HARKERS ISLAND, N.C., As more homes are built along the coast of North Carolina, waterbirds are finding fewer places to raise their young because they need sandy areas to nest. To save this island for those birds, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have joined forces.
For more than a year, the NCWRC and the Corps of Engineers have been working on a project to fix up Sandbag Island, which is an island where waterbirds nest near Cape Lookout National Seashore. Many types of waterbirds, like American oystercatchers, brown pelicans, and herring gulls, use Sandbag Island as a place to nest.
Representative said that recent storms have caused the island to rapidly erode, reducing its size from about 2 acres in 2019 to less than a tenth of an acre last winter.
The Corps already planned to dredge the nearby canal that connects Harkers Island to the ocean, but it needed a place to store the stuff that it dug up.
The two groups agreed to use a pipeline to move stuff out of the channel and pump it to what was left of Sandbag Island. Corps staff and the dredging contractor put floating turbidity curtains (which look like a shower curtain suspended from pool noodles with weights at the bottom) in the water around the work area to protect nearby submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV), which is important for fisheries and as a place for waterbirds to find food. This kept the sand and water that were being pumped onto the island from getting to the SAV.
Wildlife officials say that within days of the project being finished, two pairs of American oystercatchers had set up areas on the island and were soon building nests.