Night herons hunting at dusk
June 6, 2026
The long June light holds over Prospect Park Lake until well past eight o'clock. If you are walking the water's edge as the day cools, listen for the harsh squawk that cuts through the evening air. Black-crowned night herons are moving to their feeding stations.These stocky, thick-necked birds spend daylight hours motionless in the shadows of willows and London plane trees. Their gray and black plumage blends into bark and branch until they seem part of the canopy itself. But as twilight deepens, they descend to the shallows. The night heron's hunting strategy depends entirely on timing. Early summer brings the year's greatest emergence of aquatic insects from the lake bottom. Chironomid midges, mayflies, and caddisflies that have spent months as larvae in the sediment now rise through the water column to transform at the surface. The timing is precise. Water temperature, day length, and lunar cycles all trigger this synchronized emergence. Millions of insects break through the surface film in the span of a few hours.The herons know this schedule. They position themselves in knee-deep water where the emergent insects are most concentrated. Their hunting technique requires absolute stillness. A night heron can stand motionless for twenty minutes, yellow eyes fixed on the water's surface. When an emerging midge or mayfly breaks the tension, the heron strikes with surgical precision. The thick, dagger-like bill pierces the water and returns with its prey in a single fluid motion. This is not the patient stalk-and-spear hunting of a great blue heron. Night herons are ambush predators, built for explosive strikes in confined spaces. Their shorter legs and compact bodies allow them to hunt effectively in dense vegetation and shallow water where larger herons cannot maneuver. The aquatic insects provide more than just a meal. These emergences represent the lake's most concentrated protein source. A single night heron can capture hundreds of insects during peak emergence hours. The calories fuel not only the adult birds but also their nestlings, which are reaching their maximum growth phase in early summer. Night heron colonies often time their breeding cycle to coincide with this insect abundance. The parents alternate hunting shifts, one bird remaining at the nest while the other works the water's edge.The relationship runs deeper than simple predation. Night herons help regulate insect populations that might otherwise overwhelm the lake ecosystem. Their selective pressure keeps chironomid and mayfly numbers in balance with the aquatic plants and fish that share these waters. The herons also redistribute nutrients, carrying nitrogen and phosphorus from the water to their roosting sites in the trees above.Stand quietly at the lake's edge as full darkness arrives. The water barely moves in the still air. Somewhere in the shallows, a night heron waits with the patience that only a predator knows, yellow eyes reflecting the last light as the insects rise to meet the surface.
Diamondback terrapins cross into nesting season
June 27, 2026
Along the brackish edges of the Hackensack Meadowlands, the tidal marsh grasses stand full and green in the longest days of the year. The water is warm. The mud at the marsh edge holds heat through the night. And on the sandy berms and upland margins that border these wetlands, female diamondback terrapins are emerging from the water to nest.The diamondback terrapin is the only turtle in North America that lives exclusively in brackish water, the mix of salt and fresh that defines estuaries like this one. She spends most of her life in the tidal creeks and coves of the Meadowlands, eating periwinkles, fiddler crabs, and mussels, moving with the tides. But in early summer, something shifts. Females become restless and begin to move toward shore. They are looking for dry, sandy, well-drained ground, often above the high tide line, where soil temperatures are warm enough to incubate eggs. A female may travel several hundred meters from the water's edge. She crosses roads. She pushes through beach grass. She excavates a flask-shaped cavity with her back feet, deposits four to eighteen eggs, fills the nest in, and returns to the water. The whole process can take less than an hour.What makes this moment ecologically significant is how exposed it is. In the water, a terrapin is difficult to catch. On land, she is slow, conspicuous, and committed. Common grackles and black-crowned night herons, both present along these wetland margins right now, are capable of taking hatchlings. Raccoons and foxes find and excavate nests with regularity, sometimes destroying a high percentage of eggs in a given area. Roads are the other pressure. The sandy, elevated ground terrapins prefer for nesting often sits on the far side of a road from the water, and females are struck by vehicles during the crossing. In places where terrapin populations have been studied along the northeastern coast, road mortality of nesting females has been one of the primary drivers of population decline, because females reproduce slowly. A female terrapin does not reach sexual maturity until she is seven to ten years old. She may live for more than twenty-five years. Each adult female lost to a car represents decades of potential reproduction removed from the population.The eggs themselves incubate for roughly sixty to seventy-five days, depending on soil temperature. Warmer nests develop faster. The sex of the hatchlings is also determined by temperature during a critical window mid-incubation: warmer conditions produce more females, cooler conditions more males. Nests that receive full sun through late summer will skew female-heavy. This temperature-dependent sex determination means that the aspect and shade cover of a nesting site shapes the population's future composition. When hatchlings emerge in late summer, they are small enough to fit in a tablespoon. Many move toward the water immediately. Some overwinter in the nest and emerge the following spring.The Hackensack Meadowlands hold one of the more significant terrapin populations remaining in the region. The estuary provides the right combination of brackish tidal habitat and upland nesting areas, though development has reduced and fragmented both. Terrapins here share their wetland margins with red-winged blackbirds singing from the phragmites tops, with great blue herons standing still in the shallows, and with ospreys working the open water above. All of these species are part of the same tidal system, drawing on the same productive estuary in different ways. The terrapin's role is particular: she moves nutrients and energy between the water column and the upland, and her eggs, whether they hatch or are predated, become part of the terrestrial food web above the tide line.If you are near any of the tidal margins around Jersey City right now, look at the sandy edges, the gravel shoulders near marsh, the dry elevated ground above the water. A nesting female leaves a distinctive track, a wide drag mark with alternating flipper prints on either side. The morning light is still low enough to cast shadows across the ground. You might find one.
