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 ...
Midway has been for years a protected gooney bird nesting site. When I was there in the Navy the birds would come after you if you got too close.
Yes. This is near where I live. I very disappointed to read this.
Their idiots. My neighbor caught up 2 baby chickens that got into his pasture from one of my hens. He put them in a bucket in the blazing sun thinking that they like the heat and would survive. I told him next time just let them be. My yard chickens are subject to all manner of farmyard death but to do what he did was completely idiotic.
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