By Peter Vankevich
Here is a summary of some of this year’s Ocracoke region nesting observations.
Beach nesting birds such as American Oystercatchers, Black Skimmers and several tern species are finding it harder and harder to have success in producing much-needed fledglings.
Beach erosion, overwash from major storms and losses of both eggs and hatchlings by predation have taken their toll.
The nesting birds on South Point suffered in large part due to, as best as the Cape Hatteras National Seashore staff can figure, a single coyote. Coyotes on the Outer Banks have been increasing and becoming a threat not only to wildlife, including sea turtle nests, but also to cats on Hatteras Island.
Indications show that this animal was the cause of destroying the nests and eggs of the Black Skimmers. Only one bird managed to fledge this year.
The only successful nests at the Point were 50 Least Terns along with two American Oystercatchers, three Wilson’s Plover and one Piping Plover. Six more Oystercatchers fledged from nests on the rest of the island. Hatteras Island had 29 American Oystercatcher nests but failed this year to produce a single fledgling due to predation.
The NC Wildlife Resource Commission conducted a survey of islands around the north end of Ocracoke and Hatteras Inlet. According to Carmen Johnson, the commission’s wildlife diversity biologist, they detected approximately 320 Laughing Gull nests and seven Common Tern, 40 Black Skimmer, three Least Tern and two American Oystercatcher nests.
Other nesting species not counted as part of this survey were Black-crowned Night Herons, White Ibises, Glossy Ibises, Forster’s Terns, Tricolored Herons, Little Blue Herons, Snowy Egrets and Brown Pelicans.
Islander Karen Rhodes, who frequently spends mornings walking the island with her camera in hand, has been photographing an impressive number of bird species. Many of these beautiful photos are posted on Facebook on her personal page and the Birds of Ocracoke page, administered by Heather Johnson.
Purple Martins were seen throughout the summer due to the number of condo-like nesting houses in the village. First-year seaside Sparrows could be seen in the saltmarshes of the island, including along South Point Road and young Eastern Kingbirds could be found perching in the higher vegetation throughout the island.
Anecdotally, Great-crested Flycatchers appeared to have had a successful nesting season with several first-year birds seen in the village and at Springer’s Point. A first-year bird and an adult were seen in a yard in the Widgeon Woods neighborhood near the lighthouse on Sept. 1.
These flycatchers arrive in March and most depart by late August for their winter range of southern Florida, Mexico, Central America, northwestern South America and the Caribbean.
A birding outing on Sept. 8 yielded 13 immature Yellow-crowned Night Herons, another sign of a good year for them.
A comprehensive look at bird nesting will be published in the forthcoming North Carolina Bird Atlas. Now in its fourth year, this citizen-science project administered by the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, is mapping the distribution and abundance of bird species across the state. Many of these sightings are entered using the eBird app.
Not surveyed this year was Big Foot Island which is a dredge spoil island created by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1980s to clear shoaling in Big Foot Slough. This slough is the channel used by the sound ferries that go to Swan Quarter and Cedar Island. It hosts some of the largest nesting sites in the state for Royal and Sandwich Terns. Last year after a major replenishment of material (sand) from dredging the channel there were 6,256 Royal Tern and 1,012 Sandwich Terns nests.
Audubon North Carolina owns and manages for bird nesting three islands located two miles northwest of Portsmouth Island in the Pamlico Sound. These are Beacon, Shell Castle and North Rock islands. The North Rock islands are now submerged, and Shell Castle is barely on the surface.
It’s hard to imagine that Shell Castle Island, formerly called Shell Castle Rock, was once about 25-acres on which stood a lighthouse, windmill, gristmill, store, lumber yard, a tavern and 300-foot main building.
Beacon Island, barely seven acres in size these days, is an important nest site. It had more than 300 Brown Pelican nests and 50 Great Egrets which are good numbers for the island according to Lindsay Addison, a coastal biologist with Audubon North Carolina. There were also a few Snowy Egrets and Black-crowned Night-Herons nesting there as well along with two pairs of American Oystercatchers, she said.
Farther south, the Cape Lookout National Seashore had a great year for terns and skimmers, according to Jon Altman, its supervisory biologist.
“There were two large mixed colonies at Old Drum Inlet and Ophelia Inlet. Audubon NC had a research permit to band Black Skimmer chicks and they banded 125 between the two sites,” he wrote responding to an email inquiry.
“At Old Drum peak counts were 126 Black Skimmer pairs, 21 Common Tern pairs, 28 Gul-billed Tern pairs and 45 Least Tern pairs nesting on June 28. At Ophelia Inlet on June 5 there were 99 Gull-billed Terns, 50 Common Terns, 47 Black Skimmers and 52 Least Tern pairs. We still have to organize the data, but these two colonies produced hundreds of chicks and fledglings.
There was little or no coyote predation at these remote colonies, but coyotes did impact American Oystercatcher nesting and other colonial waterbird nesting sites, he wrote.
So are the coyotes going to be trapped or otherwise eliminated? They are not native to NC and are a very invasive species. I understand the laws are different in a few coastal counties from the rest of the state.
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