Let's Help The Rockaway Horseshoe Crabs
The above footage was taken in May, when director Shervin Hess strapped a palm-sized GoPro Hero video camera to the back of a horseshoe crab with two rubber bands and set him crawling into Rocky Point Marsh, in Breezy Point, on the bay side of the Rockaway Peninsula. “The camera is neutrally buoyant and had no discernible effect on locomotion,” Hess wrote on his blog, Rocky Point Marsh Makers. “After several minutes the horseshoe was relieved.”
Hess, who works for PBS’s wonderful nerd show “The History Detectives” with my friend Jen, has adopted Rocky Point as a clean-up project.
The five-acre salt marsh was filled with washed-up debris when he first visited with a National Park Service ranger last October. He’s been going out once a week for almost a year since then, picking up plastic trash, hauling stream-clogging lumber out of the reeds, and raking crap off the surface of the water.
He’s gotten a small crew of volunteers to help him out sometimes, and he has been meticulously documenting their progress and cataloguing the tidal patterns and seasonal changes and all the different types of wildlife that inhabit the place — with excellent photographs and, often, super-cool stop-motion videos. All of which he puts up the blog, which amounts to a fascinating and beautiful naturalist study of one small patch of New York that you don’t otherwise hear much about.
In June, Hess and co. built an osprey platform, and installed a motion-sensitive camera trap on it. Osprey and willet and herons and kingfishers and lots of other birds have been stopping by. Look at these amazing photographs of a tern diving for killfish! And in July, there was a particularly exciting aerial chase.
“As we raked, a large shadow suddenly sliced through the grass, drawing our gazes skyward to a massive female peregrine falcon towing a solitary least tern in hot, angry pursuit. Brass balls,’ Santos muttered. Indeed. The tern appeared less than least, roughly the size of the falcon’s tail feathers. It brazenly chased its would-be assassin around the marsh, coursing through the reeds and bashing into a tree before disappearing into the east. For want of a camera at that moment I offer this rendering”
God, I love that picture! I love everything about this blog. I spent a great deal of time looking at it yesterday.
Tomorrow, Saturday, September 17th, Hess has organized a large-scale group clean-up. Everyone is welcome. Volunteers will meet at the Rockaway Pier between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Tools and gloves will be provided, but people should bring their own food and water. Here are directions.
I have no idea what it will be like. I’ve never done anything like this before. But I’m going to go. I like horseshoe crabs.