Geologists have a word for a rock or rock formation that has never moved much over the eons from its point of origin: They call it “autochthonous.” Long before there was such a thing as geology, the word was applied to people. The man who comes most to my mind is Jim Zamos, who was born and grew up in Newton, New Jersey, raised a family there, worked and retired there, and, most telling of all, spent most of his free time in a large wetland complex he calls, simply, The Swamp, or Hyper. Fortunate is the dedicated naturalist who can remain fixed to a place for a long time, because he or she is able to see things that no transient ever will. John Burroughs was largely autochthonous. So was Thoreau. Jim knows the swamp now called Hyper Humus, and the region around it, better than anyone.
Everyone says that Jim Zamos is one of the nicest, most friendly people they ever met. And they remember that, often for a very long time. I can recall times when an old truck (or a Mercedes) has driven by us in an isolated spot in Sussex, Warren, or even Cumberland County, stopped, and the window rolled down: “Hey Jim, how have you been?” Chances are that Jim went to school—sixty years ago—with that person, or sold her a house, went hunting, fishing, botanizing, or birding with him; or traded stories on the arcana of old bricks or Folsomoid arrowheads.
A graduate of Lehigh University with a degree in conservation, Jim worked first for the Department of Fish and Game as a fisheries biologist, later managed the state fish hatchery in Hackettstown, and moved on to real estate in the late 1960s. He has birded practically all his life, in New Jersey, the U.S., and around the world.
I met Jim recently in the kitchen of his 1820s farmhouse on the edge of the Hyper Humus Swamp, where he’s lived since 1968.
RR: You started birding when you were how old?
JZ: I wouldn’t call it birding back then, I was just a kid interested in birds. But when I got to the eighth grade I had a teacher, Eva Rodimer, who was quite an outdoors person, an avid naturalist, and she told me that I should keep a list. So I started keeping a list, in 1944.
RR: You became a lister in 1944, in Newton, when you were twelve years old? And have kept a list ever since?
JZ: Every year. I didn’t have any bird books or anything, but in school we had a copy of Frank Chapman’s What Bird is That?, and that’s how I started identifying birds. At the end of the year she told me to keep the book—and I still have it.
Jim produces the tattered book. With his original list in it.
JZ: If you look in it, you’ll see that in 1944 I saw a total of 77 species of birds, my first year…and this was strictly by eyeball because I didn’t have binoculars. If you look at the entries in the list you’ll see the word swamp…swamp…swamp all over it.
It was the Hyper Humus Swamp, but we just called it the swamp. Memory Park in Newton is the southern end of Hyper Humus Swamp, and there’s a big natural spring there, and the swamp is where I grew up; it was my playground…The property was part of a big parcel once owned by William Penn…It was first ditched in the mid-1800s that big ditch is still there.
RR: The state bought the property in 2005, and it’s now the Paulinskill-Hyper Humus Wildlife Management Area.
JZ: Hyper Humus Company persisted until about fifteen years ago, and then Scotts (the lawn company) bought it, and then DEP got after Scotts for so many violations because the company was bringing material in, including dried cow manure…So Scotts said the hell with it, they were getting out, and they put the property up for sale…A trucking firm bought the buildings and the uplands…But the lowlands, the wetlands, no one could do anything with them. The Fish and Wildlife Service was interested, and The Nature Conservancy, and Fish and Game.
JZ: Of the three, I’d rather have Fish and Game own and operate it because anyone can go in there (in a wildlife management area) and enjoy it at any time, all year…Go up to the Wallkill National Wildlife Service and you’ll see no trespassing signs all over, even though it’s public property. People come in here to fish, ride bicycles, ski, hunt, go horseback riding, to bird and butterfly…anytime.
RR: What did you first identify in the swamp back in 1944?
JZ: One of the first things was a Northern Shrike, and Mrs. Rodimer asked if I was sure about that, and I said that I was. We went down to Memory Park on the edge of the pond…and eventually it showed up right in front of us. From that day on, everything I told her I saw, she would believe me.
RR: At the time, Northern Shrike was much the rarer of the two shrikes that occurred in New Jersey.
JZ: It was. Now it’s reversed. So I birded without binoculars for a few years, and finally, I think I was a junior in high school; my dad bought me a pair of binoculars from a G.I. They were 6×42s, and I could really see with those! They were so bright!
But I really didn’t know much about the binoculars until one day many years later, sitting at this table, we had Will Russell with us, and Will looked over at the binoculars and asked me if I knew what they were and I said that they were Hensoldts…and he told me that Hensoldt was the forerunner of Zeiss Binoculars.
RR: They’re so bright and light! Even by today’s standards. They remind me of my Zeiss 7×42s, still my all-time favorite binocular for most uses. These look a lot like them.
JZ: I’ve seen over a thousand species of birds with these, and all I’ve ever had done to them is cleaning…
RR: You learned mammals, plants, trees, and flowers when you were growing up.
JZ: Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut. You may not be seeing rare things but you’re never bored…mushrooms, butterflies, dragonflies, keep your eyes open…
RR: You’ve even picked up moth identification.
JZ: I started studying them when one of my daughters had a science project, and we collected moths…I had a huge collection that Wade Wander later used for his report on Hyper Humus Swamp.
RR: How many bird lists do you keep?
JZ: I keep an ABA-area list, and a state list, and a Sussex County list, and of course I keep a yard list…and a month list.
RR: You still chase month birds? I remember that time when you and Fred Weber hiked into an isolated spot on the Kittatinnies, chasing a Swainson’s Thrush I’d found singing there one day in early July.
JZ: I went back there and didn’t get the bird, but I went up and down the trails…and I was sneaking up on a sound I heard when I saw one the biggest bears I’d ever seen…until I realized it was two bears mating and one was standing up…I stayed perfectly still and luckily they didn’t attack…Keep quiet is a good rule…
RR: I know you don’t like a lot of talking when you’re out in the field.
JZ: I am actually amazed that people never stop talking…yak, yak, yak. They miss a lot of birds that way…I grew up birding without binoculars and I had to sneak up very quietly on the birds to see them…
RR: You went to Lehigh University, where you took that new environmental major.
JZ: It was a conservation major, which was a split between biology, geology, and chemistry. And after graduating Lehigh in 1953, I went to work for the Division of Fish and Game, as a fisheries biologist, and my first job was a marine inventory of the New Jersey coast from Morgan in Raritan Bay down to Brigantine…After that I went to the Hackettstown Fish Hatchery and later became superintendent there.
RR: I didn’t know that! I loved that place as a kid.
JZ: In 1960, I left and later went into real estate in 1965. I’m retired now…since I lost my wife I said so long to real estate…I get to call in sick every morning, no matter what!
RR: When you were younger, did you get to meet some of the pioneers in the birding world?
JZ: Oh yeah, I’ve been out with Lee Edwards, and he later moved up to the Sparta area and we went out with Lou Cherapy senior a lot…and Vince Abraitys, and Howard Drinkwater, and of course Floyd Wolfarth.
RR: Pete Dunne always credits him as his mentor.
JZ: I remember in the mid-70s going into Hyper Humus with Floyd and Pete on a Christmas Bird Count—I became a member of the gun club there, so I could always have access—and we had an immature Northern Shrike, and Floyd kept insisting it was a migrant shrike (one of the old names for Loggerhead Shrike)…until I told him that there were no brown migrant shrikes, that it was a Northern (and Pete’s first)…and Floyd finally shut up.
RR: Did you see the Loggerhead Shrike Wade Wander found here last spring?
JZ: It was on this road, practically in front of my house, but I was in Arizona.
RR: When did you first get to Cape May?
JZ: Probably when I was working for the state in 1953, doing the marine inventory. I was up and down the coast a lot, and got a lot of life birds on Great Bay Boulevard, in Tuckerton, and that’s when I really got into it…Sometimes I’d go all the way down to Cape May…and I saw the first Cattle Egrets (in 1958) in the Meadows when the cows were still there.
RR: Do you remember the story of the White-tailed Kite? What turned out to be the one and only confirmed state record?
JZ: A new birder named Al Pochek took pictures of what he thought was a Mississippi Kite at Hidden Valley Ranch, and the photos were even circulated at an Urner meeting without comment, but Rich Kane later went through them and realized that some were of a White-tailed Kite. Word got out about a month late, and no one else saw the bird.
RR: You want to get Cape May birders mad, remind them of that story. But you’ve had some pretty good luck with other one-day wonders like that ani at Sandy Hook, which I chased the day after and didn’t get.
JZ: The records committee called it a Groove-billed Ani, though I thought it was a Smooth-billed.
RR: But it’s still Crotophaga sp., an ani species nonetheless.
JZ: And another was the Mongolian Plover in Wildwood…I got down there, pulled into 19th Street and there was Jim Dowdell and Paul Holt, and we had about a half-hour of daylight left…The plover flew in, we looked at the bird for about two minutes, the bird flew off and that was it…The next morning there were dozens of people there, but they didn’t get it…You have to try or you don’t get the bird.
Off we go in Jim’s Subaru, downhill through fields and cedars and young woods on trails that lead through his property to the edge of the Sussex Branch Trail and the Paulinskill-Hyper Humus Wildlife Management Area.
RR: When do you remember first coming into the swamp?
JZ: When I was ten or eleven…I remember some woodcock hunters, the Rosellis, would use us like bird dogs to hunt woodcock. We’d flush the birds and then we were supposed to flop on the ground…
RR: So they wouldn’t shoot you! Nowadays someone would go to jail for that.
JZ: And that was great fun for us, you know?
RR: What’s changed?
JZ: I bushwhacked through this swamp for more than twenty-five years and I never had a single tick on me until 1969.
RR: There were very few deer here back then.
JZ: Very few deer, and no dog, deer, or other kinds of ticks. The ticks in north Jersey were only along the Delaware Valley where there were still deer.
RR: And you never had Wild Turkey…those were long gone from the state, but you probably had plenty of Ruffed Grouse.
JZ: Grouse all over, and on my property…now grouse is big deal and the only way you get grouse is if you hear them drumming up in Stokes and a few other places. But I don’t think it’s from competition with Wild Turkeys.
RR: And now turkeys are all over…Newark, Elizabeth…I got my first “below the canal” Wild Turkey in Cape May last spring.
JZ: You keep a below the canal list?
RR: I do…one of my more cherished lists… Do you have a separate list just for Hyper Humus?
JZ: Yes…I think it’s 240.
RR: And the yard list? Does it include Hyper?
JZ: Only what I can see from my property. It’s 199, and there are 10 or 15 I should still be able to get…
We run across a small flock of newly-arrived White-throated Sparrows, with an adult White-crowned among them.
JZ: The sparrows are just starting to come in. It’s good for sparrows here—we’ve even had Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow.
Jim identifies a Ruby Meadowhawk that eluded me.
RR: Any place out-of-country you’d like to get to?
JZ: Not now. I’m concentrating on my ABA list so that I can get to 800. My last list-bird was Sinaloa Wren in Arizona …and before that a Tufted Flycatcher, also in Arizona.
RR: Do you have favorite places?
JZ: Gambel is one of my favorites…I saw a Wryneck there, the first live bird seen in the ABA area.
RR: Do you have any “glaring” holes in your ABA list?
JZ: Cook’s Petrel is supposed to be easily seen in its area, but I went out off the California coast last July and didn’t get it…I need Buff-collared Nightjar, Red-legged Kittiwake, and Bahama Mockingbird, not counting rarities like Jabiru which I’ve chased and missed twice…
RR: Good luck.