. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. 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 l
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. 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 ; 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 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 on
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