Field Notes 



Insights into Current Sea Grant Research 



A Helping Hand for Nesting Waterbirds 



Jim Parnell's a little worried. 



Worried that a beachcomber's dog 

 might play deadly havoc with a nesting 

 colony of royal terns. 



Worried that unwary children 

 might think nothing of tramping 

 through a pelican hatchery or use 

 hundreds of bird eggs in a fight. 



In short, he's wonied that one 

 careless human act could spell death 

 for thousands of terns, gulls, skimmers 

 and pelicans. He's hoping folks and 

 their animals will leave shorebird 

 nesting sites alone. 



Since the early 1970s, Parnell, a 

 professor of biology at the University of 

 North Carolina at Wilmington, has been 

 counting and studying North Carolina's 

 colonial waterbirds, those that nest in 

 colonies instead of individually. Now, 

 with the counting done, he's recom- 

 mending ways to manage them. 



He'd hate to see two decades work 

 come to nothing at the hands of people 

 who just don't know what they're 

 doing. 



"These birds are still fairly common 

 so they like to gather in large groups 

 for nesting," he says. "That makes them 

 susceptible to disaster." 



Through funding from Sea Grant 

 and other agencies, Parnell and 

 colleagues have done away with at 

 least one danger that these multitudes 

 of birds once faced. 



In the mid-1970s, he and Bob 

 Soots of Campbell University discov- 

 ered that many common colonial 

 waterbirds built their nests on the 

 numerous dredge islands along the Tar 

 Heel coast. 



These islands were the domain of 

 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They 

 frequently dredged navigational 



Jim Parnell 



channels and dumped their spare sand 

 on the islands, sometimes destroying 

 the habitat desired by many of the 

 nesting birds. 



The Corps wanted to stop this 

 destruction, but they didn't know when 

 certain species of birds would be 

 nesting on certain islands. 



Enter Jim Parnell and Bob Soots. 



Through their research, they 

 identified not only the numbers of 

 colonial nesting birds on the North 

 Carolina coast, but they learned when 

 they nest, where they nest and in 

 which habitats the different species 

 thrive. 



The Corps of Engineers was glad 

 to gain this knowledge. Now they use 

 this information and plan their dump- 

 ing and dredging in conjunction with 

 the schedules of nesting waterbirds. 



"It was a natural extension of our 

 research," Parnell says. "My concern 

 had been to institutionalize what we'd 

 been doing in our research, to get 

 established agencies to use the informa- 

 tion." 



The Corps program was so 

 successful, the North Carolina Wildlife 



Photo by C. R Edgerton 



Commission eventually got involved in 

 waterbird management. Through it's 

 non-game species program, the 

 commission began to use Parnell and 

 Soots' research to institute a program 

 aimed specifically at protecting nesting 

 colonies of waterbirds. 



And, the National Audubon Society 

 uses the information in managing its 

 Battery Island refuge at the mouth of 

 the Cape Fear River. One of Parnell's 

 former graduate students manages the 

 refuge. 



"So, both public and private lands 

 are being managed with our research 

 and suggestions," Parnell says. "All this 

 started with our initial Sea Grant work 

 that was funded in the early 1970s." 



But the work doesn't stop here. 



"We still need to learn to manage 

 better," Parnell says. "We need further 

 research on refining our waterbird 

 managing techniques." 



As the coast gets more crowded, 

 management becomes more important," 

 he says. "Now, more than ever, colo- 

 nies of nesting waterbirds are vulner- 

 able. It's up to us to protect them." 



— C.R. Edgerton 



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