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.

Birds go to Turtleween

What a great day at Georgia's Sea Turtle Center's Turtleween. They gave me a table for my Operation Plover Patrol. Wild Birds Unlimited Nature Shop on Jekyll helped me by letting Jay B. Watcher come over and help me talk about birds on Jekyll Island. Jay did a lot of high fives. There was one very serious discussion with a budding scientist who promises to help.Right next door, kids were discovering alligators and snakes. A Wonderful way to help everyone to appreciate these misunderstood animals.

I even got a chance to ride on the hay ride. It was a blast.

SEANET surveys begin

Eek! sorry about being absent. It is a crazy time. We are pulling together all the plans for the Georgia's Colonial Coast Birding and Nature Festival. The booklet will go to the printers in just a few weeks. Well anyway, I have been busy doing a breeding bird survey down in Camden County and plover surveys up here on Jekyll Island. Strong storms a couple of weeks ago really did some damage to the nesting Wood Storks and Wilson's Plovers. Sad to see but this is nature's way of balancing.

Wood Storks in happier times before the storms.

June 2, 2009 Georgia Graves and I met at Gould Inlet on East Beach, St. Simons Island. This is going to be the site where we will be doing regular SEANET surveys. We met at about two hours after high tide. Georgia knows this beach better than I do so I listened to her advice. Yes, I live on St. Simons about two miles away from this area but it is a people beach. I used to walk my dog on leash here. What stopped me was Hart, my Australian Shepherd, was not a friendly dog. A lot of the dogs on this beach were running loose. These dogs often would run right up to him. I just gave up coming. Now that is exactly why I volunteered to do this survey here.

The Georgia Sea Turtle Center and Jekyll 4-H are covering the beach on Jekyll. Jekyll beaches are a good balance of people and birds. Yes, there are dogs that run the beach but there are eleven miles of beaches on Jekyll. There are only about three or four miles on St. Simons. It will be interesting to compare the two beaches. Also there are other Georgia beaches that are a lot less public that are going to be covered in this SEANET program. When it all comes together, will it give us a picture of how people and domesticated animals effect the birds?

I enjoy questions like this. Comparing the beaches will give clues to find an answer.

This East Beach area is now defined. Here is what it looks like:

This is looking toward the southeast from the old coastguard station

This is in the same spot just turned around and heading north. It is the start of our survey

This is mid survey area looking northwest over the dunes.

This photo was taken from the same spot but looking northeast

You can see this is a very wide beach at low tide. We will try to do this survey when the tide is high and falling. There exposed beach will be narrower and easier to survey.

It will be fun!