DE: Bombay Hook, Prime Hook and the Morality of Conservation

I traveled to Delaware for a weekend stay with family and to attend a data workshop at the University of Delaware, Lewes, on Saturday. I had a few chances to visit both Bombay Hook and Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuges, favorite stop-over and wintering grounds of migratory waterfowl and other northern birds. I also had the opportunity to sort through some burning questions I have about the current state of conservation funding and support.

Short-eared owl glides over marshes at Port Mahon, DE

The coastal marshes of the lower Delaware River have attained rock-star status among birders from all over the country. But wintering birds are what bring in hardcore birders from around the world. We're lucky to have two excellent National Wildlife Refuges at Bombay Hook and Prime Hook just a forty-five minute drive apart. In between them as well as north and south of the federal lands are state-owned properties that connect conservation landscapes in a nearly continuous range of protection from the C&D Canal to the wild tip of ocean/river coast land at Henolopen State Park.

Snow geese abound both on water and inland.

Grandson Aiden spies a Great-Blue Heron fishing a freshwater pond.

Late November through March is owling season for us - we are, as a family, dedicated birders - and owls present a great challenge when the cold weather comes and the leaves are off the trees. We try to see all the owls that come to the Mid-Atlantic Region in winter, including our year-round resident owls. It's a challenge we've taken since I worked in raptor rehabilitation back in the 80s and 90s. I'm really glad the seasonal challenge now extends to a third generation.

Immature Coopers Hawk

Coopers Hawk

We watched Short-Eared Owls from the arctic glide moth-like over the great Delaware marshes and kept our eyes open for the many snowy owls that have been reported on this year's irruption migration. Marsh Hawks (Northern Harriers) worked the same marshes during the day and I was exceedingly distracted at the workshop by watching them coast over the marshes just outside the conference room! Though the light was low and a cloud cover made it difficult to capture the owls with a borrowed 600mm lens, I had enough raptor action on both days to feel really good about the wild spaces and places along this old river.

Red-Tailed Hawk

The whole while I was attending the NOAA workshop and visiting all the marshes with family, however, I couldn't help shake my concern for current attacks on our national public conservation lands. Severe cuts to Dept. of Interior agencies budgets are underway and are having immediate impacts on the staffing, enforcement, and maintenance of NWR lands, parks, and forests. After the workshop, my daughter and I stopped in at the Bombay Hook Visitor Center and spoke to two volunteers there who have traveled the country in their retirement volunteering for national parks, NWRs, and National Forests. "This year has been terrible," they claimed. They have been worried for the park system for many years, but it wasn't until they began accepting volunteer positions at NWR sites across the country that the impact of budget cuts was made starkly real to them.

Avocets, Bombay Hook NWR

Present White House administration ( I can't bring myself to name him) promises the most severe cuts to federal lands agencies in U.S. history - and that's not just his usual bluster and bravado. A proposed 12 percent cut in Department of Interior budgets translates to a loss of 4,000 law enforcement, interpretive, and infrastructure-related jobs.  The new Secretary of Interior Zinke promises that privatization of parks and federal lands will create new streams of funding and that increases in entry fees will help make up for lost federal dollars. Welcome to Disney-esque National Parks, the commercialization of our heritage and natural legacies. What is not stated -but demonstrated - starting with today's announcement that Bear Ears and National Monument will be severely reduced, is opening the way for drilling, mining, roads, and more (surprise!) pipelines.

Great Blue Heron hunting on the incoming tide.

I believe birds are like emissaries from a wild world that humans can only imagine. We know so very little about their lives and the day-to-day existence that defines their place in a greater ecological community - especially the places these northern birds come from. We do, however, impact their world in so many ways - ways that we can hardly wrap our heads around. There isn't a place or space we haven't had a negative impact upon around the globe. Yet they come, every winter, and bring wonder and awe to our world. The political wrestling taking place in Washington D.C. affects their survival on the North Slope of Alaska as it does here on the Delaware River shore, and the thirty-thousand snow geese I saw on Sunday have no idea.

Hooded Merganser displaying for a female.

Hoodie-mates.

Conservation is about us. The birds don't care that we are battling in legislative halls over privatization and the expansion of extractive oil and gas industries. We don't matter much to them. But when when conservation policy looses against the might of industrial lobbying, under the guise of "rights" and corporate power plays (money, money, money), it becomes a moral argument. Never mind lemming populations in the Alaskan breeding ranges of the Snowy Owl have plummeted 90% in the last decade. We don't know why nor do oil companies care. If we don't know and we don't care, all the easier to make conservation landscapes about the almighty dollar. How immoral is that?

Family on a morning walk at Bombay Hook.

As  I write this blog post there is a crowd gathering in D.C. protesting the actions taken by current White House Administration, a real estate developer, on the recommendations of Secretary Zinke, a friend of Big Oil and Gas. First Nations people, conservationists, federal lands employees, and people who care about our wild and legacy landscapes are marching to express their disappointment and anger. I have to admit that over the weekend, walking with my daughter and grandson out at Bombay Hook on a frosty, foggy morning, I was angry at the thought that this "Great Idea" of American conservation is under attack threatened with death by a thousand cuts and these dramatic, attention-getting declarations. It is war declared on our public lands. A great swirling flock of grackles undulated in coordinated flight overhead as a hawk pursued its morning meal. It was beautiful, loud, and stunning to watch. My anger transformed into pure emotion - no naming it - just jaw-dropping awe. The intercession of emissaries.

Immature Great Blue at sunset.

Hairy Woodpecker at dawn.

Present White House Administration is dedicated to two things: undoing the conservation efforts of his predecessor - a particular and peculiar obsession for an elderly man of privilege unable to manage his own willfulness and insecurity - and rewarding those people and industries "loyal" to him. The birds don't care. But the people who protect the birds and the land that they depend upon for wintering over do. As the volunteers in the NWR visitor center said to me, "it's demoralizing and sad." The word demoralizing stuck with me, since the idea of conservation is a set of moral principles upon which wildlands are protected for wildlife and future human generations. Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt set that stage long ago and I wonder if they are spinning in their graves today.

Pintail drake.

Greenwing Teal drake.

Emma Maris writes in her essay, "Humility in the Anthropocene," that as a moral principle, the idea of conservation is at core a practice based in humility. "All that is our relationship with the rest of nature. To be truly humble is to put other species first, and our relationship with them second. We must not be too proud of our humility that we come to value it above other species. A  truly biocentric ethic puts the sea turtle's existence above the condition of the human sol." (1) And that is what the bluster lacks in a morally deficient White House - the humility to put others first - even if those others are seasonal visitors from the Arctic and non-human.

Bombay Hook NWR, established in 1937.

Delaware River from Port Mahon, with super moon rise.

Our ideas of conservation management have changed as our understandings of natural process have changed. We no longer brand fire as a bad thing. My daughter witnessed the control burning of grasslands at Bombay Hook last week and said it was frightening as well as scientifically necessary. They burn to benefit the native birds, mammals, and insects that depend upon the shortgrass coastal grasslands while eliminating invasive species that threaten to obliterate valued, biodiverse ecosystem.  Can our moral commitments change along with our scientific understandings to face the new challenges of corruption and poor policy? Those protesting in front of tonight's empty White House think so. I'd like to join them and lay a little char to the ground I'm standing for.



Notes

Emma Marris' essay appears in After Preservation ( 2015), an edited volume of essays on the future of conservation by Ben A. Minteer and Stephen J. Pyne, environmental ethics philosophers.

What is environmental ethics? Stanford's online encyclopedia of philosophy puts its nicely -
"Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its non-human contents to include ... the preservation of biodiversity as an ethical goal." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/

DE: Owls, Cycles, and Sky - Bombay Hook NWR

Clearly the people who don't like winter are not having a good week. Oh well. The rest of us out here are enjoying the cold and wildlife and scenery and snow and the owls! Winter has really settled in and we've just passed the meteorological mid-point of the season. We notice storm cycles and freeze/thaw events as hallmarks of January and February. The pace and intensity of winter feeding  shifts among birds and mammals. Courting, nest maintenance, mating, and egg-laying begins with eagles and owls in January.

Holly hedge and one of hundreds of hungry robins.

This week I looked out of my office window across to where a huge, old hedgerow of American Holly grows and noticed a lot of activity. There was a forecast of snow and like people flocking to grocery stores to get milk and toilet paper, American Robins were invading the hedge by the hundreds! A lot of folks  think that Robins are a sign of spring and aren't used to seeing them in mid-winter. Get out some more and you'll discover that not only are they here all winter, but they are here en masse! By afternoon the hedge of holly had been cleaned of every berry! Freeze/thaw cycles help to ripen wild berries, breaking down complex sugars through several natural processes. Berry-eating birds are keen to watch for winterberry, holly, oak-leafed viburnum, and poison ivy berries and clean them off when the time is right.

Crystal clear surface ice in Bear Swamp, Bombay Hook NWR

We are cycling regularly now between hard freezes and melt-offs. One day a pond may be open water, the next topped with ice. Shallow swamps and bays can freeze and thaw dozens of times in mid- winter. It pays to visit the water's edge often to look for tracks in snow on icy surfaces, or when open, for ducks, herons, and geese foraging for quick meals in the open leads before it freezes over again. 

Ice stacking at the high tide line. Bombay Hook NWR, DE.

Everyday cycles of the tides will push ice up to shores and banks, building ice dunes that can get quite high! Almost all of the tidal marshes now have collars of ice. Along our big tidal rivers with plenty of wind to push floes around, there may be walls and dykes of ice. Ice dunes form so high at Presque Isle State Park in Northwest PA, that beach hikers are advised to strap on ice spikes or crampons - or else stay off the lake front.

Beautiful skies after an arctic front passes over Bombay Hook NWR, DE.

Skywatching is spectacular in mid-winter as arctic fronts bring the driest air of the year. Night skies, ushered in by Orion the Hunter, spill the Milky Way from horizon to horizon. Daytime skies are deep blue with racing clouds on the back end of fast moving Clipper systems that come almost weekly now. Landscape photography is especially rewarding in mid-winter as beautiful scenes can change by the minute in low golden sunlight and shifting patterns of clouds.

Bufflehead males and females are staying close to each other.

As daylight begins to linger in the late afternoon, our arctic avian visitors begin to exhibit pairing and courting behaviors. Great feeding flocks of snow geese, Canada geese, and tundra swans cycle back and forth from fields and open water. Echoes of waterfowl hunters' guns remind us that the hunting season is coming to an end, but rafts of ducks will continue jump from the sound of guns to settle in quieter and safer waters down river for a short while yet.

Photographer framed by jetty walls. Port Mahon, Delaware River.

My favorite cycle of the mid-winter season is the dawn-to-dusk light show of golden rays as each day the sun climbs a bit higher in the sky. My daughter and I spent a very late afternoon at Port Mahon on the Delaware River this week catching the sunset over the vast tidal marshes there. Short-eared owls dipped and bobbed in the fading light, red sun illuminating their round faces. She found a screech owl popping out from a wood duck box for a sun bath. Later in the week she photographed a lone snowy owl perched watching in the marsh.

Red-phase screech owl wintering in a wood duck box, Bombay Hook NWR. Photo by Emily Eppig Curran (!)

Short-eared owl hunting at dusk, Port  Mahon, DE. Photo by Emily Eppig Curran (!!)

Snowy owl in the marshes at Port Mahon, DE. Photo by Emily Eppig Curran (!!!)

Owl woods at Adkins Arboretum, Ridgely, MD.

I visited Adkins Arboretum this week on the Eastern Shore and was treated to a rather long and loud conversation of barred owls in the low woods. Our permanent resident owls, including the barred, screech, barn, and great horned owls have started their courtships. Without summer leaves to block the view we go owling in winter, looking for perched owls, nesting owls, listening for owl calls and calling them to us. It's a winter tradition we've kept since both Em and George were very young and now she includes her own children on these cold owl outings.

Song sparrow rooting for insects in grass, Adkins Arboretum, MD.

Winter sparrows of many species flit from tufts of grass to weedy edges. White-throated, song, fox, savannah, and others test our observation skills. Winter flocks at the feeders include more sparrows by the day as the feed heavily before and during our periodic snow storms.  I returned from a long day of meetings to find all of my feeders nearly emptied! Sure signs of another storm on our doorstep!  Happy Winter!