By Steve Strunsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com on June 05, 2016 at 5:10 PM, updated June 06, 2016 at 9:34 AM TOMS RIVER — Cloudy skies didn't seem to spoil one whale of a time at the beach Sunday morning. With the caption, "There she blows," Jersey Shore resident Joe Valerie posted a video on his Facebook page showing what he wrote was a whale breaching the surface of a grey ocean under cloudy skies. Valerie said the video was taken on Sunday morning off the Ortley Beach section of Toms River in Ocean County.  What’s swimming in Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay? It turns out quite a bit.
On a beautiful Saturday, June 4, from 10am to 3:30pm, members of the all-volunteer Bayshore Regional Watershed Council conducted the sixth annual late spring “Seine the Bay Day.” The goal was to discover what fish, crabs and other aquatic creatures live along the edge of Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay, the southern shore of New York Harbor. Surveys were conducted at four locations: Cliffwood Beach in Aberdeen Township, Conaskonck Point in Union Beach, near the mouth of Pews Creek in Port Monmouth, and near the mouth of Many Mind Creek in Atlantic Highlands. As in years past, a 50-foot-long seine net, a horizontal nylon net with buoys on top and weights on the bottom, was dragged through shallow waters and pulled towards the shore. All aquatic creatures were identified, cataloged, and returned to the estuary. |
STOP THE WILLIAMS FRACKED GAS PIPELINE THROUGH NY HARBOR! MY TOP 5 FAVORITE BOOKS ABOUT NY HARBOR 1. Field Guide to the Neighborhood Birds of New York City by Leslie Day 2.Heartbeats in the Muck by John Waldman 3. The Fisheries of Raritan Bay by Clyde L. MacKenzie Jr. 4. Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate 5. The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell 
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