Away

It is hard to be away from home and family when I have to be. And there has been more than usual of that lately. 

This time I was leading a three day all staff retreat on the eastern shore of Virginia. 

At Mutton Hunk Fen Natural Area Preserve. 

At Savage Neck Dunes Natural  Area Preserve. 

(Awwww. Ain't em cute. Wuttle hogna babies.)

Wreck Island Natural Area Preserve

I (dad) got to go out to Wreck Island last week, one of the Preserves managed by the program I work for.  An involved long day trip to get there early, via car and boat travel, but so worth it.  This place is completely void of any infrastructure.  You look to the horizon and see nothing but water.  And you look around and see…

scrapes (nests are just scrapes in the sand) where Black Simmers lay their eggs

See them there again?

Greater black-backed gull nests

Herring gull nests

Fellow staff...

We have been developing some data collection apps for mobile devices.  Here we are collecting data for Piping Plover, a federally threatened species that breeds on Wreck.

vastness.  mmmmm...

aaahhhhhh...

A shell that was a fish in its past life.

Black skimmer colony waiting for us to leave their nesting area.  Our boat in the background.

Skimmers returning to nests (scrapes).

mmmmmmm… more vastness.

One of our biologists looking out over hundreds of nesting pair of brown pelican.  And the next several shots are of them.  We were literally walking amidst these massive throne-like nests as if in a gallery...

We were there to census nesting pairs of various shorebirds and gulls, test out the mobile data collection and just take in a beautiful intact coastal ecosystem.  And if you ever want to see some sea level rise evidence, go to a remote barrier island.  At one point we stopped at a buoy that in 1990 was at the north end of the island.  Today, 25 years later, that bouy is a quarter mile from the sand, out in the middle of the channel.


Very fortunate to have been able to do this...