#jersey devil encounter

Every Spring, since 1984, the New Jersey Audubon Society hosts the World Series of Birding (WSB). Much in the vein of fundraising walks and runs, the WSB is a marathon aimed at raising money and awareness towards a specific cause (bird and nature conservation). Competitors in the WSB are tasked with identifying, by either sight or sound, as many bird species as they can in a 24 hour period. While there are multiple ways to compete, the top level teams, which often include career birders, collect pledges through their own dedicated website, travel all over New Jersey in that 24 hour period to identify birds, and must be present at the finish line at Cape May Point State Park at midnight at the end of the competition.

Around 2005, a friend of mine (we’ll call her Robin) was enthusiastically getting me into birding and proposed we compete in the WSB. She had another birding friend from the West Coast (we’ll call him Jay) who wanted to come visit and the WSB was the perfect excuse. We competed under the second level, which allowed for a more casual competition, essentially treating the weekend like an excuse for an intensive birding holiday, without the fundraising and finish line requirements. This was at least in part because of my own inexperience; but I was excited and eager and, equally important, had a car and the ability and willingness to chauffeur the three of us around Cape May County for the weekend.

Robin and Jay spent the days leading up to the WSB mapping and scheduling out the birding spots we would hit, while I spent them studying up on my visual and audio ID’s (a harder task back before there were easily accessed videos and archives of bird call recordings online). The morning of the competition, we piled into my little Pontiac Sunfire and headed south.

The original plan was that we’d arrive at our hotel in Cape May in the afternoon, eat, get some sleep, and then head out to hit our first spot at midnight. Unfortunately, late in the night, Robin wasn’t feeling well. So we pivoted. Robin would stay at the hotel to get some more rest while Jay and I headed out to the first spot. After we were done, we would swing back by the hotel and, hopefully, Robin would feel better and we’d all pile back into the car to continue competing.

Since the start of the WSB is at midnight, the first spot on our list was a prime location to identify the nocturnal birds on the species list — owls, of course, but also water birds called rails. This brought us to one of the most rural spots we visited that weekend, the kind of rural spot that most people don’t believe exists in New Jersey. Jake’s Landing is an earthen boat launch in the middle of a wetlands creek, that’s accessed via Jake’s Landing Road, a 1.3 mile long dirt road that winds through a white pine forest. While you can see the light pollution from the surrounding towns in the distance, the area immediately around the landing is so dark the only light is from the moon and the vast expanse of stars.

ID-ing rails required parking at the Landing and listening for the birds out in the marshy waters. But since it’s such a well-known spot for good birding, there were always other birders standing out there with you, also desperately listening for the rails. The owls, however, weren’t out in the wetlands, they were back in the woods. Which meant that to ID owls, we had to pull over to the side of the road, turn off the car, turn off the headlights, get out of the car, and stand there in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night in almost complete darkness to listen for owls. Now, I am a child of suburbia. I wasn’t used to that kind of darkness. I wasn’t used to just being outside in the middle of the night without a car between me and whatever might be lurking beyond what my eyes could see. I definitely wasn’t used to spending time that deep in the woods, and certainly not at night. Not to mention that just a few years before this, in 1999, The Blair Witch Project had come out to the kind of hype we hadn’t seen for a horror movie since Nightmare on Elm Street and wouldn’t see again until Saw. A found footage film about three college-aged film-makers camping out in the woods to investigate the local legend of the Blair Witch, only to become victims of the Witch themselves, I loved The Blair Witch Project, it’s probably my favorite horror movie to this day. But part of that love came from the fact that it scared the crap out of me.

I was not looking forward to owl hunting.

Jay and I left Robin at the hotel to sleep and drove out to Jake’s Landing. We stood around listening to rails for a while; I don’t remember if we ID’d any on that particular stop, but we did close out the weekend with at least one rail ID’d on our list. Then we drove back into the woods, pulled over, turned off the car, and got out … 

And everything was fine. Really. I mean, we didn’t hear any owls, which sucked (spoilers: I wouldn’t hear an owl in real life for another 5 years or so). But I actually wasn’t bothered at all. It was dark and quiet and I couldn’t see anything beyond about three or four rows of trees beyond the road, but it wasn’t even a little bit freaky. After a while we both agreed that we weren’t hearing anything and it was about time for us to go pick up Robin, so we got back in the car and headed back to civilization.

We spent the rest of the day traveling all over Cape May County, hiking around bird sanctuaries and nature preserves, tromping over farms, strolling along boardwalks. I got to see red-tailed hawks and bald eagles and egrets and a purple gallinule that had made its way up to New Jersey from Florida for some reason. We stopped for snacks and meals at the whatever the nearest Wawa was, caught naps in parking lots, saw other birders ranging from casual twenty-somethings like us, little kids on school field trips, and well-aged professionals with camera equipment that probably cost more than my used Sunfire.

Then, as night fell again and the diurnal birds tucked into their nests for the night, there was only one thing left to do: head back to Jake’s Landing to try again for the rails and owls. I wasn’t worried this time, since I’d gotten through the first time without getting even a tiny bit spooked. We drove out to the Landing, and listened for a while; again, I don’t remember which trip it was, but we were only able to ID one rail all weekend. Then we headed back into the woods, pulled over, turned off the car, and got out to listen.

But something was different. It was still just as dark, just as quiet, just as isolated, though this time we had another person in our group. By all rights, I shouldn’t have had any trouble standing out there and listening for owls. But the second I closed my car door, I could feel it. Something was wrong. I still couldn’t see anything past the third or fourth line of trees past the road, but it felt like I was being watched — we were being watched. The longer we stood there, the more time my imagination had to run wild, the more certain I became that whoever — or whatever — was out there, intended us harm. We weren’t welcome. I couldn’t have focused on owls even if there’d been any to focus on, I could only think about the growing feeling in my gut that someone or something was out there in the dark seething at us, watching and waiting.

Finally, just as the feeling was becoming too much, just as I was about to suggest we go, Robin spoke up. We weren’t hearing anything, it was getting close to midnight anyway, we should just head back to the hotel and get some sleep before we had to drive home in the morning. I don’t think I even responded, I just remember snapping open my door, practically throwing myself inside, and turning the car and headlights back on before Jay and Robin had even sat down, so eager was I to be in the relative safety of my little Sunfire. We finished the drive along Jake’s Landing Road in silence. I was perhaps driving a little more quickly than I should have along a dirt road a little too narrow for two cars to comfortably pass, but I was beyond ready to get back to the main road with its asphalt and street lights and unblocked views of the surrounding area.

After having the uneasiness of the darkness washed away by blessed halogen, I finally told Robin that if she hadn’t said something when she had, I’d been ready pull the plug over how freaked out I’d felt. Which was when she admitted that the reason she’d spoken up was because she’d also felt freaked out and couldn’t stand out there any longer. We spent the drive back to the hotel comparing notes, Robin expressing a similar feeling about being watched, and me explaining how I hadn’t experienced anything close to that on my earlier owl hunt with Jay.

Robin and I had both been raised in New Jersey, had grown up surrounded by stories of the Jersey Devil, and knew when we set out on this trip that we’d be spending much of the weekend hiking around areas within the Pine Barrens, the alleged territory of the Jersey Devil.

So what other conclusion could we come to than that we’d just had an encounter with the Jersey Devil itself?