FEBRUARY 2015 1
In this issue Events & reminders. 2 FSA news... 3 Winter Shorebird Survey 2015 What s new on the FSA website? Partner blogs on coastal topics FSD updates.. 7 Register for training webinars Partner profile.... 8 Audubon honors Pat & Doris Leary Ebb tidings..... 9 The Wrack Line is the official e-newsletter of the Florida Shorebird Alliance (FSA). In addition to providing news and updates, the Wrack Line is a vehicle for partners across the state to share experiences, information, and ideas. Do you have news to share? Write us: shorebird@myfwc.com Content editor: Naomi Avissar Cover design: Chris Burney 2 Events & reminders FSA partnership meetings: February 26: FL Panhandle Shorebird Working Group @ Panama City (Contact: Amy.Raybuck@myfwc.com). March 3: Nature Coast Partnership @ Cedar Key (Contact: Ashley.Ballou@myfwc.com). March 4: Timucuan Shorebird Partnership (Contact: Blair.Hayman@myfwc.com). March 5: Suncoast Shorebird Partnership @ St. Pete (Contact: forysea@eckerd.edu). Other meetings announced next month and online. Upcoming events: February 6 12: The annual Winter Shorebird Survey (see page 3 for details). February 6 8: Birds of a Feather Festival @ Palm Coast. Info at: www.birdingfest.com. February 13 16: The Great Backyard Bird Count (www.birdsource.org/gbbc) February 21: Orlando Wetlands Park Festival @ Fort Christmas Park (1300 North Fort Christmas Road, Christmas, 32709). Visit www.orlandowetlands.org or www.cityoforlando.net/wetlands/ for info. February 28 (9 a.m. 4 p.m.): Sea Turtle Day @ Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, Boca Raton. For info, see: http://www.gumbolimbo.org/sea-turtle-day. February 28 (10 a.m. 3:30 p.m.): 6 th annual Florida Scrub-Jay Festival, hosted by Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge @ State Road 402 (5 miles east of Titusville). Call 321-861-5601 for more information. Training opportunities: February 8 (9 11:30 a.m.): Winter steward training @ Lovers Key State Park. RSVP by contacting bcornell@audubonwe.org. Training webinars for the Florida Shorebird Database will be held next month (see page 7 for details). Visit our Field Notes at www.flshorebirdalliance.org for new announcements, updates, and opportunities to get involved
FSA news The Winter Shorebird Survey is February 6-12. Contact your Survey Coordinator to get involved. Winter Shorebird Survey 2015 Florida s annual Winter Shorebird Survey (a.k.a., the First Friday in February Survey) starts on Friday, February 6 th and continues through Thursday, February 12 th. Instructions and data sheets can be found online at: http://tinyurl.com/lka5yfu. This week-long survey will serve as the official statewide snapshot of wintering shorebirds and seabirds in Florida. If you plan to survey a route, please contact the Survey Coordinator in your region: Panhandle/NW Florida: Patricia_Kelly@fws.gov North FL: Billy_Brooks@fws.gov South FL: Marilyn_Knight@fws.gov The survey is geared towards experienced birders who can identify multiple species of wintering shorebirds and seabirds. However, anyone who would like to gain experience can ask their Survey Coordinator to be paired with a mentor. If you have any questions, please contact Billy_Brooks@fws.gov. Panhandle/ NW Florida North FL South FL 3
FSA news Check out our website at FLShorebirdAlliance.org. What s new on the FSA website? If you haven t browsed the Florida Shorebird Alliance website in a while, you may want to check out some of our new resources and features at www.flshorebirdalliance.org. We have updated the local partnership pages to include background information on each group (see About Us tab and click on Partners on the left menu). From your partnership s page, you can click on the News link for local announcements, events, meeting minutes, and more. For our youngest partners, we have added a Kid s Resources section (see Resources tab, then click Outreach Materials on the left menu). This section includes a printable coloring book and craft project, and we hope to add more resources, so please let us know if you have educational materials to share. Also on the Resources/Outreach Materials page is a new postcard for use in hotels, visitors centers, and other venues wishing to educate their customers about beach-nesting birds nearby. The Beach-nesting Bird Postcard (shown below) can be downloaded and printed on cardstock. These are just a few of our latest additions, but we regularly post news, events, and job announcements in our Field Notes. Sometimes, we don t hear about an opportunity in time to announce it in the monthly Wrack Line, so the Field Notes page is a good one to bookmark and check from time to time. 4
FSA news Susan Cerulean, one of our Northwest Florida partners, has a new blog on coastal topics. Here is an excerpt on her recent Christmas Bird Count experience, entitled Divine Counting. Partner blogs on coastal topics Here is how the Christmas Bird Count found me on the third-tolast day of 2014: suspended between the divinity of the wild birds, and their utter vulnerability to human whims. The territory that is ours to count in the annual Christmas census extends from the junction of 30A and Cape San Blas Road, and Stump Hole, on the St. Joe Peninsula. Our favorite stretch, and the most productive bird-wise, is the beach. It used to be just a year or two ago that you could not drive a vehicle all the way to the tip of Cape San Blas (that ever, ever changing point of sand). You had to carry your fishing poles and your beach gear either from parking places at Stump Hole, or all the way from the houses near Money Bayou. Not too many people did, so wild birds thrived there, and you could usually find a great variety resting and re-arranging their feathers. But the protective barriers are gone now. With a cheap permit from Gulf County, area residents can motor the whole length of that beach. As a result, I was a distracted Christmas Bird counter this year. I should have been moving briskly, ticking off species and numbers of species, but I found myself obsessing about the impact of the cars and the people they ferry. You ve seen shorebirds standing around in groups on the beach, and maybe thought they were loafing without particular purpose. But between forays to fish, shorebirds need time undisturbed to rest, regroup, and dry, re-order and oil their feathers. Jeff and I set up my spotting scope a good distance away from the hundreds of birds resting at the spit, and began to scan. Royal tern, 110. Forster s tern, 97. Caspian tern, 2, Sandwich tern, 2. I named off the birds and numbers of each kind out loud, so Jeff could record them in a small, orange, waterproof notebook. 5 Black skimmer, 57. American oystercatcher, 3. Cormorant, 9. Brown pelican, 2. Continued on next page
FSA news Continued from previous page Partner blogs on coastal topics (continued) A red Jeep came rolling down the sand, and several couples on foot moved towards us from the west. Jeff, quick, move between the birds and car tracks in the sand so the people will have to go around us, I asked, and he did. I pressed the legs of my scope more firmly into the beach. It looked like a stiff, mutant spider, three-legged. As if in a football game, we body-blocked for the birds. Willet, 4. Dunlin, 41. Western sandpiper, 10. Ruddy turnstone, 5. Most people driving or even walking the beach will respect a human s unspoken right to be where they will on the shore, and as I had guessed, these beach drivers circled around us to give us space. Most people driving or even walking the beach will respect a human s unspoken right to be where they will on the shore These same polite people don t realize the nonnegotiable needs and extreme vulnerability of shorebirds. Susan Cerulean Black-bellied plover, 1. Snowy plover, 7. Semi-palmated plover, 6. Piping plover, 3. These same polite people don t realize the non-negotiable needs and extreme vulnerability of shorebirds. As the beach-goers drove away, my concern for the birds relaxed. They were no longer numbers, or species threatened by human activity. I was stopped by their magnificent beauty. A royal tern chick, bowing to and begging from its parent, for food. Northern breeding Bonaparte s gulls, with white-trimmed wings and scrappy dispositions. A black skimmer, so tired it might have fallen face down in the sand, except for its massive bill, acting as a prop. And the two of us humans, simply being, with the birds. To which tribe do I belong? My oh-so-human form and brain, or the at-risk wild birds? Or can I find a way to be a bridge between the two? Susan Cerulean Read more of Susan s blog Mostly Coastal: Notes and Essays from the Edge at: http://comingtopass.com/blog/ 6
FSD updates Training on the Florida Shorebird Database and breeding survey protocol will be held in March. Register for training webinars Next month, we will be holding online training courses (webinars) on Florida s statewide Breeding Bird Protocol and the Florida Shorebird Database (FSD). Our courses will be shorter this year, and designed for different monitoring scenarios (regardless of skill level or experience). So whether you are a beginner or returning volunteer, we ask that you sign up for at least one course: FSD for route surveyors: This course is geared for monitors who regularly survey routes. If you have a transect on the beach or anywhere else that you routinely monitor, this is the course for you! The first webinar will be on Friday, March 13 (12 1 p.m. Eastern). FSD for site monitors: This course is for volunteers who check on specific sites such as rooftops, stewarded colonies, etc., without routinely surveying a specific path. The first webinar will be on Tuesday, March 17 (12 1 p.m. Eastern). Anyone is welcome to do attend one or both webinars. Class size is limited to 50 participants, so please sign up in advance by emailing FLShorebirdDatabase@myfwc.com. We will add more classes if there is interest, so if you would like to attend but have a scheduling conflict, please let us know. 7
Partner profile Doris and Patrick Leary of Fernandina Beach received Audubon s 2014 Guy Bradley Award! Audubon honors Pat & Doris Leary On Florida s Atlantic coast, Amelia Island is as far north as you can go without being in Georgia. It s an island of coastal hammocks full of wizened old oaks, windswept dunes and expansive mud-flats, and saltmarsh threaded through with winding tidal creeks from the slow Amelia River. It is in this place that Pat and Doris Leary have elevated citizen science for the last 30 years, to teach professional biologists a thing or two about Florida s coastal birds. Self-taught, and with skills refined by thousands of hours in the field, they are experts in the tricky business of surveying cryptic shorebirds under punishing field conditions, world class in their ability to resight leg bands and flags. The Learys have assembled groundbreaking datasets on rare and declining coastal birds, sharing their data with multiple agencies and nonprofits. And in the course of collecting this data, they have turned what we know about Florida s shorebirds on its ear. When the hemisphere s foremost experts on Red Knots insisted the individuals wintering in South America flew straight to Chesapeake Bay, the Learys produced data documenting thousands of birds using the inlets of Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia. Their data has helped put Florida s Levy and Dixie Counties on the map for their hemispheric importance to wintering shorebirds, including a sizeable chunk of the Atlantic Seaboard s population of American Oystercatchers. Their data has helped designate federal critical habitat for Piping Plovers and Red Knots. And their data and photographs were the evidence Audubon used to win new protections for birds at Jacksonville s Huguenot Memorial Park. Photo above: Doris and Patrick Leary holding American Oystercatcher chicks after leg-banding. 8 Eager to share their data and photographs so that they can be used well and often, they do much of this in their free time at their own expense, for sheer love of the birds. Pat and Doris are rigorous researchers, eloquent advocates, humble experts and generous educators. That is why it was my pleasure to present them with the 2014 Guy Bradley Award for relentless commitment to the science of shorebird conservation in Florida. Julie Wraithmell, Audubon Florida
ebb tidings End notes from the editor: February is a busy month for us at the Florida Shorebird Alliance. The annual Winter Shorebird Survey starts Feb. 6, spring partnership meetings are being scheduled around the state, and we are preparing for the breeding bird surveys next month. We hope you can join us in some or all of these activities! Happy Birding, Naomi Love it? Love it knot? Share your thoughts and photos with us Email shorebird@myfwc.com or join our Facebook group! Photo below: A flock of forty winter-resident American Oystercatchers roosting near Fort Clinch. In the flock were three banded birds and two of Cumberland's surviving breeders (Photo taken January 6, 2015 by Pat Leary). Birds of a feather: Photo of Red Knots in flight by Pat Leary, the 2014 Guy Bradley Award recipient (see Partner Profile on page 6). 9
www.flshorebirdalliance.or g www.flshorebirdalliance.org The Florida Shorebird Alliance (FSA) is a statewide partnership of entities, non-government organizations, and individuals committed to advancing shorebird and seabird conservation in Florida. FSA partners coordinate their independent work and collaborate to help identify and address 10 important research, management, education, outreach, and public policy needs.