Students converge on Meadowlands to study endangered bird — and climate change

4-minute read

• The students are producing a segment for WorldCast, a program that invites schools to make video presentations about environmental concerns in their backyards.
• New Jersey became the first state to require schools to incorporate the theme of climate change into all subjects.

A boardwalk in the foreground, Manhattan’s skyline in the distance. In between? The debris of urban life — a few tires and traffic cones — poked up from greenish mudflats and murky water. The tide was low in the Meadowlands.

There to record the sights and sounds of New Jersey’s largest wet marsh Tuesday morning were five high schoolers and their teachers from the environmental sciences club at East Rutherford’s Becton Regional High School. The group was recording a contest video entry about a native bird species, the endangered saltmarsh sparrow, and a segment for WorldCast, a program that invites schools to make video presentations about environmental concerns in their backyards.

The marshes along the Hackensack River are home to the saltmarsh sparrow, a tiny orange-headed bird with brown feathers, said biology teacher and club adviser Angela Calasso. Saltmarsh sparrows spend their entire lives in coastal salt marshes along the United States’ Atlantic and Florida Gulf coasts, including New Jersey, says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service.

Story continues below photo gallery.

The species breeds in coastal states from Maine to Virginia, but as rising sea levels threaten its habitat, it has adapted to a uniquely short breeding period of just two weeks in the spring.

Becton High senior Kailyn Manzo worked with TV production teacher Carly Blake to set up a tripod and video camera in the marsh. Students held up chart paper with a script and cues handwritten in big letters. They told the sparrow’s story using conversations between the students and their science teacher.

Senior Wiktor Pietraszewski took photographs and gathered B-roll of the quiet water and the views, which included a ribbon of the New Jersey Turnpike with bug-sized traffic zipping along it.

“I love the wilderness. I like being outside,” said Joseph Mejia, the lone freshman in the group of seniors. What does he want to do for a career? It’s too early to tell, Mejia said, but he “might take this path.” He worked on the video script and helped use ChatGPT to identify the sparrow as a species for the project.

The group members wanted to pick a species in their neighborhood to study.

“New Jersey does have a lot of biodiversity,” said senior Baback Ghalamsiah. “It would take a lot of time to filter out all the species, so AI was useful to help filter out all that information.”

No one in the group expected to spot the tiny, migratory bird, which arrives to start nesting in May, coming from the warmer parts of the East Coast where it lives in the winter. But standing on the boardwalk, framed by waving golden reeds outside the Meadowlands Environment Center in Richard W. DeKorte Park, it was possible to imagine tiny nests with tinier eggs hidden away in the foliage.

The Meadowlands, once spanning 20,000 acres, have been reduced to around 4,000 acres since the 1800s due to development and landfilling, said Terry Doss, a scientist at the center.

WorldCast project

Inside the park’s environmental science center, Joe Pontoriero, a junior at Seton Hall Prep, talked about the WorldCast project. Becton High is just one school recording a submission; Pontoriero will stitch and edit the clips he receives from other schools to create a longer video in which students present climate scenarios that affect their communities.

“Kids our age are dealing with climate issues,” Pontoriero said. “These videos give us perspective on what’s going on around the world.”

WorldCast, a YouTube project that envisions bringing students together to discuss sustainability, could help youth see what “they might have to offer” to climate solutions in their towns, said founder Silvio Laccetti, a retired history professor from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Laccetti, whose father was born in Italy, thought of the program as a response to the threat to Venice’s waterways and ecology from large cruise ships. The Italian government passed a law banning large cruise ships from docking in the Venice lagoon in 2021.

In past WorldCast projects, high schoolers from Point Pleasant Borough discussed pollution on the beaches after the hit TV series “Jersey Shore.” Other collaborators included Watchung Hills Regional High School in Somerset County and schools in Venice, Italy, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The 15-minute segment by the Point Pleasant Borough high schoolers in 2022, produced in news magazine style, featured interviews with then-Point Pleasant Beach Mayor Paul Kanitra and a local commissioner. Student reporters filed a clip from the beach on local fishermen, who described dips in local fish populations, and littering from tourists and “party culture” at the beach in Bay Head.

Climate change in curriculum

New Jersey became the first state to require schools to incorporate the theme of climate change into all subjects after the Murphy administration mandated standards in K-12 curricula in 2020.

Schools had already been teaching it, but the mandate formalized the requirement after a two-year process that culminated in the launch of an online hub called the New Jersey Climate Change Initiative with lesson ideas for teachers.

This year, Becton Regional High’s environmental club has a slide presentation on impacts of rising temperatures and changing weather patterns in the state, and particularly in the Meadowlands.

“Without clubs like these we would not have awareness … we would see our seas filled with trash,” said Becton senior and environmental club member Karolina Rupinski, who wants to study biochemistry and medical biology.

Pontoriero, the Seton Hall Prep student assembling the WorldCast video, said “the coolest part for me is learning about the cultures.”

“Emailing and interacting with all these different people — my Italian has had to get so much better — is the best part,” he said.