(migrations)

A Beachhead for Birds

By Frank Graham Jr.

Photograph by David Muench/Corbis

The Cape Hatteras National Seashore, established in 1937, first carried the national park concept to barrier islands. Flanked by open ocean and North Carolina's productive bays, this 70-mile chain of sand and woody cover is all-purpose bird habitat.

Audubon North Carolina has designated three Important Bird Areas (IBAs) on its coast—the national seashore, the Outer Banks, and Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge—for the food and shelter they offer wintering, nesting, and migrant birds. As many as 90,000 shorebirds, including black skimmers, least terns, and piping plovers (the latter two federally endangered), nest among the beaches and dunes. Herons and egrets are common. During fall migration thousands of songbirds find food and shelter in the islands' shrub thickets and maritime forests.

This is people habitat, too, and 2 million visitors hit these beaches each year by highway (from the north and west) or ferry (from the south).

Thoughtless humans bedevil piping plovers and colonial birds by running off-road vehicles through critical habitat, and ditching and dune building alter feeding and nesting areas. Walker Golder, deputy director of Audubon North Carolina, says the Park Service used to rope off nesting areas in a timely way. "Now they have to see a nest before they'll put up signs; by that time the nest has been run over. It's a poor policy change that doesn't work."

Luckily, volunteers pick up the slack. On the North Carolina coast, Audubon chapter member Sidney Maddock is an especially effective advocate for the birds, monitoring nest sites and pointing them out to Park Service officials.

© 2005 National Audubon Society

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