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OBX article, JLFBC, Green Swamp, yard birds



Hi Carolinabirders,

Below is an article my mother sent along about highway 12, the Outer
Banks, and the new inlet through Hatteras Island that has inspired so much
conversation here lately. I imagine it's probably the same one Tom Joyce
just mentioned, but this way you don't have to give the NYT your e-mail
address.

For a big change, I did some actual birding this weekend! It started
Friday, when I noticed a warbler outside our bedroom window. Grabbed
binocs and got outside to find it was a Chestnut-Sided. First new yard
bird since the spring. A flycatcher in the old mulberry tree turned out to
be an immature Eastern Wood-Pewee, despite my attempts to make it an
Empid.

Saturday, with Airlie and her aunt (visiting from Atlanta) at Airlie's
baby shower, I took Uncle Jim (Colton) with me for the Jordan Lake Fall
Bird Count. We started at Horton's Pond, actually the adjacent shore of
the lake, where we tallied few migrants other than a pair of Blue-gray
Gnatcatchers. Also Camphorweed, a plant I haven't seen many times in the
wild around here. Then the R&T Grill for breakfast, and then Ebenezer
Point. Fog was so thick we could barely see the water, so we turned our
attention to migrants. We didn't see nearly as many as Mike Skakuj did the
next day, but did tally a Rose-breasted Grosbeak, a trio of Scarlet
Tanagers, and a Palm Warbler. The fog lifted around 10:30, at which point
we had our best birds of the day: about 60 terns! At least a dozen were
Caspian, and a dozen more Common. I confirmed 3 as Forster's, and assume
the rest were also mostly these species, though the ones which came closer
to the point all resolved to Common, so maybe not... After lunch from the
R&T, we finished up with Horton's Pond, one Great Egret on the opposite
shore and our only hummingbird of the day nectaring on Jewelweed the high
points of a couple of very slow hours. Actually, the real high point was
probably an Eastern Kingsnake basking in a shattered corner of the dam.

We ran into Norm Budnitz at lunchtime. He reported a Kentucky Warbler near
Patsy Bailey's house, and a possible Sandwich Tern from Vista Point.

A few more migrants in the yard when I returned home: the Chestnut-sided
again, a couple of Scarlet Tanagers, a Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, and one
White- and two Red-eyed Vireos. And 2-3 more Pewees.

Spent Sunday TAing a field trip to the Green Swamp and vicinity. Lake
Waccamaw was spectacularly dead, not even a Great Blue Heron! Apparently
the hurricane blew things away, not toward, there. Green Swamp was quiet,
as usual; we saw a Red-cockaded Woodpecker nest tree but no inhabitants.
Finished at Fort Fisher, where the woods had no birds and BILLIONS of
voracious mosquitoes! The beach had a number of Sandwich Terns, a few
Royals, and at least one Forster's, lots of Laughing Gulls and one
Herring.

Good birding,

Josh


Joshua S. Rose
Duke University
Department of Biology (Zoology, R.I.P.)

jsr6@duke.edu
http://www.duke.edu/~jsr6/

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 17:22:23 EDT

Nature Tries to Shift Outer Banks but Man Keeps Shoveling It Back
 By CORNELIA DEAN

CHAPEL HILL, N.C., Sept. 21  Nature endowed the Outer Banks of North
Carolina with great beauty long ribbons of sand with Atlantic Ocean waves
on one side and marsh-fringed bays and sounds on the other.

 But the people who flocked to the Banks have been interfering with this
fragile natural landscape for decades, and the infrastructure they have
built in particular the highway that runs along the islands that make up
the Outer Banks and possibly the artificial dune that lines their beaches
has diminished the islands' natural ability to survive a storm like
Hurricane Isabel and recover from its effects, geologists say.

So, as engineers contemplate eroded beaches, a broken highway and a new
inlet cutting across Hatteras Island, they are struggling to find a way to
restore the Outer Banks tourism infrastructure while respecting the
demands of its landscape. In particular, they are looking for a way to
maintain State Highway 12, the main road, while allowing the islands to
shift, as they would naturally, in response to episodes of heavy weather
and long-term rising seas.

 That will not be easy. The Outer Banks is really only filaments of sand
running across ancient river channels, relics of the last ice age, when
sea levels were far lower and the coastline was hundreds of miles farther
out than it is today, said William A. Birkemeier, chief of the Army Corps
of Engineers Field Research Facility at Duck, N.C., an Outer Banks village
about 60 miles north of where the hurricane made landfall.

 Monitoring, measuring and other research efforts undertaken before,
during and immediately after the storm will eventually provide useful
guidance for coastal engineers, Mr. Birkemeier said. But the problems are
pressing now.

 In this era of rising sea levels, the Outer Banks is trying to migrate
inland. Much of this migration is accomplished in storms like the latest
one, when sand washes across the island from sea to sound. Marsh plants
colonize the sound, the beach ecosystem colonizes the marsh, and the
island gradually shifts position. This is the process coastal geologists
say has been hindered on much of the Outer Banks.

 Though it looks natural, the dune that runs for 50 miles along the Banks
was man-made, created out of wood and brush and sand by the Depression-era
Civilian Conservation Corps. Some coastal geologists say the dune has
functioned as a kind of sea wall, blocking much of the overwash of sand
from beach to marsh. Today only a major storm carries much sand across the
island, they say.

 Without the dune, the beaches of the Outer Banks "would be overwashed
constantly," said Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., a Duke University geologist who is
famous in North Carolina for his advocacy of letting nature take its
course on the coast. Also, he said evidence suggested that the presence of
the dune altered wave action such that the slope of the beach in the surf
zone steepened, which, in turn, would cause waves to strike it with
greater force.

 Engineers like Mr. Birkemeier and some coastal geologists are not
convinced. "I don't think the artificial dune has made the island more
vulnerable," said Rob Young, an associate professor of geology at Western
Carolina University, who studied with Dr. Pilkey and who was out on the
Banks as the sun rose on Friday, the day after the storm.

 "Primarily what that dune did was provide a false sense of security and
put off the inevitable, Dr. Young said. "The real danger is Highway 12."

 There is wide agreement that efforts to keep the road in place have
harmed the islands of the Outer Banks. When heavy storms bury it in sand,
the sand is typically swept up and carried back onto the beach in crude
piles. The marsh, deprived of this sand, shrinks as sea levels rise.
Because the islands are so flat in some places, geologists say, their
natural elevation is only about three feet even a small rise in water
level can make drastic inroads on both marsh and beach. And in places the
islands have narrowed sharply, to the point that in some spots the walk
from ocean to sound is 100 yards or fewer.

 There are parts of the seashore, Dr. Young said, that are where they are
"only to keep Highway 12 in place."

 "If Highway 12 was not there, these portions would be able to migrate
back naturally," he said. "They might not have giant dunes, but they would
be functioning ecosystems. Because Highway 12 has to stay where it is,
every time Highway 12 is overwashed it is scraped back up into hideous,
debris-filled dunes. And they are getting larger and larger, and after
this storm they are going to be extremely large."

 Overwashed in other storms, Highway 12 actually broke up in spots this
time, as it was undermined and collapsed. So engineers must decide how and
where to rebuild. Stretches of the highway, so important to the Banks that
its mileposts function as addresses, have been moved inland before, but
now the road builders are bumping up against the marshes and duck ponds
that line the sound.

 But as Dr. Pilkey notes, "they have no way to move back along most of
this without getting into the wetlands and the duck ponds."

 Michael A. Turchy, a biologist with the North Carolina Department of
Transportation, said the department was considering building a causeway
that would run behind the islands. But this would be a complicated
engineering effort, and its environmental effects might be substantial.
Anyway, Mr. Turchy added: "In looking at what happened with Isabel, you
have to wonder what's going to happen in the next storm. A future causeway
could be vulnerable to future storms."

 Just as pressing is the decision about what to do between the villages of
Hatteras and Frisco, where the latest storm cut a substantial inlet
through the barrier island. Normally, inlets like this close on their own,
but this one is so big - it was 150 yards wide on Friday - Dr. Young said
that it may be a permanent feature.

 As a result, the village of Hatteras is its own small island now, cut off
except for the ferry that runs west to the small island of Ocracoke, where
other ferries take more than two hours to reach Cedar Island or Swan
Quarter, small towns on the quiet western shore of Pamlico Sound.

 Temporarily, Mr. Turchy said, the North Carolina Department of
Transportation is considering altering the Hatteras-Ocracoke ferry run to
include stops across the new inlet at Frisco. But a dock would have to be
built there, he said. "We're not sure how long that would take. It hasn't
been done."

 Also, it is not clear that this kind of ferry service could accommodate
tourism traffic or allow timely evacuation in future storms.

 Engineers might also consider filling the inlet. That is what was done
after the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962, still the benchmark for bad weather
on the Atlantic Coast, when an inlet was cut at Buxton, not far from the
new inlet.

 "It was very difficult to fill it in," Dr. Pilkey said. "It took several
tries. You really have to marshal all your forces and throw it in all at
once, otherwise it gets washed out."

 The new inlet is the first to form on the Banks since then. There are
only two other inlets, Oregon Inlet and Ocracoke Inlet on Pamlico and
Albemarle Sounds. "There have been more in the past," Dr. Young said. "We
should not be too surprised that the Outer Banks could easily accommodate
a third or even a fourth inlet that would remain open."

 Dr. Young recalled that an inlet opened on Pawley's Island, S.C., during
Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

 "That inlet was nothing compared to this," he said. "They closed it, but
it wasn't easy. This one is way bigger."

 He said engineers might want to bulldoze sand from either side of the
inlet to fill it, "but the adjacent portions of the barrier island have
lost their sand they are just three feet in elevation. There is no sand.
It's in the sound, offshore, but not on the beach."

 As a result, he said, he feared there would be pressure to bridge the
inlet.

 "I hope they take a deep breath and don't rush into making a decision,"
he said. "I am sure there is some panic because Hatteras village is
isolated right now. I am worried there is going to be tremendous political
and emotional pressure to do something fast like build a bridge right
away."

 That, he said, would be "another example where the National Seashore will
be sacrificed to create infrastructure; because the shoreline does not
need a bridge."