Armed with binoculars and fancy camera equipment, birders bring economic activity to Cape May County with an average spend of $662 per trip on hotels, restaurants, tours, and travel, adding up to a $313 million infusion to one of New Jersey’s southernmost counties. –
It’s the meeting of two flocks: more than 470,000 tourists come to Cape May County each year with the express purpose of watching migratory birds mull about, fatten up, and take flight.
Some are there to watch the ruddy turnstone, which stops over in the Delaware Bay to dig up bugs and grubs under clam shells and stones on the beach on their trip between the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic. Others are there to watch the hawks, which coast above Cape May Point State Park’s Hawk Watch Platform like a highway in the sky of 50,000 hawks per year. The star of the show, though, is the red knot, which flies thousands of miles from Tierra del Fuego to Cape May yearly, where it can fatten up on horseshoe crab eggs en route to the Arctic.
Armed with binoculars and fancy camera equipment, the birders bring economic activity to the area with an average spend of $662 per trip on hotels, restaurants, tours, and travel, adding up to a $313 million infusion to one of New Jersey’s southernmost counties.
According to New Jersey Audubon Executive Director Eric Stiles, outdoor recreation in the state generates $18.9 billion a year, provides 143,000 direct jobs, $5.9 billion in wages and salaries, and $1.2 billion in state and local taxes.
According to New Jersey Audubon Executive Director Eric Stiles, outdoor recreation in the state generates $18.9 billion a year, provides 143,000 direct jobs, $5.9 billion in wages and salaries, and $1.2 billion in state and local taxes.
“It’s a huge, huge sector. When you drill down to wildlife dependent recreation, that’s approximately $2 billion of the $18.9 billion,” Stiles said.
Stiles pointed out that New Jersey has more diversity of species per square mile than any state in the country, mirroring the diversity of the state’s population. “You can have all sorts of amazing linkages there. Many of our birds that breed here overwinter in Central and South America, so birds really bring people together. They bind culture, ethnicities, and transcend borders,” he said.
The Atlantic flyway has a higher diversity than any other flyway in the nation, and right in the middle, the Cape May peninsula is recognized on birding lists as one of the top places in the world to see bird migration. Just look up: with so many bird species flying through, migration is a year-round spectacle in the Garden State.
“Winter waterfowl migrate to the coast and wet areas and overwinter here and start to migrate in spring. You have birds like the eastern phoebe, they’re flycatchers, they should be here any day in northern New Jersey. You have the woodcocks with their mating dance that’s already occurring. It’s warm enough in Cape May County that they overwinter there,” Stiles said.
When American Littoral Society Executive Director Tim Dillingham advocates for the protection of bird species like the red knots, his starting point is the intrinsic value of nature and the roles that such species play in the broader ecosystem. But economics inevitably comes up, especially in a state with as many people and as active a development sector as New Jersey.
Cape May might be world-renowned for its birding opportunities, but it’s far from solely a shore bound activity. There are hawk watches in Montclair, Martinsville, and Blairstown to watch raptors take flight. According to the Skylands Visitors Center website, the Raccoon Ridge hawk watch in Blairstown alone sees 15,000 hawks per year in the fall, mostly between September and October.
The Pinelands in early May bustles with birds, especially in the wetlands because there are so many bugs. Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary in Bernardsville and Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Vernon offer a variety of species to watch. Stiles’ favorite spot, though, is Garrett Mountain outside of Paterson, where he said, “you see anything that moves—warblers, vireos, thrushes, tanagers, cuckoos, hawks. It’s famous.”
“Birds will utilize what’s available. These birds are migrating in the middle of the night, and they see a dark spot in Newark. A dark spot means its undeveloped. These birds will land on roofs in the Ironbound, which has a huge Portuguese Brazilian population … so the birds around them are the birds from their home country,” Stiles said.
Keep ’em coming
For years, the Delaware Bay was home to an overabundance of horseshoe crabs. Thirty years ago, Dillingham said there would be piles of them on the beach, and their eggs, an important source of food for the red knots, would be in windswept piles around the beach. More eggs equaled more red knots, who showed up for six weeks between May and June for the most important feast of their migratory journey.
“When people realized this was happening, they started coming. All those beaches in the curvature of the bay had the highest concentration of shorebirds, so that became a place where it was easy to see them,” Dillingham said.
A lack of regulation around fishing caused trouble. Fisherman realized that horseshoe crabs made great bait, and Dillingham said they’d collect them by the truckload.
“They had such an impact that they crashed the population, and with that crash the red knot population crashed from 100,000 birds coming each year to just 12,000 in 2006,” he said.
He’s still amazed at the American Littoral Society’s work getting a moratorium on horseshoe crab fishing. He said he spent years talking to angry fisherman, but the organization got the red knot on the endangered species list, and restoration began. The populations of both the horseshoe crab and the red knot are increasing.
The piles of horseshoe crabs and the 100,000 birds rising from the beach like a cloud “is an image of abundance that we have a hard time envisioning now. Maybe this is a Jersey thing to say, but the bigger the spectacle the bigger the draw. So if we’re making $313 million where we are now, how much more might there be?” Dillingham posed.
“We’re doing research that indicates that fish in bay like the weakfish also eat horseshoe crabs when they’re really small. Fisheries used to be big in Cumberland County, but when the fish died off and there were no sport fisheries, many people stopped coming to Cumberland County, which is now the poorest county in the state” Dillingham said. “That’s a bit of a foreshadowing of what could be lost if we lose these animals, lose these birds.”
Wildlife preservation begins with habitat preservation and restoration. Superstorm Sandy stripped the beaches in the Delaware Bay, dumping the sand into salt marshes behind it. When the dust settled, that gave New Jersey half a year—from after the storm in October until springtime, when the horseshoe crabs lay their eggs—to build the beaches back up. Without sand, the horseshoe crabs would have had nowhere to lay their eggs. Without horseshoe crab eggs, the red knots would have nothing to eat, further endangering a population that’s already undergone so much.
In that first year, 2 miles of beach were rebuilt with sand from local quarries, delivered by local Teamsters driving trucks to local bulldozer operators.
“If you don’t have the habitats, you don’t have the birds. In other words, if you don’t have the birds, the 470,000 people don’t come see the birds in Cape May County, and they don’t spend the $313 million every year for it,” Dillingham said.
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