Interstate Anomaly: Is the Jersey Devil Commuting to Our Pine Barrens?

Long Islanders are often surprised to learn that our Pine Barrens and New Jersey's Pine Barrens are ecological siblings — same sand, same pitch pine, same dwarf oak understory. To a wide-ranging aerial entity with a documented preference for exactly that habitat, the two forests are not different places. They are two rooms of one house, separated by a hallway we call the Atlantic approach to the Cross Sound corridor.

The reports

Since late May this desk has received nine independent reports along the moraine — Rocky Point to the Westhampton flats — describing a nocturnal screech 'like a heron the size of a door,' hoofbeats on roof shingles (twice), and one sighting, by a birder of thirty years' standing whom I trust completely, of 'a crane that was wrong' clearing the tree line at Sears Bellows in a single wingbeat. The Jersey acoustic archive, which this Bureau maintains in cooperation with two researchers in Chatsworth who prefer not to be named in the same sentence as their university, matches the screech profile at 91 percent confidence.

The ferry question

How does a Pine Barrens entity cross open water? The obvious answer — it flies, it has wings, this is settled — is the one this desk endorses. I mention only as a point of record that the Port Jefferson ferry logged two unexplained 'livestock smell' complaints on overnight crossings in May, both on nights matching our first two screech reports, and that we submitted a records request for the vehicle manifests. The request was denied. Not by the ferry company. The denial letterhead was federal, and the file stamp — readers of the July 11 dispatch will feel a familiar chill — carried the routing code DIV-9-R2. Why an interstate anomaly's ferry schedule concerns that particular office is a question we ask in print, where they can read it.

The practical upshot for our readers: if it has moved in for the summer, it is sharing a forest with the August 16 operation corridor. Enlisted civilians will be briefed on the difference between the two acoustic profiles at muster. In the meantime, moraine residents hearing the screech are asked to log time, bearing, and weather — and to check their shingles in the morning. Hoofprints photograph best in raking light.