Biscayne National Park was established in the 1960's by a small group of
dedicated citizen activists who were very concerned because this whole area was
slated for extensive development and they felt that the land and waters were
very, very special and needed to be protected as a national park.
In the park you can find hundreds of different species of fish and over 200 species of
birds. It includes the northernmost extent of the Florida Keys so we have
over 40 islands in the park. Because we are a water park it really adds to the
visitor experience to see large numbers and diverse species of water birds and
these nesting bird colonies are the source of these birds. These water birds,
because they're the top of the food chain, are pretty much like the canary in
the coal mine, and if their populations start to dip down we'll know that there's
a problem in the ecosystem.
Our office is charged with monitoring vital signs within Biscayne National Park.
Colonial birds were one of those vital signs. The primary colonial nesting bird in
Biscayne is the double-crested cormorant. We also have great blue herons, a color
morph the great white heron, as well as great egrets, some white ibis and little
blue herons as well.
We looked at a variety of ways to do the monitoring and we found that helicopter
was the best way for us. We have a wildlife biologist within the helicopter
who's using a telephoto lens to take photographs. They approach the island
with a very specific pattern and get a complete series of photographs we can
analyze. It can be a bit of a disturbance for the birds, but it's very short. We're
there for minutes, if not seconds. We use a helicopter for a few reasons. One, it's
one of the most accurate ways we can get to see the most birds. We very much
consider the birds and try and be as least disruptive as possible but we
stay long enough for us to get the shots and move slowly across the area. During a
monthly survey we normally take approximately 300 photographs and these
photographs become the actual data. From the photos is what we translate
onto our data sheets, the count that we will use to compare year to year and month
to month. A one hour helicopter ride turns into about 40 hours of work
between the processing, printing, and analyzing and counting. It
takes hours of going through the photographs, circling the nests, and then
doing the counts, just hours of processing of the data. We'll circle
a nest. If it's an active nest we'll circle it with an appropriate color. Yellow
indicates an adult bird on a nest. Magenta indicates chicks are present at the nest
and the cyan color indicates the nest has eggs in it. In addition to the helicopter flights once
a year, we'll do a boat survey and this boat survey allows us to do truthing
where we pick a segment of an island and we take additional photos from the boat
level, so we get a little bit more information and it allows us to verify
helicopter photos. Our office began monitoring in 2009. We've made a consistent
effort to do surveys since then because we realize how valuable this dataset
will be long-term. The only thing we knew about it coming in
was a study from the 1970's. There's been a long gap where we didn't
have any information at all so we're starting that legacy of a long-term data set.
We've identified peak nesting trends for every bird that we monitor so
there's a lot of valuable data that we've collected over time.
One of the birds that we noticed within the park that hadn't been seen before
was the roseate spoonbill which has now been nesting for several years. We think
the roseate spoonbills moving into the park is good news. It shows that the park system, the
ecosystem in the park can support roseate spoonbills in addition to
what's already there.
The park is thrilled to see the roseate spoonbill added as a new colonial nesting bird.
With dedicated staff in the inventory and monitoring network that does
science that the parks may not have the resources to do. Other vital signs
that we monitor in our network include: marine fish, coral reef health, exotic species,
and water quality. We feel it's important to spend our time and energy monitoring
these birds within Biscayne so that we can do our job of preserving these
for future generations. If we can spot a trend that's a problem, we might be able to do
something about it.
Our network, the South Florida/Caribbean Inventory & Monitoring Network, we take
our programs very seriously. All the inventory and monitoring that we do, the
wildlife itself in the parks benefit from it,
the visitors benefit, and also the science is very important.
We think it's a very important mission.