This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Beyond the Yard and Back

Sometimes you don't have to leave home to see something unusual...it flies to you.

I live very close to the perimeter of what used to be the Greystone Park psychiatric hospital. The hulking old hospital was closed and a new, smaller one was built. The leftover state land was sold to Morris County for $1 and is very slowly becoming Central Park.

A lot of the people who live near that unfenced property like to think of it as an extension of their backyards.

So I will usually see people cutting through yards to go into the area to let their dogs run or cutting class there or go in gangs with realistic-looking pellet guns. Others are content to just sit on their back decks and listen to the Canada geese honking at each other.

Find out what's happening in Morris Township-Morris Plainswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

I think of that land as an extension of my backyard, too, because a lot of the birds I have seen on my property wouldn't be there if not for Greystone.

In spring I can expect to hear several types of warblers and other migrant birds singing from Greystone's edges and then flying across the way to my property.

Find out what's happening in Morris Township-Morris Plainswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

I expect to see tufted titmouse, cardinal and song sparrow in the yard because I put out feeders. I don't expect to see phoebe, broadwing hawk or mallard, all of which showed up at least once over the years.

The other day my husband and I were listening to a carolina wren singing in the backyard from our screened porch and he pointed to something flitting about in an oak. Is that it? he asked, meaning the wren. I went out to look and I saw a yard first, a blue-gray gnatcatcher, which looks something like a mockingbird that has shrunk in the wash.

After a big rain one mild February morning a few years ago I was up early and opened a bathroom window. I heard a "peent." I looked out and a woodcock was calling from the screened porch's roof. I guess the Greystone meadows were too wet for it.

We've also had all kinds of hawks. Besides the broadwing we have had redtailed hawks (they particularly like chipmunks, for which I say hoorah), a calling red-shouldered hawk flying over and visits from the accipiters - the sharp-shin and its larger cousin the cooper's hawk. I have seen these accipiters take out juncos, chickadees and mourning doves from my backyard trees, then drop to my lawn and eat.

One day I was on the screened porch and saw what I thought was a particularly large cooper's hawk sitting on a low tree branch. I got a good, long look and was struck by the prominence of its white eyebrow.

Wait a minute: white eyebrow, large, looks like a cooper's.

This turned out to be the largest of the accipiters, a northern goshawk. This rare visitor was a juvenile, which explained why it was sitting in my backyard - perhaps it had just missed catching a chipmunk or squirrel.   

When I came out to take a picture it shrieked and, of course, took off to Greystone's forest.

This is why I get annoyed at those loose dogs and pellet guns, and why I was horrified by talk a few years ago that the state could make a lot of money and add to the budget by selling the surplus hospital land to a developer and not "give it away" to those rich people in Morris County.

A Democrat was governor when that talk was going on. Since I and many of our neighbors are Democrats and aren't even close to being the landed gentry you see in places like Mendham - where our current, Republican, governor, resides - we were more than a little alarmed at the thought of our quiet area becoming New Jersey's newest Levittown, twin to the development of ugly "townhomes" a few miles away up Old Dover Road.

Imagine the other Central Park - the one in the center of Manhattan island that is a green breathing space in a perpetually congested city - reverting to a original paved and populated state.

I am grateful the previous governor had other things to worry about and didn't do more than just talk about things so the county deal was allowed to close. But even our current governor has talked about taking state land it turned out wasn't needed for the new hospital and selling it for "development."

Luckily, the current governor also has other things to worry about, like cutting state aid to towns like mine, eliminating most property tax rebates and deciding what states to visit - you know, just to visit - during 2012.

At least it still costs me nothing to listen to those birds visiting my backyard from Greystone.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?