By Gloria Stravelli
ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS – Coastal waters off New Jersey once teemed with wildlife, from shorebirds and horseshoe crabs to seals and sea turtles, now under increasing threat from factors as diverse as climate change to development to discarded fishing line.
“I would love to bring back the wildlife, the amount of wildlife, the amount of biodiversity, that existed here 200 years ago,” Joseph Reynolds, president and one of the founders of local nonprofit Save Coastal Wildlife, said of his vision for a future Earth Day.
“I mean, think about the wildlife that Henry Hudson saw when he came here in September of 1609. The amount of biodiversity, all of the whales, dolphins, bald eagles, ospreys, the fish. All that biodiversity, just a little piece of that, would be awesome, I think.”
The survival and resurgence of coastal wildlife is the focus of the all-volunteer organization founded in 2018 by a group of environmentalists and conservationists who share a mission: “Educating people about the protection and conservation of marine wildlife that live, migrate, spawn and feed in the coastal waters, with a particular focus on the Jersey Shore from Raritan Bay to the Delaware Bay.”
The environmental group is an outgrowth of the Bayshore Regional Watershed Council; Reynolds and many members of Save Coastal Wildlife served on its board.
“We started out as a watershed group,” he said, “which was around for 20 years and we were slowly just moving more toward wildlife issues and then eventually we said, ‘Why don’t we become a nonprofit? We could do more, raise money, get more people involved and then do all the things we do along Sandy Hook Bay and Raritan Bay along the entire Jersey Shore?’
“And luckily there were people that said, ‘Yes, we’ll help you do that.’ ”
In addition to Reynolds, the nonprofit’s leadership includes Caitlin Boyle, vice president; Melanie Caponigro, treasurer; Jen Zarcone secretary; and board members Ed Babka, Sue Baklarz, Ron Dente, Elise Farnsworth, Kristin Hock, Samantha Kreisler and Joseph Sheridan.
Save Coastal Wildlife has a three-fold mission, spelled out on its extensive website, including educating the public about the biotic coastal environment along the Jersey Shore, conducting citizen-science research and conducting community-based habitat restoration projects.
These initiatives are carried out in collaboration with other nonprofits, educational institutions, municipalities, government agencies, small businesses, ethical companies and individuals.
The website provides extensive resources on coastal wildlife issues under the categories Help Wildlife, Threats to Wildlife and Discover Wildlife, plus podcasts and information on Save Coastal Wildlife.
Among the many opportunities for locals to get involved with the mission are cleanups of beaches and wetlands, which typically take place on weekend days from 10 a.m. to noon, and a microplastics cleanup on Plum Island to be held this weekend.
A Highlands resident, Reynolds’ day job is as principal park naturalist for the Monmouth County Park System and he is currently based at Freneau Woods in Aberdeen. “Our job is to educate people about their local environment, the biodiversity, the ecology of the local environment,” he said.
He became involved in local environmental issues when helping to found the Atlantic Highlands Environmental Commission and subsequently earned a master’s degree in environmental studies. While there are many environmental groups along the Jersey Shore, Reynolds saw a need not being addressed.
“When you go to different coastal states you often find that they have quite a few nonprofit organizations just devoted to educating about and protecting coastal wildlife,” he said. “What I wanted to do was to get people outdoors doing citizen-science volunteer projects to get them interested in the environment and local biodiversity and nature. People see nature all around them but they don’t really understand how it’s taking place, what’s happening, especially coastal wildlife.”
Reynolds said, even though there are other environmental groups along the Jersey Shore, there is “very little information” about the importance of wildlife to this particular ecosystem.
“There’s still a lot more to be done about why we need to protect this coastal wildlife and why their habitat’s really important,” he said, “not just for them but really for all species – including the human.”
He explained how the well-being of certain species can be a harbinger of an ecosystem’s future condition.
“So many of these animals are canaries in the coal mine, right? So, when they disappear, that’s telling us that our environment is poor,” Reynolds said.
He points out that the osprey is a threatened species in New Jersey, with much of that threat coming from human behavior. “When we clean out osprey platforms, we find so much trash, so much plastic, it’s disgusting. This does real harm,” Reynolds said. “One time we found a baby osprey wing that was tangled up in fishing line.” That young bird did not survive.
As an all-volunteer group, Reynolds said they depend on residents to advance their mission.
“We want to get people involved with hands-on projects, citizen-science projects and volunteer projects,” he said. Those projects include monitoring horseshoe crabs and seal populations in the bay, installing osprey platforms and conducting microplastic research. An important aspect of the projects is getting people outside, into their local environment, to learn, Reynolds said.
Among the group’s successes, perhaps the most significant, is calling attention to the declining horseshoe crab population, noted Reynolds.
“When I first moved up here 30 years ago or more there were horseshoe crabs all over the place and now there are hardly any,” he said. “When we started monitoring horseshoe crabs we didn’t understand why, I don’t think anybody understood why horseshoe crabs were disappearing.”
But the group’s monitoring project has discovered some interesting information, Reynolds said.
“We thought there was a disease or something. But it turns out that it’s because New York State harvests thousands of crabs every single year for bait, chops them up for bait for whelks and for eels, which then gets sold internationally to foreign markets in Europe and in Asia. And that’s something that blew our mind.”
Since then the group has been trying to bring attention to the declining horseshoe crab population in Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay and is working with New York State officials to get more protections in place for the species.
Reynolds points out that one of the reasons shorebirds aren’t more prevalent in this area is because of the low numbers of horseshoe crabs. “Raritan and Sandy Hook Bay would be an important hot spot for migratory shore birds if we had more horseshoe crabs in this area, just as Chesapeake Bay is,” he said.
“Our long-vision goal is just to educate people so they have a better awareness about the wildlife along the Jersey Shore, not just the whales and dolphins, but the seabirds, the shells. Most people don’t know what the state shell of New Jersey is. It’s the knobbed whelk.
“Something as simple as that, educating people about the shells that they’re finding. I mean that opens up a whole conversation. We just want to make sure everybody is fully educated about the life that lives along the shore. Then our job is done.”
For more information and volunteer opportunities visit savecoastalwildlife.org.
This article originally appeared in the April 22-28, 2021 print edition of The Two River Times.
