The Fyke Nature Association is proud to announce that 2013 Celery Farm calendars are here.

You can buy your calendar(s) starting this Sunday at the Franklin Turnpike entrance to the Celery Farm between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.

These splendid new 2013 Celery Farm calendars sell for just $15 (less than five cents a day), and are in need of worthy homes.

All proceeds go to the Stiles and Lillian Thomas Scholarship Fund at Northern Highlands High School.

So stop by the Franklin Turnpike entrance to the CF on Sunday, buy some calendars, and chat awhile. A free new Celery Farm brochure comes with every purchase!

The calendars, created by Carol Flanagan and some terrific local photogs, are a great tribute to the place we hold so dear, and the calendars support a terrific cause. 

Buy your calendars on Sunday (and think what great holiday presents they make)!

Hope to see you there!

Our friend Don Torino's latest column for the wildnewjersey.tv blog is about Ridgewood's Chimney Swifts.

Here's the opening: "Like a day at Hogwarts, more than a thousand strangely shaped birds gather in the sky at dusk. Never stopping to perch or rest, they soon begin to form an almost mystical circle in the air around a large old chimney atop a children’s school. 

"As if given some kind of magical signal, they begin to drop into the chimney. 450 a minute descend into the dark vertical tunnel for the evening. This continues until as many as 2,000 birds vanish for the night into the depths of an unseen place, a scene that would make Harry Potter gaze in amazement. But this is no fantasy. This is real life - an amazing story of survival that repeats itself every September at George Washington Middle School in Ridgewood. 

"Swifts are amazing creatures. They are highly urbanized birds that can eat about 1/3 of their weight every day in insects, which could mean about a thousand mosquitos. They hunt for bugs in close flying flocks. You can hear their high-pitched chipping call long before you ever see them."

The rest of Don's column is here. (That's Don on the left in the photo above, and Swift advocate/expert Kurt Muenz on the right; photo by Mike Malzone.)

This was photographed in Westport, Mass., earlier this month.

What is it?