One of my favorite summer activities is taking the subway, bus or ferry to the beach along what one of my friends calls the ‘Queens Riviera’. The long central expanse of Rockaway Beach is under NYC Parks jurisdiction, while towards the west Jacob Riis Park and Fort Tilden are within the federal Gateway National Recreational Area. Towards Far Rockaway, NYC Parks has created the relatively new Arverne East Nature Preserve.
Each of these areas now marks off certain areas to provide protection for nesting shorebirds. Members of the NYC Bird Alliance and the NYC Plover Project assist with these protection activities, monitoring the nests and educating residents and visitors about the importance of maintaining this habitat for vulnerable species. nycbirdalliance.org. nycploverproject.org
One a wide swath on bare sand by Riis Park, tiny lean-tos provide shade for American Oystercatchers, which just scrape out an indentation in the hot sand as a space to lay their eggs. The hatched chicks seem to be grateful for the shelter. Over at the adjacent Fort Tilden beach, the oystercatchers can catch a little natural shade among the dune grasses.
The oystercatcher parents take turns gathering food, mostly crustaceans from the water’s edge, and bringing snacks back to the young ones.
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The tiny piping plovers hide their nests up among the grasses in the dunes, and are usually only visible when they come to the shoreline for small crustaceans, insects and worms.
The piping plover chicks, however, don’t get the same food service as the baby oystercatchers. As soon as they hatch, they have to forage for their own food down along the water’s edge. That’s why closing the beach area between the nests and the shoreline is so important. They are practically invisible as they run back and forth.
Down by Arverne, the gulls were dominating the fenced off stretch of protected beach, along with a few oystercatchers coming down from nests up in the dune grasses.
The big excitement in the adjacent unrestricted part of the beach involved fishermen catching small sharks called Smooth Dogfish.
They generally are about three feet long and have small flat teeth for grinding up crustaceans and small fish. They are not endangered and the fishermen take home the larger ones to eat. Some smaller ones were left on the beach.
Someone had cut off a dogfish head and left it on the beach near the gulls. A juvenile Great Black-backed Gull spent a lot of time picking at it, despite its forbidding appearance.
I felt a bit sad about the dogfish, even though the gulls and the fishermen did get to eat.
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