Woodland Owners are Key to Improving Wildlife Habitat

The northeast region of the United States is home to some of the most densely forested lands throughout the country. With more than half of these forests owned by private landowners, residents play a vital role in conservation efforts of many threatened wildlife species and healthy wooded ecosystems. The American Forest Foundation, in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, are working with family woodland owners to enhance and promote the region’s habitat.

Historically, the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service has worked beside landowners to boost habitat with outstanding results. Below, we showcase just how much we can accomplish when we work as a team.

The Delmarva Fox Squirrel is a great example of a conservation success story by landowners. More than 80 percent of the squirrels forested habitat is privately owned. As landowners continue to support the squirrels with routine timber harvest and farming with sufficient mature forest nearby, the species continues to thrive and expand across the working landscapes of the Delmarva Peninsula.

Rick and Donna Ambrose, landowners and cottontail conservationists. (Photo credit: Kate Whitacre, USFWS)

Landowners, Rick and Donna, along with numerous foresters, farmers, birdwatchers, biologists, hunters and conservationists, have been part of a coordinated effort aimed at conserving the New England cottontail. Rick and Donna have improved and created young forest habitat on their land to benefit New England cottontail and numerous other species, including woodcock, bobcats, snowshoe hares, a broad range of songbirds, box turtles, and frosted elfin butterflies. Their tremendous efforts have helped keep the cottontail off the Endangered Species List.

This is a New England cottontail. Credit: Tom Barnes / USFWS

Additional efforts to support New England cottontail conservation are happening all throughout the Northeast! Benny Caiola is a real estate developer, but for the next several years, he’s going to be developing some of his land with a different goal in mind — restoration of the New England cottontail rabbit. Caiola, who lives in Larchmont, NY, owns 300 acres in Patterson, in Putnam County, that adjoins about 1,000 acres of state land. The land will now be managed to benefit young forest for the cottontails. This type of habitat restoration also benefits approximately 40-plus species, like turkey and deer!

Partners (loggers Joe Zarecki and Faun Koplovsky, forester Doug Ramey, Ted Kendziora with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) stand in front of our first private landowner project in New York. Photo courtesy of Benny Caiola

Working together with motivated landowners and partners is crucial to conservation success. These relationships have been instrumental in developing key projects with great benefit to the species.

Check out the blogs below to see more great stories like these!

Working Lands for Wildlife

Cooperation, Conversation, and Conservation

 

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!

Changing fortunes on Delaware Bay

One might think a creature named the horseshoe crab would be naturally lucky–and in some ways it is. The prehistoric throwback has retained its basic physiology for around 350 million years, so it’s already far outlasted our own species on an evolutionary scale. Evolved as it may be, its luck has been challenged along the shores of the Delaware Bay. Beaches that traditionally serve as one of the crabs’ major spawning grounds were severely eroded by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and the species is projected to be impacted by continuing shore development, frequent intense storms like Sandy and ongoing sea level rise.

The eggs of mating horseshoe crabs at Delaware Bay will sustain thousands of migrating shorebirds on their long trips to the Arctic. Credit: Gregory Breese/USFWS

Even less fortunate are the migrating shorebirds who depend on their critical stopover at Delaware Bay to refuel on sustaining horseshoe crab eggs on their way to the Arctic—a journey that, for some, clocks more than 18,000 miles annually. Take the rufa red knot for example, a species whose numbers have declined so sharply that it is being considered for federal Endangered Species Act protection. It’s estimated that more than 50 percent of the entire rufa red knot population stops at Delaware Bay, one of the last undeveloped shores on the Atlantic coast, making the area essential to the continuing survival of the species.

Fifty to 70 truckloads of sand are being added daily to five beaches on Delaware Bay that were badly eroded by Hurricane Sandy. Click below to view video of the beaches being replenished.

But sometimes good fortune is the result of foresight. To help both of these species and the beach habitats upon which they depend, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has broken ground on the first of 31 forward-looking Hurricane Sandy resilience projects: a $1.65 million restoration of several beaches along the Delaware Bay. The effort includes repairing storm surge and erosion damage at Reeds Beach, Kimbles Beach, Cooks Beach and Pierce’s Point in New Jersey’s Cape May County and at Moore’s Beach in Cumberland County (all important habitat areas for both crabs and shorebirds). The project involves  depositing some 50-70 truckloads of locally-mined sand daily to re-establish the diminishing coastline, with total sand replenishment estimated at 45,500 tons.

A map of the Reeds Beach restoration area. Inset: Greater Delaware Bay with beach restoration proposals highlighted in red. Credit: American Littoral Society.

Partners in the effort, including the American Littoral Society and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, are coordinating the restoration with the Service’s Cape May National Wildlife Refuge, and with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. These partners have not only been instrumental in helping to implement the Service’s core coastal resilience and habitat restoration goals, they’ve also been seeking to secure further funding to restore additional spans of Delaware Bay shoreline.

Restoration crews have been employing something of a hurry-up offense, as the sand must be added, spread and graded by early May, when the horseshoe crabs typically return for spawning.

Cape May National Wildlife Refuge hosts annual nighttime horseshoe crab tagging events on Kimbles Beach. Credit: USFWS.

Cape May Refuge Manager Brian Braudis says the refuge plans to host horseshoe crab taggings on May 15 and May 29 at 8:30 p.m. when the crabs return, on its Kimbles Beach parcel. Last year, volunteers including veterans, retirees and school children—some bussed in from upstate classrooms—tagged 1,000 horseshoe crabs. With a support network like this, who needs luck?

To read more about U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Hurricane Sandy recovery and resilience projects, visit http://www.fws.gov/hurricane/sandy. To view media coverage of Cape May beach restoration projects, click here. To learn about the Service’s broader conservation and habitat restoration efforts on Delaware Bay, click here.