BirdCapeMay.org

One day last June in Bermuda, after noodling around looking for a stand of Bermuda maidenhair fern —I was speaking with a British woman when she noted the New Jersey Audubon logo on my shirt.  She paused, smiled, and asked, “Do you know Pete Bacinski?”  He’d once led her around Cape May on an April day long ago.  As feral chickens wandered by and a Great Kiskadee called overhead, she dreamily recalled the Prothonotary Warbler Pete had shown her at a magical place called the Beanery.

I’ve been asked the same question in Newfoundland, Arizona, Texas, Maine, and many other more proximate birding venues, and I’m never surprised.  Pete Bacinski, the founding director of Sandy Hook Bird Observatory, is one of New Jersey Audubon’s most popular and beloved field trip leaders.  By his count, he has led over 2000 birding trips during the last thirty-four years throughout the state, the U.S., and spots as diverse as Spain, British Columbia, and Trinidad.  He leads his first New Jersey Audubon Eco-Travel trip to Panama this month.

Pete is the co-compiler of the “Voice of New Jersey Audubon” rare bird alert, and he writes the popular column “Seen in New Jersey,” which appears weekly in The Star Ledger.  He has served on the New Jersey Bird Records Committee, the boards of numerous conservation groups, and was an early and active member of the Highlands Coalition, which was instrumental in the passage of the Highlands Act in 2004.  He was one of the original participants in the birding competition which became the World Series of Birding, and a member of the first winning team, which included Pete Dunne, Bill Boyle, David Sibley, and Roger Tory Peterson.

RR:  Tell me a little bit about how you started birding.

PB:  When I was a kid I had an interest in all of natural history.  My parents did a lot of driving trips around the country and into Canada, and I had a whole series of Golden Guides—remember those?—and I’d try and identify everything I’d see.  My parents bought me my first pair of binoculars when I was nine or ten and  I’d try to identify hawks on poles and everything, but it never got beyond that and looking at things in my backyard.

Then when I was in college, I studied biology and ecology and wrote a lot of papers on a lot of subjects, including birds.  And then about my senior year, with my old friend Bruce Zatkow, I made a couple of forays up to Garret Mountain, not knowing it was, or was to become: one of the great birding places in the state…In 1970 or 1971 we found a Whip-poor-will there.

RR:  When did you first go to Cape May?

PB:  That fall in 1971 my mother read in a newspaper that New Jersey Audubon was sponsoring a weekend in Cape May and thought Bruce and I might be interested.  We signed up, and the fellow who was running the thing was named Norman Fisher, and we made friends with him the first day.  He was the director of NJAS after Frank McLaughlin and before Dick Farrar.  Later that fall, I went up to Franklin Lakes and began volunteering, and did so for 22 years until 1993, when I came to work for New Jersey Audubon full time.

RR:  And the weekend in 1971?

PB:  It was great, and the quote I heard–“If we’re lucky we’ll have five minutes for lunch”–was true; we birded all day long.  At that time, the weekend met at the north end of Lily Lake, where they had tables set up with coffee and donuts…and all the field trips originated from there.

RR:  There was no hotel involved at the time?

PB:  You had to make your own reservations at places.  Then the following year Bruce and I sold books for Audubon, we ran a bookstore in ’72 as part of our work as volunteers on the Fall Weekend.  And they put us up at the Montreal, where we stayed for several years, and which is still there on Beach Drive.

Then in 1973 I led my first field trips, which were insect walks…at the time I was getting my masters in biology-entomology at Fairleigh Dickinson.  Then in 1974 Rich Kane asked me to lead bird trips, and I’ve been leading bird trips ever since, volunteer work probably totaling thousands of hours for Scherman Sanctuary, CMBO, and NJAS in general.

RR:  Do you remember anything about those early years in Cape May?

PB:  There were very few bad days in Cape May then; a bad day in Cape May in late September was ten or twelve species of warblers, and usually lots of other birds.

RR:  When did you first meet Pete Dunne?

PB:  It was on a Fall Weekend in 1976.  I was walking across the lobby of the Christian Admiral Hotel, where they were holding the weekend in those days.

RR:  I remember that place, a huge old brick block of a building on the east end of Beach Drive, and it was owned by that fundamentalist minister and broadcaster Carl McIntyre.  We were thrown out of there once for having wine in our room.

PB:  You couldn’t drink there, you couldn’t cuss, and you had to be married couples…I didn’t stay there; we were still at the Montreal then, but most of the participants were at the Admiral because it had the biggest auditorium, and lots of vendors.

So I was walking across the floor and Karl Anderson’s daughter Barbara stopped me and said she wanted me to meet Pete Dunne, who was going to be working in Cape May for New Jersey Audubon starting that fall or next spring…to do some hawk work I think, and work on something called the Cape May Bird Observatory, which was being run at the time by Joe Lomax, who also owned the Osprey Guest House…

So I first met Pete in 1976…and the following spring, in 1977, we did the very first Cape May Spring Weekend…Bill Clark, Pete, and myself, and we had about thirty people.  And at about six o’clock that first morning Bill came to my room, at first light, and we had a Merlin come in off the ocean, exhausted, and it had to have been flying over the ocean all night…and it was a good omen.

We kept the group together, and we later saw a Bar-tailed Godwit at Longport and twenty-five species of warblers, one of the best warbler weekends I’ve ever had in Cape May…there were birds just everywhere…a good trip.

So then Pete and I began to do trips as CMBO started to expand.  I would come down at least one weekend every month, all year round, and stay in Pete’s room on top of the historical museum’s building in Swainton, sleeping sometimes on a mattress on the floor of his room.

RR:  Let’s talk about those early days of Big Days and the World Series of Birding.

PB:  I remember early Urner Big Days with Tim Koebel and company, when you’d stop and everyone would go off in their separate directions, and then you’d tally up, and go on to the next place.  And I’d done a few on my own.

So in 1980, Pete Dunne called me and asked if I’d take him on a Big Day, that he’d never been on one, but he had a few ideas…The traditional Big Day had ended at dusk at Brigantine or Holgate…Pete said why don’t we go to Cape May…he knew all the birdy places down there, and why didn’t we do the whole state?  So we did it sometime in the middle of May, 1980, and it poured all day, and we got in at the end of the day around 11, and sat down at the C View Inn, and we thought that 163 species in the rain wasn’t bad, considering the state record then was only 172.

Even after that first day, we thought we could do 200 species.

RR:  I remember you claiming that back in 1980, and everyone at the Urner meeting laughing that it was impossible, and Irv Black shaking his head and turning red.

PB:  So the next year we decided to do it all over again; I think it was just the two of us, in ’81, and most of the day we had a 30 mile-an-hour wind, the grass at Assunpink was horizontal, and we ended up with 169 species, but we really knew then we could do well with this competition if we ever got good weather.

So the following year we invited Dave Sibley to come with us.

RR: Young Dave Sibley.

PB:  He must have been in his early 20s at the time, but still, he was Dave Sibley, and we knew it.  Everyone was aware of how phenomenal he was, and we liked him.  And we had 185 species, just the three of us, from Sussex to Cape May…actually from Cape May to Sussex County and back to Cape May in 1982…but that was too brutal to continue.

RR:  And the next year, in 1983?

PB:  That year we asked Bill Boyle to come along, so we had a foursome, and we were fine- tuning the route.  And on that day we had 194 species.  That was when it was still called Birdathon, and Pete did the funny advertisements for pledges, holding out a tin pan and everything.

At that time we were constantly discussing strategy and routes…The old Big Days used to start in the Boonton Hills, but we were going to Sussex County…It was all new, we were pioneering new ideas about the event.  In those days Greg Hanisek was our biggest competition, and he was going down to Cape May too, but via the Delaware River.

RR:  What about the year you had Roger Tory Peterson on your team?

PB:  In 1984 Pete got Roger Peterson to come with us, and we did midnight to midnight, we—Pete, Roger Peterson, Bill Boyle, Sibley, and myself, the Guerilla Birding Team—did the entire state.

RR:  So it was a competition by this time?

PB:  We had thirteen teams—Hanisek, Rich Kane, Paul Buckley had a team, and maybe the DVOC, and others who I can’t remember.

RR:  So when did it become the World Series of Birding?

PB:  In 1984, and I have not missed one since.  Only Pete and I have been on an A Team for all the World Series; Rich Kane has also never missed a World Series, but he wasn’t always on an A-level team.

RR:  What are some of your memories of that day?

PB:  I remember when we were driving around during those long hours in the dark, Peterson regaled us with tales of Ludlow Griscom taking him on Big Days back in the 1930s, and about birding with Charles Urner, Lee Edwards, and the Jersey guys, and other stories of the early days of birding when he was younger…Stuff I really wish someone had recorded…

In the Newark Watershed he picked up a Solitary (now Blue-headed) Vireo which we all had missed…We went to Princeton, the Institute Woods, and we had to surround Peterson because the local birders were mobbing him for autographs…And at Assunpink he asked me to point out a Blackpoll, which by then, at the age of 74, he was having trouble hearing.  I remember him hearing a Mourning Warbler along Shinns Road in Lebanon State Forest… And at Bob Mauer’s, who had Black Rails in a marsh near his house…Peterson had contacts, and one had lodged in the back of his eye and he was having trouble seeing, so we’re walking along in the dark and I’m thinking of the headlines—“Famous Author, Artist, Bird Watcher Lost in Swamp on Bird Hunt”—so I literally grabbed his arm and helped him until we got to a place where he could see…And finally we heard Black Rail, bird number 198.

When we later counted up we had 201—really 202, but Pete refused to count the Peregrine on the hacking tower at Brigantine.

RR:  Someone got a life North American bird that day.

PB:  We had heard the day before that there had been a Fork-tailed Flycatcher seen in Cape May, and we were driving around Bayshore and New England Roads and finally found it in the fields.  Roger announced that he’d seen the species in South America, but this was a new North American bird for him.

RR:  I have a great memory of you in the early 80s in Cape May that involved a Northern Wheatear in the parking lot by the hawk watch.

PB:  I can remember that like it was yesterday.  I was sitting on the hawk watch platform with Bill Boyle and the hawk counter, Fred Hamer…and we were telling jokes and stories, typical hawk-watch banter, and no-one was particularly watching the birds.  And Bill Boyle said there was a thrush-like bird sitting on the picnic pavilion, and we looked at it for a while with Fred’s gunstock scope and didn’t think much of it for a while until Bill Boyle noticed that about a hundred people were now looking at this bird.

Soon after, all I heard was the word “wheatear” and I immediately put two and two together—Northern Wheatear—and I go bolting off the platform with Boyle, as I heard you say, “If Bacinski’s running, this has got to be good!”  And we ended up chasing the bird around St. Mary’s, and climbing fences, and the bird later settled on the garage of the state park office, where Alan Brady was taking pictures of it from the roof of a state truck.  Pete Dunne and I went up to the top of the lighthouse and we’re looking down at the wheatear, telling each other that this is definitely some kind of New Jersey first…

RR:  You and Rich Kane were the first people I knew who became very involved with the preservation of the Highlands.

PB:  In 1973 Rich Kane introduced me to the Newark Pequannock Watershed, part of the region now known as the Highlands.  Cherry Ridge. Wawayanda.  I just fell in love with it, did lots of breeding-bird studies, and led many trips there; it’s a unique place in the state.  And in 1986 Dennis Miranda asked me to join a group called Watershed Watch, and we got together with other people, started to get some publicity, and right after that I started to huddle over drinks with Tom Gilmore at fall weekends and pressed him to get Audubon involved, which it eventually did with both feet in the late 80s.  And around that same time the Highlands Coalition also formed…It all much later came to fruition when Governor McGreevy signed the Highlands Act in 2004.

RR:  How did Sandy Hook Bird Observatory come about?

PB:  Linda Mack (now on the NJAS board of directors) had always said that NJAS should have a presence out on Sandy Hook, and she had been saying it for a long time, so it was really her original idea.  I had later mentioned to Tom Gilmore about moving Owl Haven out to Sandy Hook, and he suggested that I start doing some programs out there for the National Park Service, which ran the place, as a way of getting our foot in the door.  That was around 1997, and it took us fifty-five months of travail from then until we opened our doors.

The Hospital Steward’s House, built in 1899 and on the Federal Register, and which we moved into, was a shambles…There was asbestos in the falling-down ceiling and the walls, the raccoons had chewed their way in, and there were animal droppings all over the place.  After extensive renovations by Roger Johnson, we finally moved in during December 2001, and had our grand opening as Sandy Hook Bird Observatory a few months later.  Sandy Hook is the northern coastal counterpart of Cape May.  Over 340 species of birds and over 50 species of butterflies have been seen there.

RR:  What do you think of the recent trends in Cape May?

PB:  Birding around Lake Lily and areas around the Point isn’t what it was thirty years ago, and the Neotropical migrants are way down from then; usually no double-digit warblers on many September days.  I once recently did a trip to Higbees and the Beanery and had zero species of warblers.

But then you’ve got great spectacles like the Sea Watch…hundreds of thousands of sea birds…and the opening of Hidden Valley Ranch has been great.  And moving fall weekend and The Bird Show to late October has highlighted the tremendous display that short-distance migrants like robins, kinglets, blackbirds, sparrows, and other birds can produce at that period.  I recently wrote an article in the September-October issue of Wild Bird about the subject, highlighting the huge November 7, 2000 fallout of short-distance migrants.  Few of us had ever seen anything to equal it.