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简介

A late-summer cold front blasts out of the northwest, and in the dark of night all across the northern U.S. and Canada, birds take flight. By September up to 12 million per evening appear on airport radar screens. They pour south on powerful tail winds in an ancient migration that still intrigues ornithologists. One great focus for the continent’s southward migration is Cape May, New Jersey. Cape May peninsula is to migrating raptors, songbirds, and butterflies what a rest stop is to tired motorists on the Garden State Parkway: a place to reconnoiter, refuel, and restore. It is the last land a southward flyer encounters before making the challenging thirteen-mile open water crossing of Delaware Bay. Cape May Point is a wedge-shaped attracter, a narrowing funnel of land that concentrates birds and butterflies within its revitalizing marshes and the plenty of its forests and fields. The migration opens in August when a few ospreys and bald eagles appear over the point. It peaks in autumn when trees virtually drip with birds. More than 80,000 raptors—sharp-shinned and broad-winged hawks, harriers, kestrels, Merlin’s, and peregrines—glide through in a single season. More than 200 species of songbird also make the passage. Flycatchers, thrushes, vireos, and warblers wing toward the tropics. Migrating waterfowl and shorebirds add raucous cries and calls to the Cape May cacophony. Amid this tumult, the monarch butterfly passes voicelessly. Fluttering south on orange wings, this feather-light flyer follows an instinctual map on a 2,000-mile journey to an ancestral wintering ground to which it has never traveled before. Cape May Point State Park, once a military base that protected Delaware Bay with gun emplacements and concrete bunkers, is now a boon to birders. In the fall its 300 acres and five miles of trail can be as thick with binocular-wielding naturalists as with the bird species they come to observe. This 2.0-mile loop walk explores woods, thicket, pond, marsh, dune, and beach habitat. While a fall hike rewards with the migratory spectacle, the preserve is worth a visit anytime.

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