Posted on January 16, 2023
Georgia’s coast draws in tourists year-round, but some of the state beaches’ biggest fans are the migrating shorebirds that make Georgia their go-to rest stop each year.
Scientists and advocates argue that keeping Georgia’s beaches preserved and in good shape is key to maintaining shorebird populations and ensuring their health for the future in the face of climate change.
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Ray Chandler, an ornithologist and professor of biology at Georgia Southern University, has been researching a few of these travelers with his students on Cumberland Island. He works most closely with two types of shorebirds: the Wilson’s plover and the piping plover.
The two birds show different sides of how migrating shorebirds utilize Cumberland and other beaches along the Georgia coast. Chandler said the piping plover is a winter resident hailing from the Northeast and Great Lakes region, but can be seen really from July through April, spending a large swathe of their year on the coast. On the other hand, the Wilson’s plover breeds in Georgia during the summer on the less disturbed barrier islands.
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“Georgia has done a pretty good job of protecting barrier islands, so we have a lot of coastal beaches and therefore good habitat for those birds,” Chandler said.
Undisturbed beaches, meaning those without development or too much human and pet activities, and their adjoining mudflats are prime shorebird territory. After flying hundreds to thousands of miles, they use the beaches and mudflats to find food like small ocean invertebrates and lay their nests on the sandy shores.
To see where birds have migrated through coastal Georgia, visit the National Audubon Society’s interactive Bird Migration Explorer.
Climate change squeezes habitats
Like most wildlife, the most immediate threats to shorebirds include habitat loss, beach development and habitat degradation — meaning the space is less useful or bird-friendly due to human use, pollution or dogs.
But on a larger level, Chandler said climate change is also a real threat to shorebirds in the long run. Sea-level rise and increasingly common flooding are changing the landscape of the coastal areas that shorebirds depend on, disrupting how and where they get their food as well as causing beach erosion. Beyond that, Chandler said that sea-level rise and flooding can be devastating for breeding.
It doesn’t take much to wash away a shorebird nest. Many of these birds don’t build the intricate woven baskets we are used to seeing in trees. Instead, Chandler’s shorebirds tend to take a minimalist approach: a little indentation in the sand, and maybe a couple of sticks added that do more for vibe than they do structure.
On Cumberland, Chandler and his students looked at nesting success and found that on this high-quality beach territory, plovers were holding their own against some of the regular threats. It’s not common to lose eggs: Shorebirds, like other beach-nesting creatures, are used to dangers like flooding and predators snacking on their offspring and surprisingly re-nest in the same locations despite repeated failures.
“But the key is if those floods begin to become more regular, then you lose nesting attempts more often,” Chandler said. “That’s when it starts to become an issue.”
Keeping undisturbed beach fronts as hospitable as possible for the birds is important, Chandler said. They undertake long, energetically demanding migrations and when they arrive they have young to feed, cold winter days to endure and must rest up for the next leg of their journeys.
For him, stopping the decline is important not only ecologically, but economically for tourism: “These are amazing, fascinating creatures with incredible life cycles, mind-boggling migrations.” Chandler said. “They’re attractive. They’re interesting. They’re fun to watch. They’re just valuable fellow travelers, and it just doesn’t make sense to not have them around in our world.”
Conservation efforts in the works
Conserving Georgia’s beaches is a complex task that the coast has innumerable groups working on. But Manomet, a nonprofit finding scientific solutions to improve ecosystem health and human communities, has been focusing on shorebirds specifically since 2018 with its Georgia Bight Shorebird Conservation Initiative.
Abby Sterling, the initiative’s director, said that Georgia’s coast supports up to 400,000 shorebirds each year, an internationally recognized landscape for its importance in the hemisphere-crossing journeys the birds make. To understand the interaction between Georgia’s coasts and shorebirds, Sterling said Manomet is helping shore up cooperation with groups like the Georgia Department of Natural Resources to help with monitoring and research efforts.
One of the ways Sterling said Manomet is working to help shorebirds is by focusing its efforts on alleviating recreational disturbance. With areas that get lots of human visitors, Sterling said her organization is working on education and outreach with communities to raise awareness about what areas are important for shorebirds during different times of year depending on migration cycles and the birds’ needs.
“With increased sea level, increased storm events and unprecedented high tides that we’ve been seeing more and more of, shorebird habitat is frequently lost or inundated,” Sterling said. Given these challenges, she said reducing other obstacles is key, and since Georgia already has significant undeveloped and quality shorelines the state is positioned to tackle that challenge.
