>>Bird Conservation

On the Front Lines

In the spirit of Guy Bradley, who died a century ago fighting to protect Florida's birds from feather hunters, a new flock of citizen wardens is on patrol. They may not pack guns, but the threats they face are just as real.

By Doreen Cubie

 

Jason Frederick slips his white kayak into the Indian River Lagoon near Titusville, Florida, almost 100 years to the day after Audubon warden Guy Bradley launched a small boat from the village of Flamingo, 300 miles to the south. On that morning back in July 1905, Bradley rowed two miles across Florida Bay to confront a group of men who were slaughtering nesting birds. One of them turned his gun on Bradley, shooting him in the throat at close range. The men left Bradley's body to drift under the burning sun.

Frederick, 34—nearly the same age as Bradley was on that tragic day—is one of a new generation of “citizen,” or volunteer, wardens taking up the challenge to protect birds. “It was time for me to do something,” says Frederick, who works for a plastics manufacturing company. Like Bradley, he has broad shoulders, a deep tan, and a quiet determination. Unlike Bradley, however, Frederick does not carry a weapon or a badge. Instead he relies on diplomacy, persuasion, and education—although his cell phone can be whipped out when necessary to summon law enforcement.

“I'm doing this because of people I've never met,” explains Frederick, reeling off a list of his heroes, including Audubon lecturer Allan Cruickshank and his wife, Helen, who helped preserve wildlife habitat in the Merritt Island area where Frederick lives. “They did so much,” he says. “I started thinking, ‘You haven't done anything.' ”

As his kayak floats over shallow seagrass beds, three roseate spoonbills fly overhead, their wings flashing flame and fuchsia. His paddling is taking him closer to a tangle of mangroves topped by the nests of egrets and herons. Like most rookeries, this one is a frenzy of activity and bird chatter, from growls, squawks, and shrieks to soft murmurs and coos. Recently fledged juveniles chase their parents, begging for food, and still-nest-bound young birds exercise their wings, flapping them repeatedly in the air.

Once men would move into these nurseries to massacre the adults for the elegant plumes these birds grow during the breeding season, leaving the nestlings to slowly starve. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, when stylish women wore feathered hats, as many as 5 million birds lost their lives to fashion each year. Both great and snowy egrets narrowly escaped extinction, and many other species, such as least terns, took decades to recover.

 

Today's threats no longer come from the end of a gun, but they are no less menacing. And what Frederick and nearly 200 other volunteers are doing is just as critical as the heroic efforts of the early 20th-century wardens. More than 25 species of waterbirds—including herons, ibis, pelicans, egrets, anhingas, terns, and gulls—are vulnerable once again. These birds, called colonial nesters because they gather in large numbers in colonies to raise their young, are threatened this time by loss of habitat and by disturbance from people and their pets.

Although it is illegal to bother nesting birds, it often happens. “A 20-minute visit can destroy an entire colony's reproductive effort for the whole year,” says Ann Paul, Tampa Bay regional coordinator for Audubon of Florida. Her late husband, Rich, who retired in 2003 after 31 years with the organization, was the manager of the Florida Coastal Islands Sanctuaries. He came up with the idea for the volunteer warden program, now called Project ColonyWatch. “With more and more people coming to Florida—300,000 residents a year—we're losing nesting habitat,” said Rich Paul shortly before his death last November. “The idea was to train volunteers to become monitors and ultimately guardians of sites in their communities. What they're doing is vital if we are going to save room for wildlife.”

Volunteers from eight Audubon chapters around the state are participating in Project ColonyWatch and patrolling colonies along Florida's Gulf Coast, from Venice north to Tarpon Springs, where approximately 50,000 pairs of birds nest. Other wardens patrol sanctuaries on the state's east coast.

Dana Kerstein, a dental hygienist, and her husband, Harvey, a dentist, have been volunteers for four years. Their beat: Three Rooker Bar, a barrier island located in the Gulf of Mexico not far from the city of Dunedin. On a rainy morning in June the Kersteins and five other volunteers motor out to the island, where thousands of laughing gulls, royal and sandwich terns, reddish egrets, and white ibis nest. After Harvey anchors their boat, everyone jumps into the thigh-deep water and wades ashore, carrying post-hole diggers, PVC pipes, cordless drills, twine, and do not disturb the birds signs. While some volunteers plant the signs, others rope off nesting areas with twine, pick up bird-killing trash, and conduct censuses.

Tall and slender, Dana Kerstein, 55, strides down the narrow beach, shouldering a spotting scope, which she soon trains on a spot just back from the shore. Hundreds of royal terns are bunched together on the ground. Each adult—sitting only inches apart from its nearest neighbor—is incubating a single speckled egg or shielding a chick from the sun. “You can imagine what a dog would do here,” Kerstein says, explaining how chicks scatter and become separated from their parents. In the ensuing chaos, some of the smallest babies are trampled or die of exposure. “Eggs can actually cook on the hot sand,” she says, when adults are forced to abandon their nests for a time. “Fish crows will grab a chick or fly away with an egg.”

“It's a bird-eat-bird world out there,” says Nancy Douglass, a nongame biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “It's hard to get the message across that there's a real cost every time those birds are forced to fly.” People have trouble understanding why seemingly innocuous activities like kite flying and parasailing can be harmful. But the birds act as if the kites are predators, defending their offspring. “The whole colony blows up,” says Douglass. “Every time the kite swoops or turns or makes a sudden move, the birds go up again and again.” As a result, the chicks and eggs are left unattended.

In cases like this, Audubon wardens play a crucial role, says Ann Paul, because most people are quick to move on when a volunteer tells them why the kites bother the birds. Others aren't so accommodating, though. One day Jason Frederick was touring islands in the Indian River Lagoon with a representative from the state's Department of Environmental Protection and other volunteer wardens. Approaching an island that is a critical nesting site for egrets, herons, and pelicans, he saw a handful of young men anchoring their boat. “It was 8:00 in the morning, and they were either drunk from the night before or they were still drinking,” he says. “We were raining on their parade. The DEP agent asked them to leave, and fortunately they did without a confrontation.” On the island shotgun shells and clay doves littered the sand, and trees that might have been used by nesting birds had been cut down and burned for bonfires.

 

Monique Abrams, a 43-year-old antiques dealer who specializes in paintings, has just finished climbing straight up the side of a three-story building on a thin metal ladder and is looking down at a colony of least terns on the adjacent rooftop. Since these robin-size seabirds have been pushed off beaches by constant disturbance, during nesting season they have taken up residence on the flat roofs of warehouses, marinas, car dealerships, and private homes. But when the terns move to these substitutes for beaches, such as this building owned by the Global Stone Company, not everyone is happy.

“They used to hate the terns,” says Abrams, who volunteers at least 20 hours a week during the busy nesting season, from April through July. The birds would splatter their droppings all over the marble, granite, and other stone. “After we talked to the workers and explained how the birds were just trying to raise their chicks, they changed their minds,” she says. “Now they're some of our best chick checkers.”

Chick checkers rescue the juveniles when they fall off the roof. If a predator—a large heron or a hawk—flies overhead, the baby terns panic and often tumble to the ground. Heavy rains can also wash chicks down a rainspout. On the ground, the parents will continue to feed their offspring, but if the young can't fly, they're easy prey for feral cats and other predators. They are also run over by cars in parking lots and nearby streets.

Getting the chicks back onto the roof of a two-story building used to be a nearly impossible task. Most of the time the displaced birds had to be taken to a wildlife rehabilitator. But through trial and error, the “chick-a-boom” was perfected. This low-tech, low-cost device—assembled from 20 feet of electrical conduit pipe, the bottom half of an empty orange juice carton, a lid from a plastic storage container, and duct tape—is now used to hoist baby terns back to safety. Because chick-a-booms cost only a few dollars to build, multiples are made and left wherever there are rooftop colonies. Then nearby residents and employees—Global Stone workers on break, for instance— are “deputized” as wardens to help save the juveniles by keeping them with their parents. “We beamed up over 400 chicks this year,” says Abrams, smiling.

Today about 75 percent of Florida's least terns make their nests on tar-and-gravel roofs. But new roofing products have been developed that are cheaper and more energy-efficient, and do not need to be covered by a layer of stone. Like most beach-nesting birds, terns require a rock, shell, sand, or gravel substrate to lay their eggs. Within the next 20 years or so, as the older roofs are gradually replaced with smooth materials, the birds are going to be forced out of their penthouses.

Citizen wardens are thus redoubling their efforts to protect beach nesters and what remains of their habitat. Dave Hopkins, 65, a retired engineer with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, now watches over 250 pairs of black skimmers at a busy resort beach called Sand Key. These dramatic birds are sitting on their eggs, their backs to the Gulf of Mexico and their blood-red bills pointing toward a line of high-rise hotels and condominiums. There's precious little space left here, but if the skimmers are unmolested, they will be able to fledge young. “As the beach develops with condos, it puts a lot more people on it,” Hopkins says. “We feel that because we got the posting up to protect [the skimmers] and separate the people from the birds, this colony survived better than any other colony on the Gulf Coast.”

Hopkins, who lives nearby, talks to condo managers and residents year-round. Early in the season he ropes off the area where the skimmers are nesting. Often he sets up a scope so people can see them up close. Because the chicks frequently stray outside the ropes and hang out at the water's edge, Hopkins has also made up chick crossing signs so people will watch out for the flightless juveniles.

As most volunteers will tell you, keeping an eye on these colonies requires persistence. Rookeries sometimes move from year to year; often they're in unexpected places. From his pickup truck, Jason Frederick shows me one sandwiched between a B.J.'s Wholesale Club and three condos. Young herons stand on branches next to their nests, almost ready to fledge. Flocks of white ibis glide in to spend the night. An alligator surfaces just off the shore. The days when these reptiles and deep water were enough to protect nesting and roosting birds are long gone.

More condominiums are planned for this area, says Frederick, as he watches a tricolored heron fold its wings and dive down into the safety of the rookery. “We've got our work cut out for us.” But like the other Project ColonyWatch volunteers scattered across the state, Frederick is determined that the legacy of Florida's egrets, herons, terns, and other colonial-nesting birds—and their Audubon wardens—won't end on his watch.

 

Florida native Doreen Cubie writes about wildlife from her home near Charleston, South Carolina.