Dialect of Delaware Bay seaside sparrow could be 'indicator' for climate change

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On an early summer morning, Rowan University professor Gerald Hough and his student Nicolas Buono are standing with microphones at the edge of a South Jersey salt marsh that lies between a dense forest and the Delaware Bay.

Although the busy beach town of Stone Harbor is only about 10 miles east as the crow flies, the only shore sounds you’ll hear are the ubiquitous laughing gulls feasting on the eggs of horseshoe crabs — who are likely the last of the season’s stragglers mating along the beach at high tide.

Dozens of cormorants lounge on top of a collapsed pier. Willets duck and dive among the reeds and high grasses, along with red-winged blackbirds, barn swallows and Forster’s terns.

At the edge of the marsh, Hough and Buono are aiming large microphones at tiny little sparrows perched on the swaying tops of spartina, or cordgrass.

“Welcome to Cooks Beach,” Hough said. “This is probably the closest that you can get to a seaside sparrow in South Jersey.”