Restoring Stone Harbor for birds and community

A piping plover at Stone Harbor Point with dunlins in the background. Photo from Creative Commons, Flickr user John Beetham.

Larry Niles holding two red knots. Photo courtesy of his blog, arubewithaview.com.

Today we’re sharing updates from our partners NJ Audubon and Larry Niles, a private wildlife biologist blogging on the ongoing Stone Harbor Point project to restore 20 acres of habitat for piping plovers, American oystercatchers, red knots and other shorebirds.

NJ Audubon received a grant through National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Hurricane Sandy Coastal Resiliency Competitive Grant Program for the project, which is also supported by our agency, the Wetlands Institute, Conserve Wildlife Foundation, NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife, Richard Stockton College of NJ Coastal Research Center, and the Borough of Stone Harbor.

At long last, the work began last Wednesday, when the first equipment slowly made its way to the Stone Harbor Point site. The point helps protect the Borough from damaging coastal storms and sea level rise, and the project will use local sand harvesting (no dredging or trucking in sand) to elevate and improve habitat quality for coastal birds and to reduce coastal flooding.

Boomer Heun, the supervising contractor and operator of every machine out here, stands in front of a bulldozer. Photo courtesy NJ Audubon/Larry Niles

Last week, the team finished one of the three nesting and roosting habitats for piping plovers, oystercatchers, least terns and black skimmers. The habitat areas are about 2 to 3 feet above the surrounding area, keeping them safe from the infrequent but inevitable high tides that sweep the point during bad winds storms or New and Full moon tides. These floods have contributed to a failure of Stone Harbor nesting bird population.

The same elevated areas will provide roosting habitat for shorebirds that migrant through the area in the fall and the spring migrants that feed on horseshoe crab eggs on Delaware Bay. It’s not well known that, at times, most of the shorebirds, including the red knot, fly to Stone Harbor Point to find roosting habitat safe from the ground predators that roam throughout the Delaware Bay beaches and marsh at night. In some years the entire population of rufa red knots roost on Stone Harbor Point. The roosts have failed recently during the same extraordinary tides that destroy nests. Our work will help both groups of birds.

American oystercatchers at Stone Harbor Point. Photo from Creative Commons, Flickr user John Beetham.

This part of the project aims to help people, too. As part of our team’s commitment to the community of Stone Harbor, we will fortify natural dunes that protect the southernmost part of the town. Nearly a quarter of all the sand we harvest from our borrow site at the tip of the point will be used to increase the height and width of an important dune that forms the best defense of the town’s south face. It’s our sincere hope this project will help this town face the dangers of coastal storms.

The trucks have been moving about 3,000 to 4,000 cubic yards per day! Photo courtesy NJ Audubon/Larry Niles

Even though the cold wind makes life difficult and continues to wear away at the habitat areas, it also helps. The deep freeze helps firm the sand making it more resistant to the punishing winds. The frozen beach also provide firm footing for the all terrain dump trucks. With loads of over 30 tons, a hard frozen sand roadway improves fuel efficiency by 50% and saves valuable time.

Keep up with the project at NJ Audubon’s site!

Hurricane Sandy restoration saves shorebirds, ‘living fossils’ they rely on

Roughly one million shorebirds pass through the Delaware Bay in the spring, when the largest population of horseshoe crabs in the world turns up to spawn. The largest concentration of red knots can be found in the bay at this time. This photo captures knots at Mispillion Harbor. Credit: Gregory Breese/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Today we’re sharing a post from GeoSpace by Kate Wheeling about the successful $1.65 million project to restore Sandy-affected beaches on Cape May’s inner shoreline, work that reinforced some of the most critically important stopover habitat for migrating shorebirds in Delaware Bay. The project was the first of 31 Sandy coastal resilience projects focused on rebuilding natural areas along the Atlantic Coast.

When Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S. East Coast two years ago, it threatened the survival of a 400-million-year-old crab species and about a million shorebirds that rely on the crabs’ eggs for nourishment during long migrations. Retreating storm waters took with them 60 to 90 centimeters (two to three feet) of sand from the Delaware Bay beaches where horseshoe crabs lay eggs and left behind piles of debris, destroying 70 percent of the crab’s prime nesting zones in the area.

Now, preliminary data shows that a speedy rescue project, funded in part by federal Hurricane Sandy emergency relief funds, helped restore the beaches, and that horseshoe-crab and shorebird numbers have returned to their pre-storm levels.

Work at one of the restored beaches, Kimbles Beach. A wheel loader fills the rubber-tracked dump truck. Credit: Eric Schrading/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

“Some of the hardest hit areas were those that were the most important for shorebirds, as well as horseshoe crabs. We had to restore the beaches immediately to provide the necessary forage for shorebirds before the next spring,” said Eric Schrading, New Jersey Field Office Supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Schrading described the destruction and the rescue operation during a congressional briefing last month about the U.S. Department of the Interior’s response to Hurricane Sandy.

The restoration project, an effort of the American Littoral Society, the Conserve Wildlife Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, removed over 700 metric tons (1.5 million pounds) of debris and laid down more than 40,800 metric tons (nearly 90 million pounds) of sand across five beaches in the Bay. [Check out photos on our Flickr]

“Indications are that we’ve, at least, created a beach that is providing as much ecological value as it did before the storm,” Schrading added.

Every spring, the largest population of horseshoe crabs in the world turns up to spawn in the Delaware Bay, a calm cove sheltered from the choppy Atlantic Ocean waves by a protective arm of the New Jersey Cape. At night, tens of thousands of the dinner-plate sized crabs plod up onto the beach, dig down into the sand and leave behind millions of eggs.

Check out the restored Kimbles Beach! Credit: Eric Schrading/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Shortly after the crabs invade the bay, flocks of shorebirds, including one species called red knots, pass through the area. The red knots feast on the unlucky eggs that end up on the surface of the overturned sand, fueling the birds on the last leg of their 14,500 kilometer (9,000 mile) journey from the tip of South America to the Arctic.

“Delaware Bay is the top migratory stop for shorebirds in the nation, and one of the top stopovers in the world,” said Larry Niles, a wildlife biologist and one of the founders of Conserve Wildlife Foundation, a New Jersey-based group working to protect rare and threatened species within the state.

The restoration project is just the latest in a series of efforts to protect the horseshoe-crab population on the Atlantic coast.

Although the crabs haven’t changed much since they first appeared in the fossil record over 400 million years ago, harvesting in the 1990s reduced the population of this “living fossil” to just a quarter of its original size, according to Niles. Without an abundance of horseshoe crab eggs to feed on in the spring, shorebird populations also dwindled. Red knot numbers plummeted to fewer than 20,000 birds in the last decade from more than 100,000 birds in the 1980s. [The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to protect the knot as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and we’ll make a final decision by the end of November.]

Increased regulation of horseshoe-crab harvesting in the late 1990s began to turn things around for the crabs and birds. Shorebird numbers had reached a rough equilibrium with the availability of crab eggs when Hurricane Sandy hit, said Niles.

Horseshoe crab eggs from Mispillion Harbor. Credit: Gregory Breese/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Now that efforts to restore the beach after the 2012 storm seem to be working, the focus of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has shifted to protecting the bay from future storms, according to Schrading.

One option, he said, is oyster aquaculture. Stretches of oyster-filled cages maintained by New Jersey’s own oystermen could be deployed off the coast of Delaware Bay’s beaches. Scientists believe the cages could act as a buffer for the beach while also benefiting local fishermen.

The cages could be in place as early as next spring, but according to Schrading it will take at least two years of monitoring to tell if they effectively prevent strong waves from eroding the beaches without interfering with horseshoe crab movements in the bay.

“[The project] is experimental in design, but it is something that’s worth looking into,” he said.

The September 19 congressional briefing highlighted the various ways the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) used federal Hurricane Sandy emergency funds to rebuild coastal communities and landscapes after the storm. Schrading was joined by Mary Foley, chief scientist for the National Park Service, and Neil Ganju, a research oceanographer for USGS, who presented on their agencies’ contributions to the restoration and resiliency efforts following the storm.

Read more from GeoSpace on the briefing here.

– Kate Wheeling is a science writing intern in the AGU’s Public Information department.