(sanderlings chirping)
(music)
- NARRATOR: There are 30 or so different species of birds
that spend most of their days along Texas beaches and bays.
From the Greater Yellowlegs, and American Avocet,
to the Piping Plover,
these are all shorebirds.
(music, bird calls)
But with both development and beachgoers on the rise,
the birds face serious challenges.
From a loss of nesting habitat,
to the daily struggle for space on the beach.
(Sanderlings chirping)
But these birds have allies,
- And the Sanderlings are really aggressive.
- NARRATOR: There are sentinels of the shoreline
all along the coast.
- The birds have picked through a lot of this.
- NARRATOR: These are all folks you'll meet...
- Looks like we've got a banded plover down by the water's edge.
- NARRATOR: ... who are working to protect these Texas
treasures collectively known as shorebirds.
- TONY: It's somewhat repetitive, but here we go so
Sanderling, Sanderling,
Laughing gull, um,
Ruddy Turnstone little bird there.
Sanderling.
- NARRATOR: For three decades Tony Amos has counted the number
of shorebirds along a seven mile stretch of beach on
Mustang Island.
- Sanderling, two, four, six, eight, forty, two, four,
six, eight, fifty, two, four, six, eight, sixty.
You've heard of addictions right.
...nine, ten, eleven twelve.
I'm addicted to counting things.
- NARRATOR: Using an old Hewlett Packard computer from
the 1980's, he's counting birds and people.
- So we have people two, dogs, two.
- NARRATOR: Tony's study looks at the boom in beach goers,
and their impact on the birds.
- They are constantly disturbed, just by strolling on
the beach, and it's a day to day thing that the birds
have to endure.
- NARRATOR: Many of these birds have migrated thousands of miles
from their nesting grounds in the Arctic,
and once they're here they need to rest or loaf.
- TONY: They're not feeding they're just there,
they are often in communities of mixed group and they need to
loaf just the same way we need to relax every now and again.
(dog barks)
See that, I hate that!
- NARRATOR: Unleashed dogs are another big stressor
for the birds and for Tony.
- These are migratory species, they are actually protected.
Um, the dog is chasing them and disturbing them in a
very aggressive way, and some of these birds at certain times
of the year have just crossed a whole ocean and they
are absolutely exhausted.
Hello, you know you're dog should be on a leash.
He's chasing the birds, and these birds are migrants
and have come in for...
- There's no other place for....
- Well I'm not unsympathetic to what he needs,
but it's also the law.
- NARRATOR: As Tony's research wraps up his 30th year,
he continues to keep a close eye on the threatened Piping Plover.
- I need to see if they've got bands.
- NARRATOR: Which spends over half of the year
here on the Texas Coast.
- TONY: He goes along and he moves his foot on the wet sand,
and then he pecks over here, and then he moves this foot
and he pecks over here.
And I've never quite decided why he does that, maybe he can
detect these animals underneath his foot, but it's remarkable.
So they are amazing birds, well worth preserving,
and if we don't preserve it, it's another fascinating thing
and part of nature that we will lose.
(music)
- NARRATOR: Like the Piping Plover, all shorebirds have
voracious appetites as they store up fat reserves
for their yearly migration.
And many of the tiny invertebrates the birds
feed on live in a seaweed called Sargassum.
- Sargassum is a brown algae.
It's got everything that they can use.
- NARRATOR: John Adams and other biologists want to change
the mentality of what a beach should look like.
While this is the typical postcard shot....
(Sanderling calls)
....this is what the birds need.
- There's a nudibranch right there, that's a mollusk
that doesn't have a shell.
There's a shrimp right there, can you see him.
It's just a whole ecosystem right here....
- NARRATOR: The idea is to leave the seaweed,
as opposed to scraping it off with a front loader,
(waves and Willet calls)
And that's just the case at Padre Island National Seashore,
south of Corpus Christi.
- MARK BIEL: Padre Island National Seashore protects one
of the longest stretches of undeveloped barrier islands
in the world.
(waves)
We have Sanderlings, we have Long-billed Curlews,
we have the Piping Plovers.
We have Wilson's Plovers, a Ruddy Turnstone is
another species, and you see that running around
in the Sargassum quite a bit.
But the Sargassum plays an important role for these birds
that call this place home.
(waves gently rolling)
- NARRATOR: Further down the coast at South Padre Island,
a beach city that survives on tourism, they too have changed
their attitude about seaweed.
- We are taking efforts to work more with Mother Nature.
- NARRATOR: They use the Sargassum to prevent erosion.
- This is a good example here of one of the areas
that we are trying to restore the dunes by using Sargassum
deposits that have been washing up on shore.
- NARRATOR: And at South Padre, gone are the practices of
beach clearing every day.
- I think that our tourists are going to appreciate
that fact once their educated and know why we're doing this,
why we're not grooming those beaches every day.
(waves and Sanderlings call)
- NARRATOR: Here and elsewhere coastal cities are changing the
image of what a typical Texas beach should look like.
- JOHN: It's a sales package, a change in perception,
the tourists don't ask that they scrape up all the pine needles
in the national forest, or they don't ask them to mow
all the grass in the meadow at Yellowstone, why would they
ask to remove the Sargassum from the beach.
(thunder and high winds)
- REPORTER: Ike slammed into the Texas coast early this morning
and now the search rescue and recovery begins....
- NARRATOR: In 2008 Texas beaches were hammered
by Hurricane Ike, destroying homes and habitat.
Not only displacing people but shorebirds as well.
- What we've been able to find is that a number of the birds
that were located along the upper Texas coast
where it was severely impacted have in fact moved
further down the coast, south.
(ATV starts and drives off)
- NARRATOR: Funded by Texas Parks and Wildlife,
Ben Wardwell is searching the beaches of the upper coast
on the lookout for Plovers...
- Here we go, I think he's down by the water.
This is another one of our common winter residents here,
this is a Black-bellied Plover.
(Black-bellied Plover call)
This project I'm working on right now is studying a group of
birds called the sand plovers, which include the
Wilson's Plover, the Snowy Plover, and Piping Plover
as the main focus of our survey.
- NARRATOR: Ben discovered that the hurricane actually
had some positive effects, as it created new habitat.
(bird call)
- BEN: One thing I'm seeing after the hurricane is a lot of
new tidal cuts have opened where backwater areas that initially
were isolated, now have cuts that reach all the way to the
Gulf providing an intermingling zone of fresh and salt water
which is highly productive for shorebirds.
Any and all efforts we make particularly here on their
wintering grounds are gonna have a positive and prolonged effect
on their ability to reestablish themselves as a species.
(music)
- NARRATOR: Tony's study on Mustang Island
and Ben's survey of plovers have one common thread.
No matter the species, Shorebirds here in Texas
need their space.
- One of the things we can do here on the coast to turn it
around is be more aware of what their habitat needs are
and just be respectful of them.
- TONY: There is a way perhaps of being aware, I think many
people are really oblivious to birds, they are such a part of
the background noise if you like, that people don't
really notice them.
So I'd like people to be more aware, maybe step around
them for a little bit, take a look for a while.
(waves crashing on shore)