Book Reviews

New Jersey Birds and Beyond Book Review

By PAT JOHNSON | May 02, 2012
The Sandpaper

Photographer and author Susan Puder of Barnegat wasn’t always interested in birds and birding, but when she moved to the Jersey Shore 10 years ago, the sheer number and variety of shore birds took her breath away. With her trusty Nikon camera, she began the stealthy pursuit of them with the idea of a future book nestled in her mind.

New Jersey Birds and Beyond has just been published by Schiffer Publishing Ltd. The coffee table-sized book is lavishly illustrated with 434 stunning photographs, which, except for a handful, were taken by Puder. The book’s title references the great opportunity New Jersey birders have to see an abundance of species because of its strategic location along the Atlantic flyway, a major migration route. The book showcases 180 bird species along with their native flora and fauna.” Over 435 species of birds have been recorded in New Jersey, and someday, I hope to see and photograph them all,” she said.

The book, the author’s first, is highly instructive in a friendly manner. The informal text is sprinkled with whimsical commentaries such as you might expect to hear during an entertaining slide show. For instance, on captioning her photo of four Harlequin drakes, she notes the males are better-looking than the females. “Why is that so common in nature, but not so much with humans?” she muses. And under another photo, “You may think you are seeing a flock of female mallards on a girls’ night out, but look closer for the yellow bill with a black tip and a violet wing patch and you realize it’s an American Black Duck.” “I wanted to be humorous because people should have fun birding; some birders take themselves too seriously,” said Puder in a telephone interview. “I also want to get novices interested in birding.”

She also decided to include rare visitors to the shore to tantalize the armchair birder to keep a lookout for occasional bird visitors blown by storms into our viewing area. These birds are known in birding circles as vagrants. “During the summer of 2010, a trio of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks, normally found along the Gulf coast, decided to vacation in Cape May, and who could blame them,” she writes under a photo taken by her friend Dr. Howard B. Eskin. In the interest of compiling a true picture of New Jersey birds, Puder included photos of birds she had seen but was unable to capture herself. New Jersey Birds and Beyond is obviously too big to take along on a birding trip like the pocket guide books birders often utilize, but its large-sized photos, the breezy captions and short introductions by Puder make it a great educational tool. The book’s chapters are broken down into four regions and the birds that populate them: Along the Shore; Grasslands, Meadows and Marshes; Woodlands and Lakes; and Pine Barrens. “Along the Shore” is further structured into “Winter Birds” that migrant south to our bays and ocean and those one can see “Spring through fall,” either migrating through, like the warblers, or staying to breed, like those we find in our backyard bird feeders.

A birder could easily flip through the pages of the Along the Shore, Spring through Fall section before going out on a kayak trip in the marsh or before setting off to the beach to familiarize themselves on the birds they are most likely to see.

Always willing to educate the public and share her knowledge of birds, Puder placed photos of the endangered Piping Plover on a facing page with the more-common Semipalmated Plover to distinguish the two. The Semipalmated Plover has a darker back and thicker black neckband. And who could misidentify a Snowy Egret as a Great Egret after reading “Bright yellow feet looking like a pair of galoshes helps to identify the Snowy Egret”? The Great Egret has black legs and feet, we learn.

Puder also gives tips on where to find birds locally, such as the Common Eider, a diving duck that visits during the winter at Barnegat Inlet. And Purple Sandpipers can be found on jetties along our beaches.

An avid landscape and nature photographer for 20 years, Puder said she became interested in birding just about a decade ago, but after moving to the Jersey Shore in 2004, that interest “exploded.” “I was living in Union Township and I was sort of interested, but I became serious when I moved here because there were so many shore birds I had never seen before. I’m also only a half hour from the Edwin B. Forsythe (National Wildlife) Refuge in Oceanville.” The majority of the birds in the book were photographed within 50 miles of her Barnegat home.

As a direct result of her growing birding obsession, in 2008 Puder founded the Southern Ocean Birding Group, which meets every second Thursday of each month at 7 p.m. in the Hunting Shanty at the Tuckerton Seaport. Her love of nature began in her childhood, when she visited her grandfather’s house on Culver’s Lake in Sussex County. Growing up in Union Township, she used to roam the woods behind her house. “That was before they built Newark College, that became Kean University. It was Kean Farms when I was a girl, and I saw pheasants and the typical woodland mammals. I always loved animals; birds came later.”

Today, Puder is a dedicated environmentalist and a member of the New Jersey Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental organizations. She supports the preservation of open space. “I also want to inform my readers about the threats particularly to songbirds, whose numbers are decreasing due to loss of habitat, not just in the U.S. but in Central and South America, where they winter.” She also instructs cat lovers not to let their pets roam free.

Puder’s photography has been published in Digital Imaging and AAA World magazines, and she exhibits in New York City and throughout New Jersey. She has won many photo competitions; she was a finalist in the nationwide, 2011 “We Love Birds” competition sponsored by the Cornell Ornithology Lab and the National Resource Defense Council. She is both a judge and a presenter for the New Jersey Federation of Camera Clubs.

Press of Atlantic City
March 2, 2013

From amateur to author: Barnegat woman publishes a book after only seven years of birding

By MARTIN DeANGELIS, Staff Writer

Susan Puder knows all about the dangers of watching birds. Sure, from the outside, it may look healthy and appealing, being in the great outdoors and enjoying the beauty of nature and all that. “But it is addictive,” says Puder, who lives in Barnegat Township, and knows what she’s talking about on this subject. Just eight years ago, she knew basically nothing about birds. Before that, she could be on a visit to Cape May and see what she now knows is a fairly rare bird.

“And I said, ‘Oh, that’s nice. I wonder what it is,'” as Puder put it the other day. But eight years ago is when she moved from Union County to Ocean County after retiring from her job as a technology specialist in New York.

Her favorite hobby for years was photography, particularly landscapes, “And when I moved, I did all the shore pictures and the sand dunes,” Puder continues. “But I was always interested in wildlife, and down here, the wildlife is birds.” That led her straight into taking pictures of birds, which led her to want to know more about her subjects. And that hunger for knowledge made her want to meet other bird-watchers — which led her to start the Southern Ocean Birding Group.

She founded the club in 2008, and became its president, and “I got in with people” who were hooked on birding way more than she was, she says. One of them started admiring her pictures and made a suggestion: “He said, ‘You should write a book,'” Puder remembers. The guy even suggested a New Jersey publisher who might be interested, but when she contacted them, they weren’t.

Still, the seed was planted, and when she was on a vacation in Maine, Puder stumbled on a picture-happy book put out by Schiffer Publishing of Atglen, PA. The book included a page marker with a little question on top: “Ready to write book?” Schiffer already had her book proposal finished, so she sent it to the publisher. This time, it was accepted. And last year, “New Jersey Birds and Beyond,” a coffee-table-sized book stuffed with 434 full-color pictures — all but six of them Puder’s — was released. Puder wrote all the text too, although most of her words are captions and descriptions for her pictures, and more details about the birds in them.

She had her book in the publisher’s hands by late 2011. And that means in less than seven years, this woman – who politely declines to reveal her age to a reporter — got so deeply into her addiction that she went from raw rookie to published author in the world of birds. “To come up with all those bird pictures —- that’s pretty fast,” says Linda Gangi, of the Manahawkin section of Stafford Township, the vice president of the Southern Ocean Birding Group and Puder’s friend. “It’s one thing to see them all with binoculars, but it’s an entirely different story to get a picture of all of them. I was surprised myself that she did that so fast.” Gangi, who has been birding since 1984, says that’s particularly difficult because most birds are pretty fast critters. And she has some birding credentials of her own: “I used to work for New Jersey Audubon, and I did the birding and wildlife guides for the Skylands and the Meadowlands” areas of the state, Gangi says. Still, even after almost 30 years of partly professional birding, Gangi marvels that Puder “has a bigger birding list than I do”— meaning the lifetime list of identified birds that many dedicated fans keep.

But Puder pooh-poohs her own life list when she compares it to some of her birding buddies. “There are friends of mine who have thousands,” she says. “I’m trying to get to 400.” Still, there is no disagreement between the two SOBG leaders on a few key points: “People really get into it and get hooked,” Gangi says. “It’s an easy sport when you do: All you need is binoculars or a scope, and a field guide. And that’s it.”

Of course, Puder has collected a flock of field guides, so there’s always one handy if she needs it. And she knows about other dangers of the birding habit. For one thing, it can be time-consuming, between the monthly meetings of her birding group and its monthly field trips, which can go anywhere from Cape May to Central Park in New York. The group’s schedule also includes adventures to Delaware and Pennsylvania this year. Plus, the SOBG started “Wings Over Long Beach Island Day,” shortly after it formed. The fourth annual version of the festival is scheduled for March 9 at Barnegat Lighthouse State Park, at the northern tip of LBI in Barnegat Light. That takes plenty of time to plan and prepare, plus Puder and Gangi do birding programs at local libraries and other institutions — “sort of ‘Birding 101,'” as Puder puts it, trying to spread their passion for positively identified flying objects to still more people.

And then there’s the time that goes just to birding itself. Puder tries to get out at least once per week all year – sure, in the winter too, even if the air is freezing and the wind is howling. (She can point out the bird picture in her book that she took on a 12-degree day, after a long drive.) In the heart of summer, heat and greenheads — some almost as big as birds — can make birding less than fun. “Spring and fall are really the best times,” Puder says. “So, I’ll go out maybe several times a week then.” She knows about other hazards of birding — including one friend who is so into spotting birds that he isn’t allowed to drive on their trips anymore. Apparently, he had an unfortunate habit of paying more attention to the sky than the road if some exotic bird was up there. But for all its addictive powers, Puder says there is a definite social good to birding, too. “I moved down here and didn’t know anybody, but now I have friends from the birding group,” she says. “It’s a great way to meet new people.”

And her more-expert birding friends have been generous with her — including helping with the laborious proofreading, picture-identifying and detail-checking it took to put out her book. The SOBG gang meets at the Tuckerton Seaport, the living-history museum that gives them a spot in its Hunting Shanty — where the birds all stand still, because they’re all decoys. Paul Hart, the Seaport’s executive director, likes that Puder’s group “is spreading the word about the birds in this area,” he says. “Everyone doesn’t know about the birds in Ocean County — they go to Cape May, they go to Brigantine. … But she’s getting the message out.” Puder goes to all those places and many more for the birds, but she estimates she got probably 40 percent of the pictures in her book right in Ocean County. She tries to spot birds whenever she travels, and says her bucket list includes a trip well south of southern Ocean County — to Costa Rica.

And she really wants others to get the habit too, which is why she also speaks and shows her pictures in schools any time her club is invited. She says kids can be a tough audience — at first. “But when you tell them that birds are living dinosaurs, all these little boys get hooked into it,” Puder says. “And girls love them because they’re pretty.” Then again, a lot of people don’t get hooked until much later in life. But remember, you’ve been warned – even then, you can still fall hard. Susan Puder has the pictures to prove it.