About Us

The Cape May Wildlife Guide and Cape May Plant Guide are part of a project headed by Mike Crewe, in collaboration with a number of other naturalists in South Jersey. The aim of the project is to provide a readily-accessible, online resource to allow the wider public to identify the natural history of the region.

The guide is being developed alongside the Cape May Mapping Project, a project that aims to produce a distributional atlas of the plants, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, dragonflies and butterflies of the region - all groups that are relatively easy to identify and survey, but which have not been properly assessed for many years - if at all. While much work is carried out in an on-going process to monitor rare species, little is done to monitor the populations of more common species - species which may be common or widespread today but could soon be threatened by continuing development as part of an ever-growing human population.

The website was written and developed by Mike Crewe, the Program Director of Cape May Bird Observatory. Mike has spent a lifetime studying wildlife, from early beginnings in the UK, via 12 years as a wildlife tour guide to settling in Cape May in 2009. The vast majority of photographs were taken by Mike Crewe, with others generously donated by Sam Wilson and Brian Johnson.

Both the identification guide and the mapping project have benefited from sightings reported by a number of keen and knowledgeable wildlife enthusiasts - both professional and amateur - in South Jersey. Grateful thanks are given to the following for their generous help:

Megan Crewe
Jim Dowdell
Sam Galick
Brian Johnson
Karen Johnson
Tony Leukering
Tom Magarian
Margeaux Maerz
Brian Moscatello
Josh Nemeth
Rick Radis
Keith Seager
Clay Sutton
Pat Sutton
Richard Walton
Sam Wilson


We welcome any comments you may have on the website - especially if you spot any errors (this is a work in progress after all and it will surely be some time before everything is as we would like it)! Do please contact us via the email link on the left side of this page. We especially welcome any sightings of species that are not yet covered by the guide.