Plover Patrol at Georgia Sea Turtle Center

The Georgia Sea Turtle Center attracts over 100,000 people to come to Jekyll annually. On Thursday April 9 and Friday, April 10 around 1200 people came to their spring event called Shell-a-brate.

For the past few years, I have had the Operation Plover Patrol booth at this event.  The idea is to teach visitors to the beach about the birds those birds on the beach. This year, we did something different. 

This year we decided to create signs for the nesting shorebirds on our coast. Painting is fun and a good way to engage the public in helping these birds. It wasn’t my idea. I took the idea from Walker Golder, the North Carolina Audubon Director. Since we were on Jekyll and we have a rope line at the south end with nesting Wilson’s Plover, we focus on Wilson’s Plovers.

We talked about why the rope line was up.  We showed pictures of Wilson’s Plovers as family groups. One of those pictures showed the adult in plain sight and the chick blended into the wrack and vegetation. We ask people to find the chicks. It was fun to watch them search and find the chicks.

We had decided to have three slogans to build their sign designs around. Those slogans were “Help the Wilson’s”, “Share the Beach,” and “Protect our nests.”  I had a simple way to draw a bird to show our young artists. 


The young people were very amazing at coming up with ideas on their own. Here are a few of the signs.