Long Island Sound Coastal Lowland

Two Hudsonian Godwits (Limosa haemastica) have been working the mud at the north end of the East Pond at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, reported there repeatedly through September 7. They are plain gray-brown birds at this season, nothing like the chestnut of the field-guide breeding shots, and from the shoreline they read as a tall, long-necked shorebird with a very long, slightly upturned bill that is pink at the base. Size is the quickest handle: bigger than the Willets around them, smaller and grayer than a Marbled Godwit. If one flushes, the identification settles itself. A Hudsonian flashes black underwings, a black tail and a white rump; a Marbled Godwit flashes solid cinnamon, and a Willet shows a bold black-and-white stripe across the whole wing.The reason this pair is interesting has to do with where the rest of the species is right now. Hudsonian Godwits breed on the edge of the boreal zone, with a large population centered on the southern shore of Hudson Bay. In late summer they gather on James Bay to fatten, then most of them leave on a nonstop flight over the Atlantic toward South America, wintering on tidal mudflats in Argentina and Chile. The migration runs as an ellipse: north through the middle of the continent in spring, south over open ocean in fall. The Atlantic Coast sits off to the side of that southbound line, and the species turns up here mainly when northeasterly winds push birds inshore. Whatever brought these two down, a stop at Jamaica Bay is a chance to refuel before a flight that, for most of their kind, is measured in thousands of miles without landing.What they are doing on the mud is feeding by touch. The bill looks stiff, but the tip flexes, and the bird drives it into soft sediment, feels for something moving, clamps down, then steps forward and probes again, dowitcher-fashion, sometimes with the head under water. The catch is worms, amphipods, small crabs, snails and insect larvae living in the top few inches of mud.The East Pond is not tidal flat. It is an impoundment, and the National Park Service drains it into the bay each year from July into September specifically to expose mud for southbound shorebirds and to give them somewhere to feed and rest while the tide covers the flats out in the bay. September is the tail end of that drawdown window, which is why the north end of the pond is one of the most watched pieces of mud in New York City right now. Anyone who gets there in the next week or two has a fair chance of picking out the two gray godwits among the yellowlegs and dowitchers, and of seeing a bird that is normally far offshore at this time of year, standing in Queens.

The early-summer drought is finished. Severe drought covered as much as all of Kings County from mid-June through early August, and by the week of August 25 to 31 the county had none of any drought category, not even the abnormally dry tier. The sharp reversal is supported by an August running at roughly double normal rainfall: the Central Park gauge has logged 8.5 inches this month against a normal of 4.08 inches for these calendar days, a surplus of 4.4 inches.Where that water went matters as much as how much of it fell. Much of Brooklyn and Queens drains through a combined sewer system, a single pipe carrying street runoff, household sewage and industrial wastewater to one treatment plant. The design includes a relief valve. When incoming flow exceeds what the pipe and the plant can handle, the excess discharges untreated through permitted outfalls directly into the receiving water. That threshold is crossed by rainfall intensity rather than by monthly totals: an inch spread across a day mostly gets treated, an inch in an hour does not. Storm-by-storm rainfall figures for August aren't in hand, so how much of the 4.4-inch surplus arrived in bursts is an open question, but a month running more than double normal in a place where most of the ground is paved is the shape of month that tests the relief valve.The infrastructure on the receiving end of that test is already behind. NYCDEP's 26th Ward Water Pollution Control Plant, which discharges to Jamaica Bay about five miles from here, is in significant non-compliance with the EPA for missing a deadline in its compliance schedule by more than 90 days. The city's municipal storm sewer permit is separately in non-compliance for late progress reporting on its own schedule. Neither record documents an overflow event this month; what they document is that two pieces of the stormwater system are formally overdue. Jamaica Bay's western and eastern segments, meanwhile, are already on the state's impaired waters list and still awaiting a cleanup plan.NYC H2O teaches local water ecology across the city, and is a good organization to learn from for anyone who wants to understand the health of these marine ecosystems — and where the rain on their block ends up.

A permit application under review at the DEC would rebuild roughly 270 feet of shoreline at 2 Noble Street on Greenpoint's East River waterfront, between Noble and Oak Streets, and carry a public waterfront walkway along with it. Alongside reconstructing the bulkhead and riprap revetment, the project would open a stretch of tidal shoreline that has been closed off to the public.Greenpoint's waterfront has been opening up gradually, parcel by parcel, as old industrial sites are rebuilt and each one adds its own segment of public edge. This is another step in that sequence: 270 more feet of a shoreline that is slowly becoming reachable.What that offers is a chance for people to reconnect with the estuary at their doorstep. Most residents here live a block from tidal water they can only see through a fence, and there is a good deal on the other side of it. Double-crested cormorants, black-crowned and yellow-crowned night herons, great egrets, ospreys, Atlantic horseshoe crabs, Atlantic blue crabs, striped killifish, Atlantic silversides and ribbed mussels have all been recorded around this part of the harbor in the past two months, cormorants among them on Quay and Franklin Streets, a few blocks from the site. A walkway is what turns all of that from something happening out of sight into something people can watch, learn and speak up for.The DEC is accepting comments through August 27. Comments go to Jeanette Rodriguez at DEC Region 2 (dep.r2@dec.ny.gov, 718-482-4997). This is the window to shape how the space gets built: where the walkway meets the water, whether the edge invites people to stop and look at the river or just pass by it, and what habitat the new bulkhead and riprap offer below the waterline.The Newtown Creek Alliance, a watershed group based nearby at the Newtown Creek-East River confluence, works this exact stretch of shoreline and would be a natural voice on how the access is designed. Anyone who uses this waterfront has until August 27 to weigh in.

The River Road wastewater treatment plant in Edgewater, New Jersey, has been out of compliance with its Hudson River discharge permit for more than two years running. EPA records show the facility exceeded its allowed limit for carbonaceous BOD5, a measure of oxygen-consuming organic material in effluent, in eight separate reporting quarters between March 2024 and July 2026, with overages ranging from 20 to 52 percent above the legal limit. The most recent quarter on record is still in violation. This is not a single bad quarter or a permit upset; it is a sustained pattern the facility has not corrected.The stakes are tied to what BOD5 actually does downstream: the more oxygen-demanding waste that enters the water, the less oxygen is left for whatever lives in it. The receiving stretch of the Hudson is already listed as an impaired segment under the Clean Water Act, with a pollution budget, known as a TMDL, set for it in 2022. No dissolved-oxygen readings from a monitoring station below this outfall were available to check whether the plant's exceedances are actually driving that impairment; establishing that link would require direct DO data collected during the violation windows themselves.What's confirmed is narrower but still notable: a permitted discharger has been over its organic-loading limit, on and off, for over two years, into a river segment the state already considers compromised. Groups like the Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research track water quality issues like this one across the watershed, and it's the kind of long-running compliance record worth continuing to watch.

Eastern Cicada-killer Wasps (Sphecius speciosus) are at peak activity across the waterfront and inland parks this month — 19 sightings since late June, with seven logged just in the past four days from Greenwood Heights and Prospect Park to the waterfront edge and Herbert Von King Park, including sightings along Joralemon Street and in Herbert Von King Park on July 28. These are North America's largest native solitary wasps, two inches long and formidable-looking, yet they rarely sting. Their midsummer timing is no accident: they emerge and hunt precisely when cicadas do, each female provisioning a single egg with a paralyzed cicada dragged back to her burrow.That sightings are turning up across this many city blocks — from Greenwood Heights to Prospect Park to the waterfront edge — points to the persistence of suitable ground. Sparse vegetation, sandy margins, and bare soil patches still exist here in sufficient patchiness for a native insect with strict nesting requirements to establish and forage.

Sweetpepperbush (Clethra alnifolia) opened along the tidal margin on July 8th — a critical mid-summer nectar source for bumble bees as their colonies build toward peak strength. The shrubs occupy a thin strip of marsh-edge ground that was immediately inundated: tides ran 23 centimeters above predicted levels and remained elevated through the week.The timing creates a botanical gamble. High water persisting through the bloom window could shorten the flowers' productive life, just when the bees most need them. If the surge holds, the window for pollination and seed set may close before the plant can fully capitalize on the season.

Jamaica Bay's creek systems are already struggling under decades of nitrogen enrichment. Eelgrass beds that once stabilized sediment and provided nursery habitat for fish have nearly vanished, and the shallow waters now oscillate between hypoxic and anoxic with each tide cycle. Late July is precisely when bay waters warm, oxygen solubility plummets, and tidal flushing becomes slowest — this week's tides are running 0.2 meters above predicted normal, which reduces water exchange even further.A major wastewater treatment facility discharging into these same creeks is currently in significant permit violation. The timing and location could not be worse: adding treated but still nitrogen-laden effluent to an already impaired system during peak summer heat extends the window of stress for whatever finfish and shellfish juveniles remain. The bay's recovery window is already narrow. Each violation tightens it further.

The irony of the urban canopy shows itself sharply on poor air days. A network of 7,000 street trees — dominated by pin oaks — pulls nearly 12,000 pounds of pollutants from the air each year. Yet pin oak (Quercus palustris) ranks among the northeast's most ozone-sensitive species, and today's unhealthy ozone levels are doing exactly what the trees are meant to prevent: damaging the leaf tissue that filters the air.Chronic ozone exposure wounds leaves from the inside, reducing their ability to photosynthesize and to absorb the particulates the canopy depends on to be effective. The trees keep working — they have no choice — but at a rising metabolic cost. With today's air quality forecast to persist through the end of the month, and every surface water body in the area federally impaired, the strain accumulates quietly in the leaves overhead.

Spotted Lanternflies (Lycorma delicatula) are at peak abundance across the urban core — over a hundred sightings since late March, with adults now feeding heavily on oaks and maples in Williamsburg, Clinton Hill, Brooklyn Heights, and Lower Manhattan. The insects have spread from a focus point on Governors Island in late spring to establish themselves in clusters throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan within ninety days.Their explosive presence here traces back to an earlier invasion. Tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima), which arrived in these neighborhoods in the 1700s as an ornamental, proved to be the perfect host plant for this invasive pest. Now the lanternflies' honeydew coats street trees in a thin film of sticky residue that fuels sooty mold blooms — blackening foliage on the very maples and oaks that neighborhoods have spent years establishing and maintaining. The ecological cost compounds: weakened urban canopy, pest populations exploding where natural predators are scarce, and no easy way to manage the cycle without broad toxin applications.

Along the weedy margins of Brooklyn's open lots and park edges, the common milkweed is in full leaf now. The broad, paired leaves are a deep matte green, soft on the underside, and the plants stand knee-high or taller in the places where the soil has been disturbed enough to let them take hold. If you find a patch, look at the undersides of the leaves. You may already see what is coming.Monarchs are moving through the region in early summer, and the females are laying. Each egg is a single pale dot, smaller than a pencil tip, pressed to the underside of a milkweed leaf with a small amount of adhesive. A female may lay several hundred eggs over the course of a summer, but she places them one at a time, often one per plant, spreading the risk. When the egg hatches, in three to five days, the larva eats its own eggshell first, then begins on the leaf itself. Common milkweed produces a sticky white latex that contains toxic compounds called cardenolides. Most insects cannot feed on it at all. The monarch caterpillar can, and it sequesters those compounds in its own tissues as it grows. By the time it pupates, it is unpalatable to most birds. The milkweed's defense becomes the caterpillar's defense. The relationship is not mutual in the strict sense — the milkweed gains nothing from the monarch — but the monarch is entirely dependent on plants in this one genus. Remove the milkweed, and there is no workaround.In the same disturbed ground where milkweed grows, horseweed is coming up fast. Horseweed is a native plant, a tall and bristly annual in the aster family that colonizes roadsides, vacant lots, and any ground that has been scraped or compacted. It does not host monarchs. But later in summer, when it flowers, its small white heads will draw a range of small pollinators, and the monarchs that emerge from their chrysalises in August and September will need nectar sources for the long flight south. Horseweed and milkweed share the same ecological address: edges, gaps, disturbed ground, places that are not managed closely enough to be lawns but not wild enough to be forest. In a city like Brooklyn, that kind of ground is exactly where monarchs find what they need.The red milkweed beetle is already on the plants. It is a striking insect, bright red with black spots, and it feeds on milkweed throughout its life cycle. Like the monarch caterpillar, it tolerates the latex and accumulates the toxins. The large milkweed bug does the same, piercing the seed pods to feed on the developing seeds. A single milkweed plant in early summer can be carrying the eggs or larvae of multiple specialist insects at once, each one using the plant's chemistry in its own way. The common eastern bumble bee works the flowers for nectar and pollen without any of that chemical tolerance — it simply avoids the latex by working the open florets where the sticky sap is not exposed.The monarchs you see here are not the ones that overwintered in Mexico. That generation died in the spring. The butterflies laying eggs on Brooklyn milkweed now are their offspring, born somewhere to the south in April or May and continuing north. Their own offspring will be the ones that fly back to Mexico in the fall, navigating by the sun and by some sensitivity to the earth's magnetic field that researchers are still working to understand. The insect on the leaf in front of you has never made that journey and never will. It is here to reproduce, and the leaf it chooses determines whether its line continues.The milkweed flowers are just opening on some plants, the pink-purple globe clusters tight and fragrant in the heat. Find a patch in sun and stand near it for a moment. The bumble bees are audible before they land.