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People can impact the habitat quality and quantity of coastal areas in many ways . Even small management efforts to maintain critical habitat can pay off .
” sanderling , and semipalmated plover using the habitats of the Georgia Bight from northeast Florida through the barrier Islands of South Carolina .
Each species and each individual within each species have their own migration timing and destinations , creating their own calendars and maps throughout the year . Many of those maps converge on Coastal South Carolina and Georgia . Like the whimbrel that frequent many parts of the barrier coast during each spring , most shorebirds need a mosaic of habitats during each day and season to meet their biological needs . These include undisturbed places to rest at high tide during the day when feeding areas are flooded with water , safe places to congregate at night to avoid predators , and many large areas of open , intertidal sands and muds to find abundant and readily available food .
with the whimbrel , maintaining a healthy saltmarsh is a good start , but what about the night-roosting needs on the outer barrier sands ? Are we managing those for large numbers of birds at night ? And what are the shorebirds doing in the day when the tide comes in and covers all but the tops of dunes and the tops of the shell rakes out in the marsh ? Are those sites free from disturbance ?
Maintaining or restoring depleted and / or declining shorebird populations requires using the best available information to understand the causes for population imperilment and taking an action or a set of actions to address the root of the problem . We refer to ‘ management ’ as the sum of the measures needed to reverse negative influences on shorebirds and the habitats that support them at the local , regional , national , and international scales .
Short-billed dowitcher defending a patch of sand rich in horseshoe crab eggs . A large proportion of two short-billed Dowitcher subspecies “ stage ” in South Carolina and Georgia before continuing on to the Boreal zones of eastern and central Canada .
An adult whimbrel getting plump on fiddler crabs during a long stopover in the marshes of Georgia .
People can impact the habitat quality and quantity of coastal areas in many ways . Even small management efforts to maintain critical habitat can pay off . Preserving the integrity of habitat quality and quantity for shorebirds can be complex , but understanding the needs of each species throughout each phase of its annual migration is a good way to start . As we see
Working within the goals of larger scale conservation strategies strengthens local initiatives . Upland , freshwater wetland , and coastal systems all mandate different management approaches to provide the resources to support shorebirds in full life-cycle conservation efforts . Managing for shorebirds often means creating the local site-level habitat conditions most conducive to supporting the structural and biological needs for regional priority species . For longdistance migrants as well as short or non-migratory shorebird
28 Naturally Kiawah