Story and photos
By MAUREEN CAWLEY
“That was fun,” my daughter Anna, 10, said, as we walked along the pathway from Sun Ray Beach Preserve, in Delmont, to our car. She sounded both convincing and sur-prised.
You see, over the years, I have often in-vited my kids along to “help me” cover a story, and they’ve learned over time not to expect too much. Turns out tagging along to city council meetings and the gatherings of blathering grown-ups offers little to interest the average grade schooler, but sometimes I still ask.
Such was the case last Thursday when I was heading off to help Nature Conservancy volunteers to “seine” the Delaware.
“Do you want to come with me to pull a big net out of the water and see what kinds of fish we’ll catch?” I asked them.
“Will it be fun?” Anna asked.
The e-mail I received promised an event that is fun for the whole family—“See what types of creatures we can find using team-work and a large net to seine along the beach of the Delaware Bay,” it read. It sounded good–on paper, (or on computer monitor, if you will), but we’d both been down that road before.
“I don’t know,” I told her honestly, “but it sounds like it.” My youngest daughter, Katie, 8, demurred, but Anna was game, and to-gether we spent an enjoyable hour, “work-ing” with Nature Conservancy staff and a group of environmental interns from New York City.
They pulled nets, similar to those used in volleyball, through the water, and we helped empty the nets on the beach and identify the catch using field guides before returning the fish to the bay.
We learned quite a bit, including, for start-ers, how to pronounce seine (It rhymes with pain, not pen). But we also learned that the rumors are true—there really are lots of fish in the sea. And many of them–horseshoe crabs, blue claws, tiny shrimp, slippery fin-fish and gelatinous blobs of jellyfish—are swimming just out of sight in the knee-deep water where we swim.
To some that might be intimidating, but to us it was an important reminder to do what we can to protect their habitat.
As it turns out, my daughter Katie was sorry she didn’t join us and even more dis-appointed that the Nature Conservancy sein-ing program was only being held once this summer.
But no worries—two other local environ-mental organizations offer similar programs on a regular basis. Now if I could just find someone to come long….
Harbor Safaris, Cape May Nature Center, 1600 Delaware Ave., 609-898-8848, njaudu-bon.org; Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:30 a.m. through Aug. 28. Walk-ins welcome. $10 adults, $5 children ages 3-12.
Catch o’ the Day, Wetlands Institute, 1075 Stone Harbor Blvd., 609-368-1211, wet-landsinstitute.org; Monday and Friday, 3:15 p.m. and Saturday, 2:15 p.m. Ages eight and up; free with admission. $7 Adults, $5 chil-dren 2-11.
To find out more about the Nature Con-servancy’s efforts and the more than 56,000 acres they’ve protected in the Garden State, contact their local headquarters on Route 47 in Eldora at 609-861-4120.
West Cape May – Blaming DEI for the California wildfires is classic Trumper behavior – making an assertion with no facts or real analysis with more than a whiff of racism. But I guess they would rather do that than…
