You scared me for a minute there! Watching female beach volleyball is one of my favorite things. That's me on the far right, in the light blue shirt. It's amazing where you can walk if you just act confident.
Posted on 08/05/2018 5:53:42 PM PDT by BBell
Beachgoers playing volleyball on a small island at the mouth of Mobile Bay perpetrated a horrific crime in recent weeks, likely killing hundreds of tiny least terns.
The volleyballers even stacked dozens of eggs stolen from nests in a pile to bake in the sun.
Birmingham Audubon, which discovered the tragedy, hopes to use it as a teaching moment and further the group's effort to help Alabama's coastal birds rebound from the BP oil spill.
Least terns are the smallest of the terns, weighing 1.4 ounces as adults. They are about half the size of a cardinal, with snowy white feathers and a rakish black cap atop their heads. Their nesting style - laying eggs in shallow depressions on bare sand beaches - leaves them vulnerable to all manner of threats, from storm driven waves washing their nests away to predation by larger birds, or other animals, such as foxes.
Part of their evolutionary strategy to survive those threats is to nest in dense colonies of dozens or even hundreds of pairs of birds. The nests are close together, usually a foot or two apart. The speckled eggs laid in them are about the size of a grape.
That nesting behavior appears to have set the stage for the massacre, which was discovered by Andrew Haffenden, with Birmingham Audubon's Coastal Bird Survey. Haffenden, who was a wildlife researcher in his native Australia, was conducting a bird survey on a spit of land that juts off the south side of Dauphin Island.
Ironically, that spit of land was once Pelican Island, one of the best nesting sites in the northern Gulf for least terns and other beach nesters. But that was before the entire island migrated north and connected to Dauphin Island about 12 years ago. When the two islands merged into
(Excerpt) Read more at al.com ...
Bill, this is near where you are, no?
Bill who?
They throw you under the jail if you step foot on a rookery around here. I live on a lake now and it has three islands designated as state WMA’s (wildlife management area). You can bird watch from your boat, that’s it.
Volleyball Hooligans!
Because these idiots have no clue, these islands ought to be off limits during the nesting season of all sea birds. There should be strict enforcement of this ban with sizable fines.
Idiots! Where I live we have speed limits and roped-off areas for our Skimmers.
Just as long they ban Female volleyball tournaments!
Worse than wind turbines.
Least Terns have their enemies. Pilots especially. The birds tend to nest near airports, and on flat spaces near runways. They have no fear of airplanes and often fly right underneath taxiing aircraft. A bird sucked into an aircraft intake can result in a crash.
Lots of different measures have been tried to discourage them, but they are only moderated effective. As a result, sometimes pilots and those associated with aviators resort to more direct methods to keep the populations down.
I can recall one case back in the early 1980s when an ABHC was quietly and quickly retired after it was learned that he had led a group of sailors on an unauthorized mission to reduce the tern population of a NAS.
Not sure if it is the case, but I would bet that something similar to that is at least partially involved.
Were there no signs posted saying this is a protected area?
Sometimes I think there is truth to that increasingly popular belief that teenage brains are still not completely formed, and wont be until about 19. Then I think that I would never have done this, at least not in such great numbers. Hundreds of baby birds??? No. I’ve never been that young or that drunk. It takes time and work to do all that.
BIG correction ——”Just as long they DON’T ban Female volleyball tournaments!!!
I generally side with anyone but the environmentalists but this time I think just killing bird for your convenience is awful.
You scared me for a minute there! Watching female beach volleyball is one of my favorite things. That's me on the far right, in the light blue shirt. It's amazing where you can walk if you just act confident.
I’m surprised they’re not off limits during nesting.
I would think that some investigative work might turn up some leads; locals that saw somebody, a group of cars that turned up on surveillance cameras to or from the route to the nesting sites, somebody bragging on social media about what they did, a reward for information, etc.
Ya needed that correction.
The towel in your waistline helps. It makes you look official.
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