Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge

The entire reason we visited Broad Channel was because we went to the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

One of the native peoples who were here when the Dutch, and then the British, arrived called themselves Jamacoe, or, probably like many tribesmen, the name they were eventually given had more to do with what their word for "people" turned out to be (or "enemy", when naming another set of tribesmen). Their original main community is now called Jamaica, Queens, and while there are many Caribbean islanders living there now, the fact that Jamaica (NY) is spelled and pronounced like the sovereign Caribbean island-nation is just a coincidence.

How the bay got the moniker Jamaica Bay, since it's not very close to the community, is still a mystery to me.

In any case, getting off the train at Broad Channel, and about a mile walk away, you enter the Jamaica Bay estuary and Wildlife Refuge. There is an information building, and the entrance to the free West Pond Trail. On the main island in Jamaica Bay, the main salt-marsh which has the community of Broad Channel upon it, there are two large ponds, two large bodies of water basically enclosed by the millennia of salt- and sandy-buildup. They flank the bridge that takes the subway into Broad Channel, while the cars cruise in along a different route.

The West Pond is the smaller of the two, and the trail around takes far less time. Also, the trail has been graveled into the ground, and cut wide, while the trail around the East Pond is more for the more-than-casual-hiker. We consider ourselves more than casual, but the tick problem out here is unbelievable, and Lyme's disease is a real threat that afflicts half the people we know, so we wussed out and went with the more conventional path.

The West Pond, as is the entire estuary, is home to a wide variety of birds. Here are some of them...a wren walks about on the right of the frame, a swan flaps their wings, the ducks float around.

There are osprey, owls and swallows as well, and off a beaten path we found a roped off area of beach head during feeding time, and I was able to get this shot.

This side of the island is also home to a natural terrapin hatchery, and so is off-limits most of the year. It does seem serene and oddly similar to some areas we left three-years and thirty-five-hundred-miles ago.

Even out here, in the quiet solitude of an estuary, off in the distance the skyline is visible.