As a springtime breeze blew gentle waves onto the sandy shore, Red 64 broke out of a speckled egg on Gomez Key, an island barely visible from Cedar Key despite being only a mile away.
Summer came and her tiny, dark gray beak grew into the molten-steel-orange of a mature American Oystercatcher. Yellow-eyed, she searched the shallows for her namesake prey and, finding dozens, quickly ate her fill.
The bird, identified by a red band placed on her leg, has returned to Gomez Key every year since hatching in 2015. She has nurtured nine chicks in eight years, far above her species’ average. She sticks close to Gomez Key throughout the year, and keeps to its shores to breed.
But Red 64 may not have a home for much longer.
Gomez Key and dozens of other shorebird roosts are quickly disappearing as rising sea levels reshape Florida’s Nature Coast. Artificial reefs and conservation purchases, undertaken to save the region’s oyster industry, offer a glimmer of hope for oystercatchers.
Islands underwater
In September and October, thousands of the black and white shellfish eaters from Massachusetts to Georgia take to the skies and trickle into Cedar Key. The city is home to the nation’s greatest wintering concentration of oystercatchers, more than 2,000 strong. It also houses a much smaller, breeding group listed as threatened in Florida. Surging tides impact both groups.
The local sea level has risen nearly 6 inches in Cedar Key since 1992 and, according to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, continues to accelerate at one of the fastest rates in the nation.
The surging waters claimed more than a third of the oystercatcher island nesting area between 1974 and 2016. Derrick Key, the birds’ main nesting site, totally disappeared.
That season, mating pairs rebuilt their nests again and again. A merciless tide washed the shallow, shell-lined holes away each time. Then, for a month, the tides lowered and fuzzy, white-bellied chicks waddled across the sand. Too soon, the tides came rushing back and the rising Gulf swallowed Derrick Key.
Baby oystercatchers, too young to fly, drowned.
“I saw Derrick go underwater,” said Janell Brush, an avian research scientist at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Today, watching trees die, sand erode and oysters disappear from Gomez Key, she feels a distressing déjà vu. “The next major, catastrophic habitat loss in the area is going to be Gomez Key for sure.”
Rising waters affect the wintering population, too. High tides are getting higher, covering oystercatchers’ ideal roosts and forcing them to riskier, tree-covered ones where raccoons or peregrine falcons could lurk.
Higher maximum daily tides contributed to a 7.3% increase in mortality in wintering oystercatchers between 2007 and 2018, according to a study by Brush’s team.
“Even with the decline, survival is still high,” she said, “but we really need to keep our eye on the area.”
A suite of other species, including the federally threatened piping plover and roseate tern, also use Cedar Key’s high-tide roosts. All face the same problem: The low-lying coastal areas most crucial to their survival are also some of the most vulnerable to sea rise and other climate tolls.
Hurricanes and human impacts
The 21-foot Carolina Skiff sprayed saltwater as it sped away from the Cedar Key boat launch. Brush, shorebird biologist Julia Magill and avian research scientist Bobbi Carpenter looked out at a landscape remodeled by Hurricane Helene five months prior.
The hurricane's 12-foot storm surge pummeled offshore islands just as it did homes and businesses in the town.
Hurricane-strengthened currents stripped shoreline and seafloor, depositing the sediments in new shallows. “Dog relocated its beach,” joked Brush, pointing to a sandy bank on Dog Island that didn’t exist before the storm.
“We lost a lot of high-tide roosts,” she said of the three hurricanes to strike Cedar Key within 13 months. “We didn't really gain any new high-tide roosts that we've documented yet.”
Beaches are scarce on the islands surrounding Cedar Key. The few that remain are magnets to shorebirds and humans alike.
The FWC and other partners post signs in shorebird and seabird nesting areas cautioning visitors to avoid the nests, or in some cases entire islands, during this special season. Ignoring them can be fatal for new oystercatchers.
FWC research teams set up game cameras to monitor nests on Gomez Key last year. They were thrilled to see a mating pair of oystercatchers lay their eggs out of reach of rising tides. After a few weeks, when they expected chicks to have hatched, researchers ventured out to Gomez Key to band them.
They waited and waited, but no chicks ever appeared. Instead, they saw the eggs still intact, bleached white by the sun.
When they reviewed the camera footage, the team saw a fishing boat had landed despite posted signs and scared the parents off of their nest. For the eight hours the anglers stayed, the oystercatchers circled the Key, screaming and calling.
The eggs, exposed and un-incubated, never hatched.
Oyster decline and recovery
On the Nature Coast, oyster reefs act as a living blockade, absorbing energy from waves that would otherwise slam into tiny islands. But the commercially important reefs declined by two-thirds from 1982 to 2011 and further after that, according to a 2020 study by University of Florida researchers.
Around 85% of oystercatchers’ breeding habitat loss at Cedar Key happened after 1995, coinciding with oyster decline.
Some researchers are hopeful that reef restoration projects will benefit the birds, too.
“On the Nature Coast, if you stick your toe in the water for long enough, you’ll grow an oyster on it,” said Brush, paraphrasing her FWC colleague Kent Smith. Oyster larvae still float in the water column, searching for a reef to colonize. By carefully sinking limestone and other hard substrates, researchers give so-called “spat” a place to grow.
UF/IFAS researchers finished one such project, the three-mile Lone Cabbage Reef Restoration, in the summer of 2018. By 2022, oysters on the reef were large enough to harvest and oystercatchers foraged on the structure.
The Lone Cabbage project replaced a tiny fraction (3% to 4%) of reef area lost, but other efforts are underway to restore more.
Joe Marchionno, a doctoral candidate at UF, installed 80 reef-restoring panels at Corrigan’s Reef off Cedar Key last summer. The wavy, jute-reinforced cement panels look like ruffle-cut potato chips, their flat profile designed to support shorebird foraging.
Marchionno’s panels survived the season’s hurricanes unscathed, oysters remained intact and oystercatchers returned to forage.
Marchionno’s approach suggests reefs can be designed to the benefit of mollusks and shorebirds alike, but “it’s not something that is going to be an everything solution.” he said.
An island for the birds
As Marchionno works to restore what was lost, other shorebird aficionados scurry to protect what remains.
The American Oystercatcher Working Group, founded in 2001, is a network of nearly 300 members who coordinate research and management efforts throughout the birds’ habitat.
Doris and Patrick Leary, married volunteers turned oystercatcher experts, are two of the group’s most loyal members. Before Patrick Leary, 75, retired from the construction industry, he and his wife, 77, spent their free time counting shorebirds in Northeast Florida on foot, bike and ATV.
In the 1970s, “I made the assumption that somebody from the state or the federal government was out there doing this kind of stuff,” Leary said, “and it was a bit of an eye-opener to find out they weren't.”
The pair kept records, took photos and shared their data with state, federal and international agencies and researchers, who eagerly encouraged their work. “We saw a void,” Leary said.“We saw a need, and it was valued and appreciated.”
They expanded their fieldwork to the Nature Coast, quickly becoming an integral source of oystercatcher data.
Brush started as the first research scientist focused on shorebird and seabird research at FWC’s Research Institute in 2006. “My boss gave me a list of ‘here’s the people you need to talk to about oystercatchers,’” she said, “and he said ‘Pat Leary, if he hasn’t heard about you yet, he will find you.’”
While surveying oystercatchers after Hurricane Helene, the Learys noticed damage to a house on privately owned Cotton Island, offshore of Horseshoe Beach. He reported the damage to the Boston-based homeowner, who said he’d offer up the island for permanent conservation rather than rebuild.
“Where there is tragedy, there is often opportunity,” Brush said. “And Cotton Island is our opportunity.”
FWC is now working with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to acquire the island and remove the house. While oystercatchers haven’t historically nested on Cotton Island, Brush is optimistic that removing predator hideouts will allow the birds to settle in.
“Any habitat enhancement or restoration project to create habitat will succeed because we've got birds just waiting to jump into the breeding population,” she said.
“If we build it, they will come.”
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