People are finding fish in their backyards and truck beds in NJ. So, what’s happening?
When a man found a fish in the back of his pickup truck in New Jersey, he called the police thinking it was a cruel prank, he said. But it wasn’t a prank at all.
In fact, Matthew Pelligrine, naturalist at Cape May Point State Park, isn’t the only one who’s found a fish in an unlikely place.
The state park shared a Facebook post Aug. 31 about a similar experience, and multiple people responded in the comments, saying they too had found saltwater fish in different places.
One person responded to the post with a photo of a fish lying on a red brick pathway. “This came flying thru the air into our yard a few weeks ago,” they said.
Linda Fisher, who told McClatchy News she lives near the Cooper River in western New Jersey, also commented on the post, saying she found a dead carp on her deck one morning.
Fisher said she knew her neighbors liked to fish, so she thought maybe one of them had pranked her.
“But I asked them, and they said they hadn’t been fishing,” Fisher said, adding that one of her neighbors told her no one fishes for carp in the area.
What’s happening?
Pelligrine said the pieces all came together for him when one of his colleagues found the fish shared in the Facebook post.
“He picked up the fish and looked at it closely, and he found the puncture marks from the osprey’s talons,” Pelligrine said during a phone interview with McClatchy News.
According to Pelligrine, fish can sometimes be found in random places due to kleptoparasitism, a type of feeding behavior where an animal intentionally takes food or resources from another animal.
In New Jersey, this often happens between bald eagles and ospreys, he said.
“It’s very spectacular to watch in the sky,” Pelligrine said.
Ospreys will flip and show the eagle its talons, but because eagles are bigger, ospreys usually give up and drop the fish, he said. But eagles don’t always catch the fish, which causes it to get lost in people’s neighborhoods and yards, Pelligrine said.
According to Pelligrine, people might expect to see more random fish from mid-July to November, when eagles are more mobile.
“They’re not tied to the nest anymore, so some of them are just wandering around looking for easy pickings,” he said.
This story was originally published September 5, 2024 at 6:20 PM with the headline "People are finding fish in their backyards and truck beds in NJ. So, what’s happening?."
