[Mark] Everyone thank you for joining us today for our
webinar, Nesting Waterbirds of Coastal North Carolina,
we welcome Lindsay Addison as our presenter.
I'm Mark Losavio, the Media and Outreach Coordinator
for Monitor in Malice Bay, Potomac River
National Marine Sanctuaries and I'll be your host today.
[Jessie] And I am Jessie Frayser, the Education Outreach
Support Specialist for Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
and I'll be your co-host.
[Mark] This webinar is brought to you by
NOAA's Monitor National Marine Sanctuary
in collaboration with the North Carolina
Office of State Archeology.
Partnering since 1975, NOAA and the state of
North Carolina work to research, honor and protect
the hallmarks of North Carolina's underwater
cultural heritage, shipwrecks.
These shipwrecks hold information
about the ever-changing
technologies and cultural and physical landscapes.
They serve as uniquely accessible underwater museum
and a memorial to generations of Mariners who lived,
died, worked and fought off of our shores.
This is one of the many webinars we'll be hosting
in the coming months for submerged NC webinar series
in collaboration with the North Carolina Office of State
Archeology.
[Jessie] Monitor is just one of the 15 national marine
sanctuaries and two marine national monuments in the
National Marine Sanctuary system.
The system encompasses more than 620,000 square miles
of Marine and Great Lakes waters from Washington state
to the Florida Keys and from Lake Huron to American Samoa.
During the presentation, all attendees will be
in listen-only mode. You are welcome to type questions
for the presenter into the question box at the bottom
of the control panel on the right hand side of your screen.
This is the same area, you can let us know
about any technical issues you may be having
that we can help you with.
We'll be monitoring
incoming questions and technical issues and we'll respond
to them as soon as we can.
We're recording this session and we'll share the recording
with registered participants via the webinar archive page.
A URL for this webpage will be provided at the end
of the presentation.
[Mark] So without further ado, we'd like to welcome
Lindsay Addison, oh the coastal biologist for
Audubon North Carolina and I will go ahead
and change presenter here.
Take it away.
[Lindsay] All right, hello everybody and thank you very much
for having me today and for attending.
As was stated, I'm the coastal biologist for
Audubon North Carolina and I'm gonna give everybody today
a little tour of the nesting birds of North Carolina
and I'm also gonna throw in a few non breeding birds,
so I decided to make the title of my presentation
very broad.
And what I'd like to start off with is a little bit
of background just on what is Audubon and why does
the Audubon Society exist?
So the reason the Audubon Society exists is because
of the feathers coming out of this bird's rear end.
They're called plumes or egrets, and they're
the courtship plumage that herons and egrets grow
every year in order to display and attract a mate.
They also displayed and attracted a lot of interest
from the fashion industry of the late 1800s
and early 1900s.
These feathers and indeed actual taxidermied parts
or entire birds were incorporated into fashionable dress,
namely women's hats. And as a result, these birds were
hunted very heavily
at a market type of scale in order to obtain these feathers
and the feathers were so valuable that they were worth
more per ounce than gold back at the turn of last century.
So that's quite a lot of money and the way that
these feathers would be obtained, was not through
picking them up after the birds molted them out,
but by shooting them while they were still on the birds.
So basically people would go to the areas
where these birds nest and they nest in groups
called colonies and they would spook them all up
by whooping and hollering and then they would shoot them.
So this is not the type of of harvest that that populations
can sustain and people of the day began to notice
that these birds were diminishing in number
and various Audubon societies were formed
in order to protect the nesting sites.
And in fact, in many states, Audubon societies
were the precursor to state wildlife agencies,
that fact is true in North Carolina as well
as in other states.
And and what these Audubon societies did was they hired
wardens to protect areas that they either bought,
so they owned them or had some other agreement to protect,
and they also advocated to protect birds
through legislation and through education.
So folks that were worried about birds
would let other people know that,
"Hey, when you wear this hat with these feathers in it,
it's actually getting these birds killed
and it's not worth it."
So that was very effective and the advocacy side of it
in the legislature was very protective.
You may have heard of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act
that was enacted back in 1917 and was a direct result
of these efforts centered around preventing the plume trade
from driving birds like great egrets and great blue herons
to extinction.
So it was very successful and these Audubon societies
kind of continued throughout the 1900s educating people,
trying to get kids into birdwatching,
trying to gather data about birds.
And now that we're here in the present day,
the National Audubon Society still exists.
I work for the state office of the
North Carolina State Office of the National Audubon Society.
And we face various different threats,
not hunting for plumes, but a multitude of other threats
that affect coastal birds, especially nesting birds.
And some of these are natural, some of these are manmade
and some of these are kind of a synergy between natural
and anthropogenic sources.
So for example, nesting birds on the coast do have to
deal with over wash and flooding from storms,
king tides and other sources of inundation
such as hurricanes, but those problems are exacerbated
by sea level rise, which is a result
of anthropogenic climate change.
Another example of a threat to coastal birds is
coastal development, which can result in
degradation of habitat and some coastal development
and some coastal engineering projects are a response
to issues that are exacerbated by climate change.
We also have temperature stress on beaches,
especially due to the way that the sand gets very,
very hot during the heat of the day.
If you have ever tried to walk across the beach
without wearing your flip flops,
you have probably experienced this.
But if you put a thermometer on the surface of the sand
on a typical hot day in North Carolina,
you'll see that that thermometer registers over
150 degrees Fahrenheit.
So these birds really need to spend time with their nests,
keeping their eggs cool and their chicks cool
just as much as they need to keep them warm
during rain events or cool overnights during the spring.
Another challenge for these birds is depredation by a whole
variety of predators, everything from gulls and crows
to raccoons and foxes and a lot of these animals
that are problems as far as being predators on these species
are generalist species.
They can eat lots of different things, they can live
in lots of different habitats and coastal birds tend to be
specialists that want a very specific habitat to nest in.
And these generalist predator species can take advantage of
human food sources such as our trash cans,
they can take advantage of special things like crawl spaces
that give them extra access to denning, breeding areas.
So we actually can increase their populations artificially
and then when you have too many raccoons or too many foxes,
it can really be a problem for success of of nesting birds,
especially those species, such as the least terns
that you see in the picture here that nest on the ground.
And finally, another threat that coastal birds face
year round, but especially during nesting when they
need to be, again, regulating the temperature of their eggs
and their chicks and protecting them from predators
is disturbance from people and pets.
So causing birds to flush up away from their young
or simply causing them to flush up and waste their energy
during migration or winter when they need those calories
for survival and not for fleeing from people
is also a problem.
So we face a whole lot of
different challenges on the coast with managing birds
and so that's informs a large part of our work.
And what we do in North Carolina in our coast program
is we manage a network of sanctuary sites
that consists of about 15 islands represented by
the little black dots that you see on the map.
And those black dots support somewhere between 35 to 40%
of North Carolina's nesting coastal waterbirds every year.
So we manage a very significant portion of the population of
these species in the state and we do that
with one full-time person, two seasonal staff members
and a host of volunteers.
And if you're wondering what does 40% of
North Carolina's nesting coastal waterbird population
look like, that's over 40,000 nesting adults.
So quite a lot of birds and these are a lot of different
species, which I'll give you a brief overview of
in a moment.
What type of work do we do on our sanctuary sites?
We do managing, monitoring and research.
Management is any activity that you do to try to improve
or enhance habitat for birds or whatever your target species
might be.
In the upper left hand corner, you can see
volunteers helping to put up a posting and a lot of our work
around, especially nesting birds, is trying to reduce
anthropogenic disturbance, so putting up signs
and string helps to keep people away from sensitive
nesting areas during those critical times of year.
We also do habitat modification, enhancement,
creation in order to sustain nesting habitat
and in the lower right hand you can see a controlled burn
on one of our islands in order to remove vegetation,
so species that want to nest on the open bear sand
will have access the following spring.
We also do monitoring, so monitoring is basically
how you know if your management is doing any good.
This could involve bird surveys, it could involve doing
nest tracking to see how many eggs are laid
and how many chicks are fledged and then finally,
research is answering a specific type of question
that you might develop.
So that's a more directed specific type of project
and the whole goal of all of this work is to preserve
a stable and diverse shorebird, waterbird populations
for North Carolina and indeed for the Southeast.
And we want to make sure that our sanctuaries provide
opportunities for research and study of shorebird
and waterbird ecology, specifically with projects
that have relevance to their conservation.
And so these are more specifically examples of where we work
around the state, just to give you an idea.
So our work is primarily in the sanctuary system
is primarily focused in the Southern half of the state
from Ocracoke Inlet all the way down to Brunswick County
and the type of work that we do at the areas with the
red stars is productivity monitoring,
which is more intensive tracking of pairs
and their nesting success.
So we might follow the nest of a variety of species
in any given year, oystercatchers, black skimmers,
gull-billed tern, least terns, piping plovers,
Wilson's plovers, those are examples of species
whose nests we've monitored.
And that involves visiting them several times a week
to see how they're doing, see how many nests they lay
and determine the fate of those nests
and then if they hatch, determine the fate of those chicks.
Other nesting seasoned work, including keeping track of
how many species are using each site as well as doing
sea turtle monitoring on our Barrier island site
involves less frequent visit and various types of censuses
where we report the outcome of that data to the state.
And of course we do management at all sites as needed
and type of management just depends on the site
and its various needs.
So what type of islands do these birds like to nest on,
on our sanctuaries?
There's three main types of islands that we
kind of categorize and the first one is just natural islands
that are not barrier islands.
So usually these are marshy, they are,
as the title suggests, not made by people,
they just ended up there by natural forces.
And that's what you're looking at there in the upper
left hand corner is an example of what we call a shell rake.
And so this is actually, it might look like sand
because it's light in color, it's actually a mix
of some sand, but mostly old oyster shell.
And these shell rakes, fringe marshes in a lot of places
and they're created by the presence of oysters
and as oysters age out of the population and their shells
fall onto the sea floor, they get pushed up by wave energy
and storms to form these windrows along the edge
of marsh islands and they create wonderful nesting habitat
for a variety of different species.
Things like oystercatchers, willetts, laughing gulls
like to nest on them.
Another type of island the birds nest on are called dredged
material islands and these are islands that are manmade.
Either whole cloth, meaning there was never an island
there before and now there is, or some islands
were natural at one point, but they received dredge material
back in the day when you could pretty much do
whatever you wanted with dredging and they were created
generally through the maintenance of navigation channels.
So especially the US Army Corps of Engineers,
which is tasked with maintaining navigational channels
in the United States, when they do a dredge project,
they will often come to us or whatever other
relevant organization is working in that area
to see if there's a place that they can put
the dredge material that would be beneficial to wildlife.
And as you can see, these are big sandy mounds
for the most part, these are the types of dredged islands
that birds like to nest on and they provide
wonderful habitat, they can kind of stand in
for a sandy habitat that is not available elsewhere
and in the photo on the upper right you might notice
there's kind of a cloud of of white dots, that's about
6,000 royal terns all flushing up because a bald eagle
flew overhead.
I happened to be at the site watching from a distance
and I got to see this site of all of these birds
hitting the air at once, bald eagles are predators
and can cause quite a lot of damage to a nesting colony,
so they were reacting completely appropriately
to that flyover.
And I should say that the top two pictures,
the natural and the dregged-material island photos
are from the Cape Fear River, which is a really important
area in North Carolina for nesting coastal waterbirds.
Finally, barrier islands are natural islands as well,
but we separate them out because they're kind of unique
in their character.
They're these narrow ribbons of sand fronted by a beach
and usually on the sound side there's some type of marsh
system.
And one of the interesting things about barrier islands
is that they are actually supposed to move,
they're supposed to change, they're very dynamic systems.
And when an island is undeveloped, it can do that,
the dunes can get knocked over by hurricanes
and form big sandy expanses.
And then the dunes regrow
and there's a whole process of kind of dynamic creation
and destruction that actually sustains, maintains, creates,
and destroys bird habitat as well as habitat
for other wildlife.
It becomes more challenging for birds to nest
on developed barrier islands simply due to the fact
that they are no longer as dynamic, they're being kind of
artificially held in one place.
And so there is less habitat usually available,
but on developed barrier islands, the ends,
the spits at the terminus of of the island are usually good
areas for nesting birds and that's usually on
developed islands where you will find nesting birds.
So why do birds like to nest on islands?
One of the things about birds is that a lot of the species
we work with nest on the ground or in low shrubs
and that means that mammalian predators just really can't be
a big thing.
As discussed before, overabundant mammalian predators
are a big threat to nesting birds.
So islands that are isolated enough, far enough away
from land or small enough that they don't really support
populations of foxes or raccoons year round are ideal
for nesting.
And it was really hard to find a picture
of a raccoon that didn't look cute and friendly,
so that is the meanest raccoon picture I've found.
Islands also need to be high enough above the high tide line
or even above the high, high tide line to avoid flooding,
so we really can't have flooding, they need to have
enough elevation to prevent nests from being swept away.
And last of all, you wanna have the right type of habitat,
whether that's a sandy substrate as in the case
of this oyster catcher nest, or whether it's a tree
or a shrub that a heron or an egret might like to nest in,
you need to have the appropriate habitat
and islands do provide a variety of habitats for nesting
birds along the North Carolina coastline,
so that's what we're looking at for islands
being good habitat for birds.
So I wanna kind of go through and talk about
some of the species nesting on these islands.
And it's interesting because a lot of times people go
to the beach and if they go to the middle
of a developed barrier island and kind of do
the typical human beach thing, you might not see these birds
if you go to the ends of the barrier islands
where the inlets are or if you take some kind of eco tour,
you might go to some other estuarine natural islands
or passage dredged material island and get to see
these guys.
But a lot of people just don't get to see these
nesting birds because again, these are islands tend to be
fairly remote, fairly isolated and not necessarily
where the vast majority of people are spending their time
recreating and vacationing on the Carolina coast.
So the first species I'm gonna talk about are royal
and sandwich terns and they're kind of whooped together
with some other species that aren't found
in North Carolina as crested terns because they have,
as you could see, kind of that shaggy mohawk
on the back of their head.
So they are business in the front and party in the back
and we are presenting for you the numbers of pairs nesting
on Audubon managed sites in North Carolina.
So you could see for most recent complete year of data,
we had over 3,500 pairs of royal terns and over 1200 pairs
of sandwich terns nesting on Audubon sites
and that's over a third of the North Carolina population.
As you can see, both of these species nest
in very dense colonies.
All of the birds with the
orange bells are royal terns and they incubate
for about four weeks and even though they are nesting
very densely, they can locate their own specific egg
in all of this and the eggs are in fact quite variable.
They have different shading on them, different patterns
of spots, so that probably helps them to locate their egg
as well as the bird's ability to remember spatially
where within the colony their nest is located.
And unlike some of the other species we manage these birds
typically lay only one egg and they lavish a lot of care
and attention on their only chick.
And they have to take care of those chicks for five
to six weeks before they fledge and they start off
when they first hatch, spending time as cute
little fuzzy guys with the individual parents.
Both the male and the female take care of the egg
and take care of the chick.
But when they reach about somewhere between two
to three weeks of age, the chicks all start
grouping together and they form what's called a creche
and that's basically a herd of thousands of tern
chicks roaming around one of these dredge-material
islands and it's quite a site.
It looks like a whole bunch of little sheep.
And the adults will watch over the flock of chicks,
but they will pretty much only feed their own chicks
and we think they recognize each other by the
distinctiveness of their calls.
As the adults fly in with fish that they've caught
from the ocean, they cry out and the chicks respond
and they meet up and the chick is fed.
One of the interesting things about royal terns
as well as sandwich terns is that they're almost
entirely dependent on barrier islands for nesting
in North Carolina and indeed throughout much of their range.
So dredge material islands, I think I said barrier islands,
but anyway they pretty much only nest on dredge-material
islands in the state.
And as you can see from the bar chart below, well over 80%,
in most cases, over 90% of royal terns nest on
dredge-material islands.
And that's partially because of habitat loss,
some of the lower islands in Pamlico Sound
or Core Sound have eroded away over the years
and they don't have a natural site to nest on.
And another challenge of course is that there's not a lot of
barrier island nesting habitat available due to development,
especially in the Southern part of the states.
So they have really done well by adapting to use of
dredge-material islands.
And as you can see,
the process of maintaining a dredge-material island
can also maintain bird habitat.
On the left hand side, this is a island called
Ferry Slip Island located on this South Pelican Island
located on the Cape Fear River and on the left you can see
what it looked like prior to a dredge-material deposit.
It was very vegetated and not a very good habitat
for royal or sandwich terns, because these are one of those
species that wants to nest out on open bare sand.
And when the navigational channel got a little bit
too full of sand, the US Army Corps of Engineers came along
and they basically ran a pipeline dredge
from the channel onto the island.
And you could see in the the middle picture there,
on the left hand side of that picture,
there's a pipe that is spraying out slurry,
which is a mix of water and sand and the bulldozer
shapes it and then at the end of the project you end up
with beautiful new sand habitat.
This is same island after that project
and that provides wonderful nesting habitat
for these and other species.
Another type of species and one of the most well-liked birds
on the coast is the brown pelican.
Audubon has usually between 1,015 pairs nesting
on our sites and the brown pelican is one of those species
that can nest in a lot of different habitats.
They'll nest in trees and shrubs and they'll also nest in
grass.
And unlike the terns, which didn't make much of a nest,
you probably saw that their egg is pretty much
just sitting there on the sand in a shallow scrape.
Brown pelicans nest on actual nests, there's about 25%
of the state's pelicans on Audubon Islands.
And these are what the nests look like on the
upper left hand corner, you can see the pelican
is constructing the nest, both the male and the female
contribute to the nest building.
And it's basically a really well constructed structure of
sticks and grassy vegetation.
They lay two to three eggs and those are just white eggs
and they are very big, so they're about three times the size
of a chicken egg, but they don't have any coloration,
no spotting, the pelicans just have to remember
where their nest is in the colony.
They are also a group nesting bird, just like the terns.
They incubate for about a month,
sometimes a little bit more and again,
both sexes will incubate and when they first hatch out,
they pretty much look like tiny little dinosaurs.
Some people find them to be cute,
some people find them to be ugly,
I think the answer is that they're both.
But it takes them quite a while to raise a pelican chick
up to adulthood, some of that time depends on if there
are siblings or not, they actually compete quite fiercely
with the other chicks in the nest, there's a lot of pecking
and stabbing.
So if you grew up with an antagonistic relationship
with a sibling, you might actually be a pelican.
But in the end, oh, I don't have a picture of a big chick.
But in the end you do end up usually with an adult pelican,
they can typically fledge two to three chicks out of a nest
and a lot of birds have that where they lay
a couple more eggs perhaps than they might expect to raise,
so that's kind of their version of an insurance policy.
A lot of different species of Herons and Egrets nest
in the coastal zone of North Carolina.
And those species include the great egret,
which is pictured here, the snowy egret,
the tri-colored heron, the little blue heron,
and the black-crowned night heron.
And we usually have somewhere again around a quarter
of the state's nesting egrets and herons
kind of lumped together as a group.
And as you can see from this picture,
they're a bird that likes to nest in some kind of structure,
so typically a shrub or a tree and all of these species
build nests out of sticks.
And just as a couple of specific ID helps,
people often will ask, what's the difference?
They see a white long-legged wading bird,
and they don't know if it's a snowy egret or a great egret.
And the Great Egret is a much larger wading bird.
It has a yellow bill and black legs and one of the ways
you can tell them in flight when they're flying
is it's really easy to count the wing beets.
They're a much larger bird, so they flat more slowly
and that just kind of helps to give you like that first
correct impression of what species you're looking at,
so wing beat is helpful.
And then a snowy egret is much smaller
and these are pictures, they're two different pictures,
but they're pretty much to scale, because they're taken
in the same area at the same distance.
And so the snow egret is much smaller
and you'll notice that it has yellow, yellow feet.
And so the way, if you're trying to figure out
how to remember what's snowy egret, if you remember,
don't eat the yellow snow and snowy egrets have yellow feet.
They also have a black bill and both of these birds
are in their breeding plumage, so you can see those egrets
the plumes coming off of their backs.
And you'll also notice that the great egret
has got really kind of bright green in front of its eyes.
That unfeathered part of the bird's
face is called the lores.
So you've got a bright green on the great egret
and then the snowy egret actually gets bright pink
there in front of it's eyes, so that's pretty neat
and that's just a hormonal change.
When spring arrives, these birds develop these bright colors
that aid them in attracting a mate and they will capitalize
on just about any type of of vegetation.
So this is a marsh island again on the Cape Fear River,
it has a lot of kind of subtidal area with
spartina growing, so very nice productive marsh.
But there are some small mounds, slightly higher elevation
that support little thickets of cedar and marsh elder
and that is what these birds like to nest in
and you could see them all standing there
on the cedar trees.
Their eggs across all of the egrets and herons are bright
blue, no one really knows why.
And just to kind of follow one species,
it takes almost a month for a great egret
to hatch their eggs.
They will lay three to four eggs in a nest
and it takes quite a while over a month,
close to two months to fledge the chicks.
And fledgling just means they're old enough to fly
and they start off as quite like the pelican chicks.
They start off as as as quite floppy and not very
able to do much, they don't have many feathers
and they're very weak.
But as they get bigger, they become more erect,
they become more assertive.
They hound the parents for food, they have a special sound
that they make for to beg for food,
it sort of sounds like someone shooting,
you know like a super Marios sound effect in a video game.
So it's kind of a funny, funny kind of soundscape
if you enter a colony and listen to the chicks
calling to their parents.
And I have heard people say they look kind of like Fraggles
and I really can't disagree, so that's what it looks like
if you're a baby egret or a heron.
And the next species we'll talk about are
American oystercatchers and we have about 25%
of the states nesting oystercatchers,
so you'll see it's kind of a theme for some of these groups.
And oystercatchers, unlike the other species we've looked at
so far, are solitary nesters, they do not nest
in a group called the colony, they nest on a territory.
Each pair has its own territory and some of the territories
are quite large.
They will spread out on barrier islands and be several
hundred meters apart on natural or dredge-material islands
where the habitat area is smaller, they tend to
be a lot closer together and as you can tell from that
oystercatchers nest on a variety of habitats.
This is a marsh nesting pair here that was nesting
in Ocracoke Inlet.
And this is a couple of oystercatcher chicks
and their egg sibling that are
in the process of hatching out on a barrier island.
It takes them about a little bit more than two weeks
to hatch and then one of the interesting things about
the chicks is just how much parental care they require.
So when the chicks hatch out, you can see this
is a newly hatched chick, it has a very short bill,
it has very short legs and it requires the parents
to feed it and what do they eat?
They eat exactly what you think they eat based on the name.
They eat oysters and other bivalves and the adults use that
long orange bill to pry open the shellfish
just like we shuck an oyster.
they shuck an oyster and they bring the contents of the
oyster back to the chicks.
As the chicks get to be a little bit older,
first they grow their legs so they can run
and hide from predators, then they grow their wings
so they can fly away from predators and the last thing
that finishes growing on a oystercatcher chick is the bill.
So even though they can fly at about 35 days of age,
they don't necessarily have the skills and the bill needed
to open up the shellfish.
They can start learning, but it takes them a while.
They have an instinct to probe and pry,
but there's some skill that has to be developed.
And therefore, even though around 35 days of age
they're fledged, they still require another
two to three months of parental care sort of supplemental
feeding as they transition from being totally dependent
on the parent for food,
to learning how to get their own food.
So in a way it's like they're
going to college, so there's that kind of
intermediate dependence between the adult and the chick.
And this is an oystercatcher that has been banded,
the reason it's wearing those bands is because we're
tracking it as an individual.
So it's not somehow found trash on the beach
and put it on its legs, those were intentionally placed
safely.
And now since I've kind of started off talking about
the pelicans and the egrets, which are birds that tend to
nest on the non-barrier islands and with the oystercatchers,
birds that nest in marsh, beach, various types of habitats,
we're now transitioning to birds that nest exclusively
or nearly exclusively on beaches, barrier island beaches.
And two of the most common birds that people might see
around the state are least terns and black skimmers
and as I discussed, beach nesting species will be found,
especially on developed barrier islands,
they tend to be found at the tips of the island.
So as you can see in the photo, in the upper right
that is the spit, that's what I'm talking about.
The ends of the islands at the inlets have these big open,
sandy areas in most cases and those are what provide
the nesting habitat.
And least terns they're ubiquitous around the state
and they tend to colonize any habitat very quickly.
So as soon as there's a new sandbar or a new little
bit of open sand, there very well could be a least tern.
They have a distinctive kind of little kiki, kiki
kind of call that people might have heard
over their heads and they are the only tern
in North Carolina, indeed in the United States
that has a yellow bill.
So they are very distinctive, they're small,
but they're very feisty.
The way that they defend themselves
and their colonies is by mobbing.
So if a predator or some other perceived threat like a
person enters their nesting area, you'll hear them
calling overhead, they'll swoop down,
they'll often even poop on the intruder.
And so sometimes that's how people will have been
introduced to the terns is by getting attacked by them.
But all that means is you just need to move away
from the area and let them settle back down.
They're just trying to tell you that you're too close
to their very adorable chicks or eggs, which as you can see
are very well camouflaged.
Black skimmers, very similar to the least terns like to nest
on open sandy beaches, raise their young
right out on the sand.
And black skimmers are interesting, they like to nest
in association with terns such as least terns
or some of our other nesting tern species,
gull-billed tern, common terns and that's because
the terns tend to be a little bit more aggressive
about attacking threats and the skimmers like to
capitalize on that.
One of the most important things we do in terms
of bird management and bird protection conservation
is we do management for these beach nesting species,
because beaches are recreational hotspots for people
that we like to come to swim and fish and play,
but if people are not educated about where birds
are nesting, they tend to just walk through
these nesting areas.
And you can imagine if a big giant monster is walking
through the maternity ward, that can be a little bit
disruptive and not really helpful for success.
And so we put up what's called symbolic fencing,
which is signs with string between them.
And we often also will have volunteers spend time at these
sites on public beaches in order to educate the public.
Showing them the birds with optics, showing them pictures
of the birds as is happening in this photo.
And just kind of generally trying to raise awareness
as well as enhance the value of the area
for people's entertainment and recreation.
Because a lot of people, especially folks that are not
from the coast, they don't realize birds nest on the beach
at all and when they do, it can be another fun activity,
birdwatching, that they can take part in.
And the people that do the education outreach work,
we call them bird stewards and they basically again,
are basically docents or ambassadors for the birds
to increase awareness.
And it's also a great way to spend time on the beach
and you get to watch the birds raise their families
throughout your volunteer time.
Other work that we do with these nesting species
includes productivity monitoring and banding.
So I talked a little bit about the productivity monitoring
before where we want to follow certain nests
and pairs throughout the season to see how they do.
We also want to understand population dynamics
and the way that we do that is through banding.
And banding basically allows us to uniquely identify
an individual throughout its life.
So the bird gets a unique color and code and resighting them
allows us to know the answer to two very basic questions,
where do they go and how long do they live?
But that translates into a whole lot of other things like
the survivorship among different age classes,
population structure, population dynamics,
so there's a lot you can do with this data.
And one of the species that we band are oystercatchers,
we also banned royal terns, sandwich terns
and black skimmers.
So here you see pictures of a black skimmer chick
getting a band on the upper right and on the lower right
you can see this is a royal tern chick recently fledged
and he's supporting some new bird banding bling.
And we've been working with partners around the state
including the National Park Service and the North Carolina
Wildlife Resources Commission to band black skimmers
and royal terns.
So that's been a really fun project and we have learned
a lot about survivorship and recruitment back
into nesting colonies.
We also do work with students
with different various research projects.
One of the most recent ones that we've just wrapped up
a couple of years ago and now is being written up
for publication in a scientific journal.
We did some food chain monitoring on the
Lower Cape Fear River, which is an area where we do a lot of
our work.
And the Lower Cape Fear River is a site that has received
a lot of pollution over the years from different point
and non-point sources, so industry runoff and so forth.
And a UNCW graduate student who now holds her PhD
thanks to this effort named Anna Zarn came out
and we looked at mercury levels in the water,
the substrate, shellfish and the oystercatchers
that eat the shellfish.
So that was a really interesting project
and it incidentally started right after Florence,
so that was an interesting time to be starting a research
project.
Another project we've been working on and is getting close
to being wrapped up and and getting ready to move into
the publication stage is tracking fine scale habitat use by
breeding American oystercatchers and how we do that
is by putting data loggers on them, they wear them
and they have a little harness that goes around their legs
and it sits on the back.
And the data logger that you see here in the upper right
is basically talking to the same satellite system
that your car talks to
when it tells you when to make a left turn.
And they wear it for about a year,
then we recapture them and take the data logger off
and it gives us the oystercatchers location
within about four meters every 30 to 60 minutes.
And from that we can understand the type of habitat
that they're using, we can understand differences
in habitat use between birds nesting on barrier islands
versus dredge islands versus natural islands,
so there's a lot of different types of information
we we're gaining from this work as well.
And I do want to touch on, I realized we were getting into
the fall and it's no longer the breeding season.
So I am gonna piggyback a little bit of information about
non breeding birds on the coast because a lot of management
effort is focused on breeding birds, reducing disturbance
at breeding bird sites, enhancing and managing habitat
at breeding bird sites, but it's very important
to protect non breeding birds as well.
So in the state, the way that we work with
non breeding birds is pretty much to do surveys
and those are international shorebird surveys
or oystercatcher roost surveys.
So the international shorebird surveys
are part of a hemispheric wide protocol
that basically counts arctic breeding shorebirds
at different coastal sites.
And what is an arctic breeding shorebird?
So basically a sandpiper or a plover species
that nests literally on the arctic tundra.
So that can be a sanderling, the little sewing machine birds
that run back and forth in the surf, that could be
a willet the bigger birds that you might see eating
mole crabs.
So we count those at five different inlets in the state,
mainly in that Southern part of the state
and we also monitor non-breeding oystercatchers.
Again, because of the banding work,
there's a lot of band resighting that can be done
and we can also count numbers of oystercatchers.
And those count locations are in the blue dots
and the oystercatcher roof surveys are in cooperation
with the North Carolina Coastal Reserve System
and the National Park Service,
specifically Cape Lookout National Seashores.
So a lot of this work is accomplished through coordination
and the help of partners.
So one of the interesting things about North Carolina
and indeed most coastal areas is that birds rely on
these habitats year round and one of the most
important habitats for birds during the non breeding season
are inlets.
Inlets are used by a lot of different species
and in fact the species listed below,
which the abbreviations stand for a black-bellied plover,
piping plover, which is in the upper right hand corner,
red knot, ruddy turnstone, snowy plover,
Western sand piper and Wilson's plover all are found
more abundantly at inlets and more frequently at inlets
than in other sandy coastal habitats.
So why do inlets make such a difference for birds?
Inlets are kind of those gaps between barrier islands
and in those gaps you have the right mosaic of habitat.
You've got intertidal shoals where they can forage,
and you have these open sandy spits where they can roost.
Now you might think that a small bird like a piping clover
would want to go hide in the bushes, but they don't,
they want to sit out in the open and the reason they want to
do that is because they want to be able to look at the sky
and make sure that no predators are coming.
And if they do, then they can flush up and flee
and have some advanced warning, because the predators
that are most concerning to them in the non breeding season
are falcons, some Merlins and peregrine falcons.
And they actually are bird species that specialize
on eating other birds and this is the way they've adapted
to deal with this threat.
So inlets are very important and they are in fact
so important that we focused our shorebird survey efforts
at inlets.
And when you compare inlets that are natural that have not
been altered by terminal groins or jetties
and too much dredging compared to those
that have been altered, you'll find that birds
are more abundant at natural inlets,
which are the peak counts of shorebirds at the natural inlet
in this study were in blue and the altered inlet
mason borough inlet are the bars in red.
So you could see it's pretty easy to tell
that all of these shorebird species are more commonly found
at inlets with these natural habitat features
than those without.
And that's because in large part, this is where they get
their food from these sandbars and shoals
that don't exist in an inlet that's been too dredged
and too stabilized.
So they'll eat things like mole crabs,
which is the lower left picture donax or coquinas,
those little tiny clams that if you're looking in the swash,
you'll kind of see the waves uncover them
and then they have to dig back down
and then the waves uncover them and they have
to dig back down.
And then also another really important source of food
for birds are polychaetes, if you've ever gone fishing
with blood worms, you've gone fishing with a polychaetes
and that's that marine worm that you see there
on the right hand side.
And the birds here that are foraging in the intertidal zone,
those are red knots and so those are the shorebird
that most famously makes the giant migration
from the Arctic circle all the way down to the Southern tip
of South America, Patagonia.
So they have a truly impressive migration
and it's all powered by these critters.
And one of the big conservation threats to these species
is actually alteration.
So habitat alteration, so some dredging,
some modification inlets and bird habitat can withstand
but too much.
And you end up with basically impoverished ecosystems
that don't provide the habitat, that's really high enough
quality to support birds.
So you could see we've done a lot to our coast to change
the way that the habitat works and functions for birds.
And one of the most harmful things you can do to inlet
is to try to stabilize it with a terminal groin
and so that's one of the things that was
rather disappointing back in 2011 when North Carolina,
which had a law prohibiting terminal groins,
the law was changed to allow a certain number
of terminal groins.
So one of the things about store bird migration
people don't always understand though, is that it starts
a lot earlier than you think and goes a lot longer
than you think.
So people are still coming to the beach,
the kids aren't back in school yet when the birds
are coming back from the tundra.
So you could see here, this is a black-bellied plover.
You could see when the, if you look in the middle
of the graph here, you can see there's lower numbers
in the middle of the summer, but they start to peak again
in July or in August.
And that just goes to show that these birds that are using
arctic nesting areas, they have a very narrow window of time
when it's good to nest up there.
And when it's good, it's really good because the tundra
has a huge amount of invertebrate life,
mainly different insects that they feed on
when they're up there and breeding,
but they start coming back quite soon.
So we start to get migrants coming back South quite early
and we do have migrating birds on our coast
all the way into May.
A similar type of pattern here with the semipalmated plover,
The numbers, the scale has changed.
So we do have quite a large number of them coming through
and again, you'll see those peaks kind of late spring
and late summer or early fall, so shorebird migration
right now is underway.
And one of the things that we want to use our shorebird
survey data for is to address gaps in knowledge
of where birds are found, how important inlets
and others significant habitat types are to them.
And then we can provide that to the regulatory agencies
that make management decisions and policy decisions about
where can people dredge and what type of shape
do these projects take.
So that's very helpful from a standpoint of advocating
for bird conservation and the data of course does
go to a database of all international shorebird survey data,
so that's important.
So I'm gonna wrap up here really quick just to hit one thing
because I've got kind of a broad audience,
a lot of different people, everybody goes to the coast.
What's one of the most important things folks can do
for birds is to be aware of the impacts of disturbance
and again, disturbance is basically just anything
that disrupts what the bird was doing naturally
and most of the time birds and other wildlife
are doing important survival behaviors.
For example, in this photo, these are perfectly innocuous
folks, they're just having a nice time,
they're boating, having a little picnic perhaps.
But because they are in proximity to an oystercatcher nest,
which is in the red circle there, the oystercatchers
are not taking care of those eggs and if it's too hot,
those eggs could cook and become non-viable.
So this goes to show if this was a posted area,
the people would know not to be in that space
and the birds could be with their eggs.
Another type of disturbance that people don't really
classify as disturbance or classify as a problem
for wildlife is flushing groups of birds.
And this can happen if people let their dogs run,
this can happen if people decide that they want to
take a walk through the flock and take a picture of them,
but basically it just tends to waste the bird's energy.
And if you're a red knot migrating from the Arctic circle
all the way to South America, you really need your energy
for other things, so a really important thing folks can do
is just simply walk around flocks of birds.
If you see a group of birds on the beach,
you don't have to worry if it's gulls
or if it's a shorebird or if it's something else,
just walk around it and that will ensure that they're not
wasting their energy trying to get away from people.
Some other things folks can do to help birds is of course
to pay attention to any signage at the beach,
pay attention to how the birds are responding to you
if you're kayaking or visiting an area without posted areas.
If you see a bird freaking out nearby,
it probably is freaking out if it's in the spring
or the summer because it's got an egg or a chick nearby
and it would just like you to move away so that
it can settle back down.
And of course I have a dog, many people have dogs
and they are wonderful, but they also look like
natural predators to birds.
So it's helpful if you wanna take your dog with you
to a coastal area to try to go to an area where you don't
typically see birds so that you don't have that impact
on wildlife.
And of course sharing information with other folks
about what you've learned is always a great way
to help out as well as volunteering with
any coastal organization that's doing any type of work
to improve or enhance coastal habitats.
These are the folks that took the pictures and I understand
there will be a question period now.
[Mark] That's right, thank you very much,
let me bring this back to the question screen here.
Alright, so I actually thought of a question
while you were talking about the oystercatchers
and I was wondering how do, would you band a bird?
Like how does it work?
You said you give them like a special color
and a special number and then I assume that bird just lives
its life, how do you go get that data again?
[Lindsay] So one of the really cool things about banding
birds is that it's the data collection part of it
is something that everyone can participate in.
If you have a pair of binoculars, a camera with a zoom lens,
which a lot of people have these days,
just go on Facebook and you can see that a lot of people
have got cameras or spotting scope,
if you're kind of the serious birder is look at bird legs.
So basically if you're looking at the bird
and you notice a little bump or something on its leg,
look a little closer and see if you can tell if it's a band,
if it's a band, see if you can read the code off of it,
note where on the leg it was, the color of the band,
and the code.
We also, in our shorebird surveys and our other work,
we are actively looking to read the bands ourselves.
So the great thing about bird banding is it's a combination
of paid staff doing their jobs and the public
contributing their observations as well.
And for example, the oystercatcher banding project
has been going on for about 20 years,
we have a coordinated banding scheme around
the entire US range from Texas to Maine.
And we have a database with over 90,000 records
and many, many, many, I think about approaching 5,000
of those records are from the public.
So just people on the beach that have noticed something
and they've reported it, so that's a really great question
and people get into it, we have folks that just really
enjoy bird band or bird band resighting.
[Mark] Oh, that's amazing.
[Jessie] Do you have any fun stories about bird families
that you've followed over the years?
[Lindsay] Oh yeah, so one of the really cool things about
banding or about doing this productivity monitoring work
is that, you know if you're just going someplace
and looking at a bird, it's a bird.
But if you've been monitoring its nest,
and especially if it's been banded as an individual,
it's that bird, you know it's like, oh, it's person to,
"oh, that's Sally," you know.
So one of my favorite oystercatcher chicks
that we banded on the Cape Fear River
was on South Pelican Island, which is that island
that was in the example photo of a dredge-material island.
And that was a very, very sneaky, sneaky chick.
It was really hard to catch, it took three attempts
to catch it 'cause it would go and hide,
there was a small clump of grass in the area that it nested
in that year.
And I would try to sneak up on it and I failed
and I failed and then I succeeded.
And so I really enjoyed watching that chick grew up after
I banded it and I really enjoyed seeing it around
the Cape Fear River as it grew up and lived its life.
So I definitely enjoyed that and we have had a lot of fun
over the years watching oystercatcher families
at the South end of Wrightsville Beach, which is our most
public managed bird area.
You can drive onto Wrightsville Beach, it's a busy
public beach with development.
So, you know that's good and bad.
The good side of it is the public really gets to enjoy them
and we've had many chicks fledge from there over the years
and we're still waiting for one to come back
and nest at its natal site, they don't always come back
to the place that they nested to breed.
But one of the chicks that fledged from Wrightsville Beach
did come back and start nesting two islands North
on Lea-Hutaff, another island that we manage
and so I particularly like that bird because I knew it
from a baby.
[Mark] Okay, I think we have a question.
We have time for a few more questions, so please make sure
you put them in the chat, but I am assuming
that birds probably don't respect our state borders
very much, so what does it look like to work with like
a South Carolina or Virginia team for this kind of stuff?
[Lindsay] Yeah, so one of the ways that we work together
is we have what's called the
American Oystercatcher Working Group.
And so it's a informal organization of pretty much
all of the different site managers and student researchers
and so forth who work with oystercatchers.
And that really encompasses oystercatchers,
we call it an umbrella species because they nest
in so many different coastal habitats
that if you're managing a site for the benefit
of oystercatchers, you're benefiting many other species
as well.
And so we have annual meetings where we get together
and talk, we collaborate.
Conservation science is also kind of a is a social activity,
you know because you need to know partners.
We've had research projects that have crossed state lines,
the banding has brought a lot of people together,
'cause we coordinate our banding schemes across states
and we have organized training of students for the
different skills that they need to work with oystercatchers
in the field.
So that's been a really great way to interact
and kind of the sort of substrate from which
all of that grows is sort of the connections
and social networking from the
American Oystercatcher Working Group.
[Mark] Really cool.
Think we have one more question, Jessie,
if you see one?
[Jessie] Yeah, so someone is asking in the chat about Texas,
so could you share where Audubon has bird programs
and a little bit more about kind of the far reaching
aspects.
[Lindsay] Yeah, so there is a state office in Texas,
Audubon, Texas,
and they manage a huge number of coastal islands in Texas.
So you can visit it's probably tx.audubon.org
and get involved with that.
I believe they have coming up in October,
a coastal cleanup day where different organizations
all around the state will get together
and go out to different coastal sites
and take trash off of the islands.
It's a great time if you had to do that
because there's not typically nesting in October.
I believe it's in October, so you'll wanna check me on that,
but we were just talking about that actually
on a call yesterday.
So there is a Audubon of Texas and there are
other bird conservation organizations working on the coast
in Texas, another great one is the
Gulf Coast Bird Observatory.
They're out of Port Jackson, but they do work around
the state and they are actually the lead organization
working with oystercatchers in Texas.
So if you got kind of excited about oystercatchers
and wanna learn more about them in Texas,
they have a great program
and that's the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, so there's
definitely opportunities to get involved in that regard
in Texas as well.
And I would say every other state around the Atlantic Flyway
and the Gulf Coast has got great opportunities
to work with these species because we're not the only state
that has them.
[Mark] Alright, well thank you so much.
We actually have a lot of great questions in the chat,
but unfortunately I just have a few more things
to say before we leave you all today.
So if you have not already downloaded Lindsay's bio
in the chat box, you might want to do so now
in the bio you will find more information about Lindsay
and links that might be of interest to you.
Yeah.
[Jessie] And if you did not get your question answered
or if you have additional question, you can always send
them to Lindsay at the email address listed on this slide.
You can also learn about Audubon North Carolina at the URL
listed here at the bottom of the slide.
[Mark] A video recording of this presentation
will be made available on the Sanctuary's webinar
archive page found at the URL listed here at the top.
In addition, the webinar will be archived
on Monitor National Marine Sanctuary's website.
Click on the multimedia section in the toolbar
on the top to access the webinar box.
It usually takes about 10 days to be posted.
You will also find future webinars in that same section.
So make sure to stay tuned and don't worry,
all of this information will be sent to you in a follow-up
email once the recording is ready to view.
And of course, we invite you to follow us on social media
to stay in touch with what's happening on the sanctuary,
We will also update you on when this recording is ready to
view on social media.
[Jessie] And lastly, as you exit the webinar
and there's a short survey for formal
and informal educators.
If you are an educator, NOAA would really appreciate
it if you would take a minute or two
and complete the survey.
Your answers will help NOAA develop future webinars
to meet your needs and your participation
in those surveys are completely voluntary
and your answers will be anonymous.
[Mark] Once again, we'd like to thank Lindsay
for her fabulous presentation, I really learned a lot about
birds and thank you so much for taking the time to join us
today, have a wonderful day
and that concludes the presentation.