The beleaguered Venus flytrap, one of the Carolinas’ claims to scientific fame, may be on the way to a better, more protected future.

The relatively small, carnivorous plant (Dionaea muscipula) that inhabits increasingly fewer spots within southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina is being considered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for endangered or threatened status. Such a designation, its fans hope, would bring it a federally backed recovery plan that mandates periodic prescribed burns, protection of habitat in the midst of rapid coastal development and protection from poachers.

Twenty-six of those fans, including some of the Southeast’s most prominent botanists, petitioned the wildlife service back in 2016 for the “endangered” designation.

They were gratified in late December 2017 to learn that their petition, rather than being denied as a previous petition was, is being taken under review.

The agency has promised to evaluate both threats to the plant and efforts to counter them and is inviting the public to provide additional information at www.regulations.gov. Docket No. FWS-R4-ES-2017-0041 must be entered in the Search field. Comments can also be made in writing, using the docket number in the address, to Public Comments Processing at the agency’s office in Falls Church, Virginia.

Snap, and You’re History

The flytrap’s habit of turning insect visitors into meals has excited interest among scientists and laypeople as far back as the 1700s.

It looks like a plant, absorbs moisture like a plant, even conducts photosynthesis like a plant – but it traps and digests live prey like an animal.

Hapless spiders and ants are among those insects that, when they repeatedly touch a series of hairs on the inside of green-red leaves, find the leaves closing tightly over them. The “snap trap” reaction, which can take less than a second, traps them within a sort of “stomach” formed by the leaves, where enzymes start digesting them.

Charles Darwin, enamored of the plants, ordered them, begged them from friends, and tried to get them to react to non-animal materials like flour and water. Trying in vain to establish an evolutionary link to the animal kingdom, he pronounced the plant “one of the most wonderful in the world.”

The plant, which only grows naturally within 100 miles of Wilmington, sets up housekeeping in nutrient-poor soil, and scientists think that its taste for meat is an ingenious way to supplement its diet.

Its fame has long since spread beyond the scientific community, and that’s one factor leading to its presently diminished numbers. Some consider it the inspiration for the monstrous Audrey in the “Little Shop of Horrors” film.

The plants grow well in cultivation, and for years, poaching them for sale as novelties has reached the level of “a cottage industry,” said Roger Shew of the North Carolina Nature Conservancy. Shew, a geology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and his wife Dale have been studying flytraps in the Conservancy’s Brunswick County Green Swamp Preserve.

Poached plants bring from a dime to a quarter apiece, said Angie Carl, the Conservancy’s coastal fire and restoration manager. They’re sold to mom-and-pop stores, flea markets and the like.

If you want a flytrap for your home, this is one time where it isn’t wise to shop local, Carl said. “The place to buy is Walmart or the big-box stores. They’re actually getting them (legally) from tissue culture.”

Recently, the North Carolina General Assembly, which in 2005 adopted the flytrap as the state’s carnivorous plant, took poaching out of the “misdemeanor” category, in which thieves were fined as little as $50, and declared it a felony. Two of the state’s superior courts have since weighed in with one jail sentence and two cases of hefty monetary punishment.

One man involved in poaching 970 plants from the Holly Shelter Game Land in Pender County was sentenced to from six months to 17 months’ jail time in 2016. A theft of 1,000 plants from Brunswick County’s Orton Plantation in 2015 led to nearly $2,000 in court costs, fines and fees for one man, $500 for another. In both cases, the plants were saved and replanted.

In 2017, after the Pender County jail sentence had been levied in mid-2016, Roger Shew saw poaching in his research plots drop. “Only six of 18 had some degree of poaching,” he said. Beforehand, in early 2016, it was 12 of 18.

Not the Biggest Problem

Poachers are not the flytrap’s biggest enemy, though, said Shew and the petitioners for endangered status. Ahead of them come destruction of habitat and lack of periodic fire, which clears their boggy savannas of the grass that will shade them into oblivion if left unchecked.

The Nature Conservancy’s Carl said there are now only a handful of places where the flytrap has a sizable population, and they’re all in the hands of protective organizations: the military’s Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune; the conservancy-managed Green Swamp Preserve; the Croatan National Forest in Carteret County; and the state’s Holly Shelter Game Land, which is managed by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.

It’s in other southeastern counties, which historically had only scattered populations of flytraps, that their loss is most apparent. Looking at a map, Carl can tick off counties where flytraps once had a presence, but no more: “Duplin, Robeson, Lenoir” … and so on.

Donald M. Waller, professor of botany and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the chief author of the petition, said that the population sites still around “are in Fort Bragg and hugging the coast. Those in between are not there.”

In 1968 there were 259 sites in 21 counties, he said. Now it’s down to 12 counties and 179 sites. “We’ve lost essentially almost half from a generation ago.”

Petitioners besides Waller include Sir Peter Crane, a former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London.

With flytraps in short supply for scientific study, Darwin once asked a friend to approach the Kew director “and ask him whether he could lend me a plant.” He’d return the plant with some alterations, he said. “I should require to gather and dissect some leaves.”

Some of the other petitioners include Robert Peet, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill professor of biology; John Randall, director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill; Peter Raven, former president of the Missouri Botanical Garden; Alan Weakley, director of the UNC Herbarium; Peter White, UNC professor and executive director of the American Public Gardens Association; and William Morris, Duke University biology professor.

This month, a delegation from the group is set to visit southeastern North Carolina to see the plants for themselves and to see, Waller said, if there was anything they could do for the plant while awaiting USFWS action. The visits set for May 20-22 include Fort Bragg, the Green Swamp Preserve, Shaken Creek Savanna Nature Preserve in Onslow and Pender counties and Holly Shelter Game Land in Pender County.

Friends Are Off-Limits

Even though no special link has been pinned down between the flytrap and the animal kingdom, scientists think the plant still has a lot to teach them.

Research at North Carolina State University, in which scientists from USFWS and the UNC Botanical Garden collaborated, revealed earlier this year that the flytraps don’t eat the insects that pollinate them.

They have no compunction about gobbling up a spider but say “no thanks” to their most common pollinators, a green sweat bee, a checkered beetle, and the notch-tipped flower longhorned beetle.

Researchers theorized that these pollinators, all of whom can fly, visit only the plant’s white flowers, which soar above the deadly snap trap below. It’s the creepy-crawlies that get caught.

Although, says their paper, published in the American Naturalist, it may be that different parts of the plant give off different scents or enticing chemicals. “There is still a lot to learn about these plants and their pollinators,” said Rebecca Irwin, NCSU professor and co-author of the study.

Their fellow scientists hope a U.S. Fish and Wildlife designation will help them do just that. “Around the world there are scientists who have done research on this plant that care deeply about preserving it for future generations,” said Waller.

Learn More

• Petition to list Venus flytrap as threatened or endangered

BATTERY ISLAND — When you see large white birds with red, curved beaks and red legs wading at lakes, golf courses, even backyard ponds in southeastern North Carolina this time of year, you’re seeing extreme parenting in action.

What’s attracting the white ibises, many of them part of a 10,164-pair nesting colony on the 100-acre Battery Island near Southport, are freshwater crayfish and minnows.

It’s not their own bellies the birds are trying to feed. It’s all those demanding mouths at home, which can be miles away from where the adults are probing in the shallows.

Unlike chicks of herons, oystercatchers and other shore birds that depend on close-to-home crabs, mussels and clams, baby ibises can’t tolerate salty food.

Just as human parents humor their infants’ dietary restrictions, the adult ibises scout out freshwater areas, like Lake Waccamaw 40 miles away in Columbus County, which have ample crayfish and then spend the summer winging back and forth to the coast with their prizes. Both males and females forage.

“If you sit on Highway 133, south of Winnabow and north of Shallotte, you can watch ibis fly over all morning long, flock after flock,” said Walker Golder, director of Audubon’s Atlantic Coast Flyway strategy.

The distinctive-looking birds started appearing in North Carolina, specifically Battery Island, in the 1960s, said James Parnell, professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

They’ve nested on the state-owned, Audubon-managed island at the mouth of the Cape Fear River nearly every year since then. Their numbers have grown until they’re probably one of the largest colonies in the United States, said Lindsay Addison, Audubon coastal biologist. The colony, she said, “is of global importance.”

In the first half of the 20^th century, white ibis were considered Florida birds, their reputation enhanced by dazzling nature films.

“They’re one of the species that made the Everglades famous,” said Addison. “Billowing clouds of birds.”

“They’ve just gradually been moving north the last 50-60 years,” said Parnell. “It may have to do with the warming trend.”

When they swooped down on Battery Island, where their white bodies make the ibis-covered yaupon and red cedar look like flower-bedecked magnolias in the summer, they brought with them the puzzle of their foraging habits.

Scientists asked, “Why do the ibis pass up great foraging habitat to fly so far inland?” recalled Golder. Adult ibises eat fiddler crabs and other salt-marsh crustaceans, as well as fish.

“They’re generalists,” said Addison. “I’ve seen them eat water snakes.”

With plenty of food close to home, there had to be another reason they were traveling inland, especially during nesting season. That’s a time, Golder said, when “their attention is just focused on raising the chicks.”

The answer, discovered by researcher Keith Bildstein at the Belle W. Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences near Georgetown, South Carolina, is that the chicks’ salt glands don’t develop until they’re 5 to 6 weeks old, nearly ready to fly.

In Bildstein’s experiment, “Those fed salty prey lost weight and died,” Golder said.

Once that was discovered, a second question was: Where do they go to forage?

In protecting birds, it’s as important to know where they forage as where they nest, Golder said.

So, in the late 1980s, Golder, who was writing a master’s thesis on the birds, teamed up with the pilot of a small plane to find out.

The two took off at first light, headed for Battery Island. “We circled and picked up a random group that was leaving the colony in the morning,” Golder recalled.

Since the plane flew faster than the birds, whose top speed is thought to be 30 mph, it flew in large circles above them. “We were spiraling out.” And since they didn’t want to scare the birds, they flew 1,000 feet above.

The birds didn’t seem spooked by the plane, and after reaching Lake Waccamaw, they descended into its swamps where, Golder said, “They probe around till they feel food and then they snap it out. Their bills are real sensitive to touch.”

Waccamaw State Park Superintendent Toby Hall said the birds couldn’t have found a better place. In the 1760s, famed botanist John Bartram said of the 9,000-acre wooded lake: “I think it is the pleasantest place that ever I saw in my life.”

A Carolina Bay, the lake is full of bream, Hall said, and has species of fish, mussels and snails found nowhere else in the world. “The grass beds that are out in the shallows of the lake, we call them bream beds.”

They are, he said, “a buffet” for wading birds.

He typically sees the ibis on the largely undeveloped southwestern side of the lake. It’s a good place for them because there’s not much boating or other human activity there, he added.

Not all the Battery Island ibis head for Waccamaw, however. In two seasons of tailing the birds by plane and observing them on the ground, Golder found that many go to Bald Head Island. So many, in fact, that a lake there has been named Ibis Lake.

“A great gathering spot for ibis; they feed in the lake, rest around the lake,” he said. Others fan out through rural areas of Brunswick County and into New Hanover County around Wilmington.

“I saw a flock in Brunswick County last week in a soybean field,” said Parnell. “I presume they’re getting grubs and worms.” Since they have no interest in seeds – only live prey – they present no danger to the crop.

A favorite sight from the Southport waterfront is the birds heading back to Battery Island in the evenings. They often fly in V formation – “that’s an efficient way to fly,” Golder said.

Over land, they’ll catch thermals, columns of air rising vertically as the sun warms the ground, and spiral upward, then break out of the thermal and glide.

Standing on the Southport waterfront, “you’ll see them hit that last thermal over the mainland, and glide onto the island,” Golder said.

When the chicks fledge, they are bundles of brown feathers over white underparts; they don’t molt into the white feathers of an adult until after their first year. They start learning to fly in the marshes of Brunswick County.

Adults keep feeding them as long as two months after they fledge, and many of the adults and young birds will remain in the state during fall and winter, said Parnell. “As our winters have gotten warmer, we’re seeing ibis all year now.”

There are ibis now all up the North Carolina coast and as far north as southern Virginia.

Audubon knows exactly how many are on Battery Island, which is off-limits to visitors, because they, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and volunteers conduct a painstaking ground count of nests every three years.

“You have to clamber and crawl. You can’t knock into anything; chances are each shrub has an ibis nest,” said Addison.

The current 10,164 pairs are 2,115 more than the 8,049 pairs in 2014, but not a record. The North American Breeding Bird Survey shows that, continent-wide, white ibis numbers went up 4 percent from 1966 to 2015.

“In North Carolina, they’re doing well. They have good nesting habitat, good natural areas for foraging,” said Addision.

Plus extra-attentive adults who’ll go the extra mile, or miles, to see that a new generation of ibises gets a good start in life.

Learn More

• Audubon North Carolina
• Important Bird Areas: Battery Island

CAPE FEAR RIVER — The only thing that American shad, striped bass, and Atlantic and shortnose sturgeon want in springtime is to get up North Carolina rivers to the fall line to spawn.

Except for something to eat, of course, and in the case of the shad, they don’t even want that – they fast during the 100-mile-plus journey from the Atlantic Ocean.

On the Cape Fear River, their destination is thought to be the ruins of an old dam and some rapids at Smiley’s Falls, near Erwin in Harnett County. There, where the rocky Piedmont meets the Coastal Plain, is where they began life, in a spot that offers protection for offspring.

“Eggs can fall down in those cavities and be protected from predation,” said Joseph Hightower, retired North Carolina State University professor and U.S. Geological Survey biologist.

Conservation-minded folk, who want to grow the state’s fish population and with it the economy, gave the river’s anadromous, or inland-spawning, ocean-living, fish a $14 million boost in 2012. That’s when Lock and Dam No. 1 near Riegelwood was turned into a manmade rapids that the fish could swim over, rather than wait for a lift in the lock by the dam-keeper.

It was a pioneering step – the first rock arch rapids on the East Coast – but two more lock and dam combinations remain between the fish and home, No. 2 at Elizabethtown and William O. Huske No. 3 below Fayetteville.

Now a move is underway to make it possible for the fish to flip themselves unaided all the way to Harnett County.

The Cape Fear River Partnership, a coalition of public and private groups including Cape Fear River Watch, has cobbled together $2.3 million, with hopes of making it $3.2 million, to design and start building similar rapids or other fish passages at the remaining dams.

Moffatt & Nichol, a global infrastructure advisory firm with a Raleigh office, has already started design work.

Numbers of the fish have declined dramatically due to overfishing and the dams that 19^th and 20^th century industry brought to the state’s rivers. There are now catch limits on shad in the Cape Fear and  a total prohibition of catching striped bass there.

There are estimated to be only 300 Atlantic and 50 shortnose sturgeon in the Cape Fear, and catching the endangered fish anywhere on the East Coast is prohibited.

“Most North Carolinians have never seen a sturgeon,” said Mike Wicker, Raleigh-based biologist for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “They’ve got no idea that back in the 1800s there were these 18-foot fish and people were harvesting them for caviar.”

Shad Take The Chance

There’s evidence that the fish are responding to the boost past Lock and Dam No. 1.  American shad – bony, silvery and fierce fighting – started swimming up the rapids even before they were completed.

Now, Cape Fear River Watch Executive Director Frank Yelverton says that 65 percent or more are making it over the top. When the Wildlife Commission collected eggs in 2016, 95 percent of them came from above the rapids.

Shad are historically renowned for their eggs, or roe, but even more important to North Carolina, said Wicker, is their role as food for the $2 billion saltwater recreational fishing industry.

“Speckled trout, flounder, puppy drum and even things like bluefish and tuna, king mackerel” – they all feast on shad, Wicker said. “Dolphins eat them too, porpoises … even whales.”

Reluctant Stripers

Striped bass, two or three times as big as shad and a fish that likes to swim in schools, haven’t fared as well at the rapids. Of their eggs, 97 percent were collected below the rapids, which are a carefully arranged collection of large boulders sloping up to the 11-foot-high top of the dam.

With new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration guidelines for rock rapids in hand, the partnership wants to make the existing rapids more attractive to the bass, which are tasty and an angler’s dream.

Under the new guidelines, boulders would be arranged so that their slope is more gradual, and instead of 18 inches between them, the space would be more like 8 feet.

Under The Radar

As for the sturgeon, the “now you see them, now you don’t” phantoms of the river, there’s evidence that some of the few remaining may also be heaving their mammoth bodies past the rapids.

The prehistoric-looking fish have changed little since dinosaur days, with long rows of bony protuberances, called scutes, down their bodies. They’ve been known to reach 800 pounds and live 60 years, though some caught in the Cape Fear estuary several years ago were closer to 80 pounds.

One researcher who caught them said that when they take one of their unexplained and prodigious leaps, “It sounds like a tree fell in the water.”

Dawn York of Wilmington environmental consulting firm Dial Cordy and Associates, which coordinates the fish-passage project for the partnership, hesitates to say that the sturgeon are definitely making it over. No tagged ones have been found past the rapids, she said.

But distinctive as they are, one veteran fisherman is sure he saw one in 2014. And last September, a researcher for an environmental consulting firm found a 4-foot juvenile tangled in his gill net at Elwell Ferry, 8 miles above the rapids.

“We let him go and he swam away in good condition,” said Mark Westendorff, senior environmental scientist for Wilmington-based consulting firm CZR Inc. “I thought it was great. “

York thought it was great, too. Though there’s a slight chance the upstream fish got a lift through the lock during infrequent maintenance, she likes to view them as evidence that the rapids work.

“The fact we’re finding them further upstream than they’re typically found means that they’re migrating and they’re looking for spawning habitat,” she said. “It demonstrates we need to continue our effort.”

Learn More

• Fish can now get around old obstacle

MANTEO — Thanks to an almost-accidental alliance between a major conservation group and officials in an N.C. coastal county, the county’s homeowners may be looking at a reduction in flood-insurance rates in the future.

FEMA’s Community Rating System offers a discount to residents of counties and towns where there’s a lot of documented open space – floodplain space where development is prohibited. Open space, the agency figures, is a lot less expensive to replace than buildings in case of a disaster, so it’s included among the benchmarks of good coastal management that the rating system seeks to promote.

Dare County has qualified for a 10 percent discount in the past. Planning Director Donna Creef has painstakingly sought out everything from town parks to school ballfields, using GIS software and county tax records.

“You have to map a lot of stuff. Kind of a hunt and peck kind of thing,” Creef describes it.

Then, two years ago, Kate Murray, a conservancy coordinator in the region, came calling. She wanted to talk to Creef about using oyster reefs as a natural form of coastal protection.

She brought with her apps showing maps prepared by the conservancy’s international Global Oceans team, which creates coastalresilience.org, the group’s award-winning mapping website.

They zeroed in on oyster reefs, not open space, but Creef, impressed with their detail and ease of use, saw other possibilities.

“Wow, if I had apps like this it would help me a lot,” she said. They could immediately identify and display the land parcels she’d been looking for.

Murray jumped right on it, offering the services of the Global Oceans team, which conferred with FEMA contractor to see what requirements the spaces would have to meet.

Then, with input from the governments involved, the team came up with custom maps for unincorporated Dare, including Roanoke and Hatteras Islands and Wanchese, and the incorporated towns of Manteo, Nags Head, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills and Southern Shores and Duck.

Click on one of several apps showing the maps and you immediately see, in living color, those open spaces that meet CRS qualifications.

“It saves time and it saves effort and it identifies open space that we can get credit for. It’s a win-win situation for us and the citizens of Dare County,” Creef says.

Currently, Dare and town officials are working with the Conservancy to fine-tune the apps, with Currituck County representatives sitting in on the conversations, though Currituck is not involved.

What the Conservancy’s app-makers do is take publicly available data, then “package and analyze” it – the first time, Murray says, that it’s been done to FEMA specifications.

“Our hope is that (the process) can assist not only Dare County but other counties participating in the Community Rating System,” she says.

She realizes that the quality of data will vary from locality to locality. “Not every county has the same resources.”

But, she says, “We got lucky with the quality of data there in Dare County. They had great data.

“We’re hoping to move this to Hyde County next. We’re talking to local government now, looking at what to do to replicate it and make it work for Hyde County.”

An intern from East Carolina University hired by Hyde will include gathering data among her chores this summer, she says.

“Personally, I think it’s a fantastic application that could be useful beyond North Carolina,” Murray says.

In Dare County, the apps weren’t ready to use the last time Creef applied for a rating system discount; reviews are held every five years and her application was in November 2015. The resulting Dare County discount has not been revealed, though she’s hoping the previous 10 percent goes up to 15 percent.

If the apps, expected to be completed this summer, show significant increases in qualified open space, she’ll consider asking for an interim amendment to the rating, she says.

One new area to be included is called the beach erosion hazard area – the strip of land between high tide and the beginning of beach vegetation. “It’s that public area of the beach where you set up your beach chairs,” Creef explains.

For the first time, it qualifies as open space under CRS rules and is included in the app.” You click on a parcel and see an erosion layer on the oceanfront, see how many points that would get,” Creef says.

A 30-foot state-mandated buffer along estuary shorelines and canals can also be counted if it contains no manmade structures.

Since much of unincorporated Dare’s oceanfront is federally owned and therefore excluded, Creef doesn’t expect much in the way of a benefit to the county. Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head, which have their own municipal beaches, should benefit, she says.

One app still under construction is a “futures” version. It shows floodplain spaces currently excluded from discounts because there are no restrictions ensuring against future development.

A town or county that’s in the midst of rewriting a land-use plan might see possibilities there, Murray says.

They might ask, “What if we put this marsh in a conservation easement (with the cooperation of property owners)? What would be the benefit (to insurance policy-holders)?”

The Nature Conservancy has not forgotten the mission that brought Murray to Creef’s office in the first place. Oyster reefs as coastal protection remains “an important subject,” Murray says.

The app-making, she says, became a priority after Creef presented it as “a real need we have.”

“We wanted to work within their time frame.”

Learn More

• FEMA Community Rating System
• The Nature Conservancy

HOLDEN BEACH — Many a beach visitor has been perplexed by the end-of-vacation question: What to do with all the leftover food?

For many, the garbage can is the answer, but that solution disturbed one beach resident so much 10 years ago that he decided to offer an alternative.

“I’m of the generation where it was just a sin to waste food,” said Bill Spier, 81, a Holden Beach resident.

So Spier parked himself, his 1990 Nissan pickup and a food-donation sign where departing vacationers couldn’t miss him in the parking lot of Holden Beach Chapel, less than a block from the Inland Waterway bridge.

Now, he and friends hold forth each Saturday through Labor Day weekend, accepting milk, eggs, crackers, bread – all the perishables and nonperishables that nobody wants to haul back to Memphis, or Raleigh or wherever.

“Bring everything,” Spier said. “We can put it to good use somewhere or other.”

Over the past decade, that’s added up to more than 140,000 pounds of food. Perishables go to Sharon United Methodist Church on the mainland, where they’re picked up by recipients or delivered to those house-bound.

“They will be gone by this afternoon,” predicted Spier one recent Saturday morning.

Nonperishables go to the food pantry at Brunswick Island Baptist Church on the mainland.  Deliveries to the churches are made by Don Downs, a retired U.S. Forest Service employee from Supply.

Downs has worked with Spier from the beginning, when, he said, “I really didn’t recognize the need.”

But now that he’s seen “people elderly, people that have lost their jobs,” he said, “it’s been more of a blessing for me” (than for them).

News of Holden Beach’s A Second Helping, spread up the coast to Emerald Isle and Topsail Beach and Surf City, where residents began their own versions last summer, collecting more than 6,000 pounds of food.

A Second Helping-Emerald Isle, formed by George B. Gardner and other volunteers, collects Saturdays through Sept. 5 at four locations for the food pantry of White Oak Ecumenical Outreach Ministries in Swansboro.

One site is beside N.C. 58, where “People would just come by and join us,” he said. “It turned into a real community effort.”

A couple of early-morning locations are in coffee shops because, Gardner said, “A lot of people stop by and get coffee when they leave the island.”

At Topsail Beach and Surf City, the “Friends Feeding Friends” collection is sponsored by Emma Anderson Memorial Chapel.

Volunteers in bright yellow T-shirts spend Saturday mornings through Sept. 5 near the bridge to the mainland, collecting for the food pantry of Faith Harbor United Methodist Church in Surf City.

Though the beach economy may seem to be booming, said co-coordinator Bryant Mende, “There are plenty of people down here who have missed the boat.”

Besides, he said, he remembers childhood beach vacations. “Everybody would fight over NOT taking the food home – ‘I don’t want this loaf of bread.’ ”

Vacationers leaving Holden Beach that recent Saturday seemed universally thankful for Second Helping.

“I know there’s such a need, often invisible,” said Diane Wykcoff, on her way home to Nashville. As a former school social worker, she referred people to food pantries.

Told that there surely were other ways they could be spending Saturdays at the beach, Spier and friends showed no regrets.

“This is something that’s important,” retired accountant Bill Hadesty said.

“I could be baby-sitting right now,” joked Larry Blume, a retired police officer. “I’d rather be here.”

And, said Spier, “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”

This story first appeared in Carolina Country magazine

This story first appeared in the Charlotte Observer and News & Observer of Raleigh.

The American oystercatcher is among the 314 birds that National Audubon Society’s recent report considers at risk of losing more than half of its range across the country by 2080. Photo: Meryl Lorenzo/Audubon Photography Awards

First of a two-part series

North Carolina’s bright summertime landscape of songbirds, seabirds and even game birds like wild turkeys may be in for some drastic changes as the 21^st century wears on.

The climate change predicted by many scientists to accelerate rapidly is likely to have many species leaving home in search of cooler, more hospitable climes.

“For the majority of the birds, especially in the East, it’s going to be a northward shift,” says Tom Auer, Important Bird Area biologist for the National Audubon Society and one of the authors of the society’s recent study on the effects of climate change on North American birds.

In the case of North Carolina’s birds, the move could be westward. The Appalachians beckon with their nearly 6,700-feet elevation, and that, Auer says, “is going to allow species at lower elevations to move uphill as climate change progresses.”

The N.C. mountains already make up the southernmost range for a number of birds, says Curtis Smalling, land bird conservation director for Audubon North Carolina. They include several species of warbler, least and alder flycatchers, and the ruffed grouse.

Some of North Carolina’s most familiar birds are among the 314 that the report considers at risk of losing more than half of their current range across the country by 2080. They include mallards, house finches, ospreys, wild turkeys and, on the coast, black skimmers and American oystercatchers.

Others – including northern cardinals, eastern bluebirds, mockingbirds, Carolina wrens, goldfinches, and downy woodpeckers – are not considered at risk to such a degree.

Home Sweet Home

“Birds are very similar to us. They can live only within a certain range of temperature, precipitation and seasonal change,” says Heather Hahn, president of Audubon North Carolina.

“If it’s too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, birds cannot survive.”

The report, which studied 588 species in all, admits that it can’t predict what individual species among the 314 considered at risk will choose to go, but most are likely to move, says Auer.

“They’re migratory species, and that indicates they have the capacity to relocate.”

It’s already happening in some areas, he says.

“The hooded oriole is making a lot of moves farther up into California,” Auer says; and the Acadian flycatcher, which counts N.C. forests among its homes, “has recently really been pushing into New England.”

Those birds caught in changing circumstances are already beginning to suffer, National Audubon President David Yarnold indicated recently as he introduced the report in an NPR interview:

“This year, in southern California, 90 to 95 percent of raptor nests failed,” he said. “There were no baby raptors because of drought.”

The scientists used 40 years of climate information and several decades of Christmas Bird Counts and North American Breeding Bird Surveys to determine the current comfort zones of the 588 species.

What Do Birds Need?

These comfort zones, called “climate envelopes,” consist of the amounts of rainfall, the range in temperatures and the seasonal changes that each species has come to depend upon.

Then they compared these requirements with climate changes predicted by the 2007 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Assuming that the majority of threatened birds will strike out to new territories rather than sit still and perhaps perish, the six scientists conducting the study created animated maps showing places where various species might find compatible climates.

This little bird is the brown-headed nuthatch, a non-migratory bird that may lose 95 percent of its summer breeding range by 2080. Photo: David Hill/Flickr Creative Commons

The maps also illustrate likely population shifts in what Auer says is “kind of a best-case scenario for a lot of birds.”

Fans of particular birds can seek them out by name or state on the maps.

But the study, meant to guide future bird conservation efforts, doesn’t tell the whole story, Auer says.

“While the climate may be suitable, the habitat may not be there,” he says. What looks like open space on the map might turn out to be a parking lot or a high-rise.

Work to Do

That’s where bird-lovers come in.

North Carolina has 13,000 Audubon members and 1.5 million North Carolinians who identified themselves as bird watchers in a U.S. Fish and Wildlife survey, according to Hahn.

Besides galvanizing them to work for a reduction in greenhouse gases, she hopes the report will inspire them to create and preserve habitats for both existing birds and those that are to come.

“We need to know that, as they move, they have the habitat they need,” she says.

For her, the report is “a story of hope. We know what they need, and I think we can help them survive.”

Members of the Sunset Beach Turtle Patrol excavate a hatched nest. Photo: Jim Barber

This story first appeared in Carolina Country magazine

First of two parts

SUNSET BEACH — Even the sand seems to like Sunset Beach.

For years, it’s been coming in from offshore, adding to the already wide expanse of natural beach on the three-mile-long island near the S.C. state line. Unlike other N.C. beach communities, Sunset has never had to resort to re-nourishment.

“If I knew why, I’d be a genius,” says Orrin Pilkey, coastal geologist at Duke University.

What he does know, he says, is that “it’s a marvelous beach.”

Another reason the island is marvelous is that because of its alignment on earth – roughly northeast to southwest – you can see sunsets over the ocean.

On any given summer day, some 15,000 Sunset Beach fans would agree it’s a marvelous place. They’re the 3,600 year-round residents of the town, 100 of them on the island and the rest on the mainland, plus the nearly 12,000 vacationers who visit daily at the height of the season.

Townspeople think so much of Sunset, which celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year, that they’ve held a series of anniversary parties, put together an exhibit of historic photographs at Ingram Planetarium and are collecting mementoes for a time capsule to be sealed in March.

Sunset started out low-key and residential, planned that way by founder Mannon C. Gore, says his son, Edward M. Gore Sr., who succeeded him as head of the Sunset Beach and Twin Lakes development company.

It’s still that way, says Town Council member Karen Joseph, even though “It’s a small town whose population has doubled in a very short period of time.”

A 35-foot height limit on island buildings pretty well limits them to two-story, single family homes, says former Mayor Ron Klein. Commercial enterprise, which includes five golf courses and several residential communities, is on the mainland.

The most impressive thing about Sunset may be the accommodation it makes to the ever-changing ocean, Klein says. Years of sand build-up have created a 200-foot stretch of land between homes on the island’s main street and the dune line, yet the extra sand has never been built on.

“That is so unusual,” says Pilkey.

The reason, says Gore, is prohibitive deed restrictions put in place by his father that are now part of zoning law.

To get people over the Intracoastal Waterway, founder Gore built a pontoon bridge beside his home.

“People would drive up and honk their horns,” and he’d pull the cables that operated the bridge, says Ann Bokelman of the Old Bridge Preservation Society.

Various improved versions of the old bridge lasted until 2010, when the state built a soaring stationary structure. The old 110-foot span and the tender house were moved by tugboat and crane to the mainland, where the Old Bridge Preservation Society is turning them into a museum.

Because it’s never been artificially re-nourished, Pilkey says, the island beach is “a rich ecosystem. So full of critters – mole crabs, coquinas.”

Up to 30 loggerhead turtles crawl ashore each summer to nest, says Carmel Zetts, coordinator for the 65-member Sunset Beach Turtle Watch Program. Members check nests during the hatching season beginning at 5 a.m. and, when hatching occurs, escort the hatchlings to the ocean.

Farther down the beach, on what was separate Bird Island before shifting sands filled in an intervening inlet, more dunes and marsh make up the 1,400-acre, state-owned Bird Island Coastal Reserve.

“It’s an incredible area to go kayaking in, so many tidal creeks. Just drift past the herons and the egrets and the willets and they’ll just be sitting in the grass looking at you,” says Jim Barber, coordinator of the Bird Island Stewards, who lead birding tours.

Between the natural wonders – “The sunsets are absolutely undescribably beautiful,”  says Edward Gore, and the small-town atmosphere, Sunset Beach is “a wonderful place to live,” concludes Council member Joseph.

Thursday: Saving the old bridge

WILMINGTON — In 1982, as the newly formed N.C. Coastal Federation helped residents fight proposed peat mining on the Albemarle/Pamlico peninsula, its leaders recognized that their fledgling organization was likely to have staying power.

“It was our hope and dream that it would be an ongoing proposition,” says Executive Director Todd Miller, the only employee at the time.

So, in an era before widespread email and computer use, “We kept paper files on things we were working on,” he says.

In the years since, as membership grew to more than 10,000 and preservation efforts spread to include all 20 coastal counties, the organization continued to detail everything from studies that its staff, which now numbers 22, consulted to papers they filed in defense of federation positions.

Newspaper clippings on anything coastal were filed away, as were issues of the federation newsletters, Coastal Review. Even the sums brought in by T-shirt sales were duly recorded.

Now, what were 15 to 20 filing cabinets filled with papers representing the years 1982 through 2004 have been transferred to the Special Collections unit of the Randall Library at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

There, Special Collections Coordinator Jerry Parnell and his staff, after organizing the files and preparing an online index, have made them available to the public.

“The records,” says the library, “chronicle the transformation of the North Carolina Coastal Federation from a small group concerned with coastal issues to an active, influential participant in North Carolina coastal management.”

Though Parnell expects university faculty and students to consult the files, Miller thinks the federation itself may be among the biggest beneficiaries.

In its role of environmental advocate, the federation has been a source of practical and scientific information for policymakers dealing with coastal issues, he says. And the same issues, like stormwater pollution of coastal waters, crop up repeatedly, he says.

“As we cycle through new administrations and leadership in the state, the same questions get asked again and again.”

Instead of having to rely solely on memory, federation officials can consult the archived documents, he says, to understand how they arrived at a particular position.

“We’ve learned a lot from past efforts, evolved strategies that are based on . . .  what practically will work,” Miller said. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

One example, he says, is the recurring debate about how best to control stormwater runoff. In other parts of the state where shellfish beds don’t have to be protected, a good bit of attention is paid to controlling the pollutant-heavy “first flush” of runoff, he says.

But because coastal waters need the protection from bacteria that longer-lasting control can provide, Miller says, “We’ve taken a different path . . . with good reasons to do that, good, valid, scientific reasons.”

Taken as a whole, the papers provide an overview of the life of the coast 1982-2004.

Fifty-two oral interviews by historian J. Glenn Blackburn, long-time federation member, author and retired professor at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, Va., flesh out the facts with the human story behind them.

He talks to Anne and Wayne Brady, crabbers in the Albemarle/Pamlico area who feared for their livelihoods when the proposed peat mining operation threatened in 1982-83. The idea was dropped when a federal subsidy ran out, but not before the newly formed federation played a major role in fighting it.

Blackburn also interviews James Barrie Gaskill, a commercial fisherman whose family has been on Ocracoke Island since the 18^th century.

Gaskill, a federation board member since 1993, says that fishermen’s dislike for governmental fish-catch quotas and other environmental regulations make them wary of environmental organizations in general.

But the federation, he says, has a better reputation than many because “We aren’t against everything . . . We are there to help people.”

And ocean ecologist Richard Barber of Beaufort, professor emeritus at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort and former member of the N.C. Environmental Management Commission, describes the federation as being like a family company, based on friendships and dedication to a place.

Its greatest contribution, he says, has been helping to sustain the coast, which he sees as still beautiful and a good place to live.

Blackburn “has done a wonderful job of reaching out to all the people involved with the federation from the beginning, and getting their perspectives on what we’ve been able to accomplish together,” Miller says.

The historian, who is writing a history of the federation (Working title: “We Love the Coast: The Story of the North Carolina Coastal Federation”) was the go-between for the federation and UNCW.

Parnell made three trips to federation headquarters in Ocean in the summer of 2008 to pick up the papers.

The three van loads were “a little bit more than I expected,” he says.

Even more materials will be turned over in the future, including more interviews by Blackburn, and Parnell and his staff expect to organize, conserve and present them as well.

“It’s a wonderful service by UNCW,” says Miller.

Finding the Archives

To find the federation papers, go online.

Search for N.C. Coastal Federation, bringing up a Records and Manuscripts line. Click it, and under “Special Collections – Manuscript Finding Aids,” click on “North Carolina Coastal Federation Papers SC/MS/313.”

In its “detailed description,” the finding aid lists material under six major headings, or “series:” administrative records, subject files, newspaper clippings, publications including the Coastal Review, maps and Blackburn’s oral history abstracts.

Blackburn’s oral histories can be read online in pdf format. To see the other documents, record the identifying numbers of the folders and the boxes they’re stored in and take the information to UNCW’s Randall Library, 601 S. College Rd.  in Wilmington.

To make an appointment, which Parnell says is the fastest, most efficient way to view the papers, email him or Rebecca Baugnon. Special Collections is on the library’s second floor, Room 2042. It’s open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays and 9 a.m. to noon Fridays on days when classes are in session.

If you’re looking for information on a particular topic, the “subject files” series is divided into 42 sub-series with general titles like “Water Quality.”

If you’re searching for a more specific topic, like information on “Shell Fishing and Water Quality, 1982-1991,” a numbered folder with that name will be stored in a numbered box under the general “Water Quality”sub-series heading.

Oreo feeds one of her three chicks, none of which survived the summer. Photo: Walker Golder, Audubon North Carolina

The story first appeared in The Charlotte Observer

When the migrating urge hit American Oystercatcher CFX in mid-August, he took off from his Outer Banks home to join the party gathering on Capers Island off Charleston.

There, up to 1,000 of his fellows, striking black and white shorebirds with long orange beaks and orange-ringed eyes, fly in from Texas to Maine to spend the winters.

An S.C. Department  of  Natural Resources officer spotted CFX by the identifying number on the bright green leg band worn by birds banded in North Carolina and notified N.C. scientists who’d been keeping an eye on him.

Lindsay Addison, an Audubon coastal biologist, and Ted Simons, N.C. State University biology professor, already knew where he was, however, through a tiny backpack, or satellite tracking transmitter, that he wears. They caught him last spring at his home in Cape Lookout National Seashore and attached the $3,000 device.

Powered by a solar battery, the one-inch by half-inch backpacks that Addison and Simons have attached to six N.C. oystercatchers inform orbiting research satellites every couple of days of the birds’ whereabouts.

Checking in via computer, the biologists not only knew that CFX had gone to Capers Island, but that he made a pit stop at Masonboro Island near Wilmington along the way.

They – and CFX’s many fans on the tracking project’s Web site —  didn’t know how the bird weathered the trip of more than 250 miles, however.

Lindsay Addison, left, and Ted Simons outfit Oreo with a tracking backpack. Photo: Walker Golder, Audubon North Carolina

When S.C. scientists gave them the heads up, Addison and Simons told CFX’s fans via the constantly-updated Web site that “CFX was looking healthy and preening himself while the flock waited for the tide to fall and their oyster buffet to become available again.”

Why all the fuss about a bird that lives only on the fringes of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and measures from 17 to 21 inches long? It numbers only about 11,000 in its entire range, about half what it was before massive hunting wreaked havoc in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Closely observed oystercatchers, say those who study them, are in a perfect position to be the “canary in the coal mine,” an early warning system for threats to the coastal environment.

They eat oysters, crabs, mussels and marine worms, a diet dependent on clean, unpolluted estuaries.

They scrape out a nesting spot and lay their eggs right on the beach, often in front of dunes, where they’re in danger of overwash during storms and unusually high tides, a threat that scientists fear will grow with rising sea levels.

Their eggs and chicks are at the mercy of beach-going humans and the unleashed dogs they bring with them, as well as raccoons and other creatures attracted by the presence of humans. The spotted eggs blend in with the sand, Nature’s protective coloration, but people step on them and vehicles run over them.

As a result, North Carolina’s 300 to 400 nesting pairs have found refuge in government protected national seashores or conservationist-supervised islands off the coast or the Inland Waterway.  The state lists them as “a species of special concern.”

Banding has long shown scientists the end points on the birds’ migration journeys, but how they get there has been a mystery. Now, the four groups sponsoring satellite tracking – Audubon North Carolina, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Together Green (Toyota/Audubon partnership), and N.C. State University – hope to learn enough to help keep them safe and healthy en route.

Oystercatcher eggs are at the mercy of storm tides, raccoons and other predators. Photo: Sam Bland

They hope in the future to take advantage of GPS technology, which is being used to track bald eagles and other large birds. So far, those transmitters are too large to be carried by oystercatchers, who 1.5 pounds at most.

A side benefit, say the scientists, is that oystercatchers’ looks and temperament make them great poster children for shorebird protection.

“Not only are they beautiful, humorous and attractive, interesting birds with interesting behavior, their life histories tell a really good story about the coastal environments and the factors affecting them,” says Simons.

Those orange-ringed eyes on a black head look continually surprised, and the heads bob up and down, orange beaks pointed downward, as a couple walk side-by-side during courtship. Their mating call is a sharp, rhythmic chirp called “piping.”

The sexes look alike, so Addison arbitrarily designated males and females – CFX may be a girl.

Both sit on the eggs and are attentive parents, often standing over eggs or chicks to shade them from the sun.

Threats to their territory bring out the swashbuckler in them. “They will put their heads down, put their feathers out, charge at each other and call,” says Simons.

“Making a big Web site out of it, putting the birds on Facebook (under Audubon North Carolina)  and Twitter (under AMOYtracking) allows people to track the birds,” says Addison.

It also lets watchers in on the birds’ misfortunes. Because of predators and other factors, all six pairs were only able to raise one chick between them this summer. It belongs to Arnie, a Cape Fear River bird.

A stroll down the beach is part of courtship for these oystercatchers. Photo:Walker Golder, Audubon North Carolina

Oreo, named by Ann “Cissie” Brooks’ fifth-grade marine science students at Wrightsville Beach Elementary School, lost the last of her three chicks in front of onlookers at Wrightsville Beach, where she lived in a protected area.

A gull or another oystercatcher attacked so viciously that the chick had to be caught and euthanized.

Oreo’s many fans, says Addison, “were very sad.”

Nesting success for oystercatchers is very low, with only about one-third of nesting pairs fledging chicks in any one season, Simons says. But the birds live 20 to 25 years, and that success rate is enough to maintain a stable population.

And Simons says that North Carolina’s total population seems to be inching upward, thanks to closing of certain areas of beach at critical times and efforts by the National Park Service and the public to better handle raccoon-attracting garbage at Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout national seashores.

The satellite tracking attempt suffered a minor setback when three birds – Arnie, CF7 and Orange Green – preened underneath the transmitters’ Teflon leg bands so vigorously that the backpacks fell off and were lost.

The scientists had hoped that all six birds would keep the three-ounce devices on through migration, but the information already gained made up for the disappointment, Addison says.

“It’s a learning process. We’re learning about their movements, their habitat use – and also about techniques for better attaching these transmitters.”

Jeremy McCargo, left, of the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission and Joseph Hightower of N.C. State University hold a tagged Atlantic sturgeon just before releasing it in the Roanoke River. Photo: Chad Thomas, NCWRC

An endangered fish leaping in a North Carolina river has created waves in fish science that could lead to better protection for the entire species, which dates to the dinosaurs.

The fisherman who witnessed that prodigious leap in the traditional spawning grounds high up Roanoke River in the fall of 2009 had no doubt it was an Atlantic sturgeon, says Fritz Rohde, a Beaufort-based biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “A big fish that comes out of the water like that, they’re very distinctive,” he noted.

The prehistoric-looking fish with five rows of bony protuberances down its length can reach 14 feet and 800 pounds, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its lifespan almost rivals humans’, at 60 years.

Once common along the N.C. coast, Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oyxrinchus oxyrinchus) was prized for its fleshy white meat and abundant roe for caviar. The fish became so rare that to preserve the remaining population the state more than 20 years ago made it illegal to possess a sturgeon. The federal government last year placed it on the Endangered Species List.

Until the Roanoke leap, scientists were aware of young fish in the estuaries of the state’s big  coastal rivers – the Roanoke, the Cape Fear, and the Neuse. But how they got there was a mystery because no adults were being sighted at spring spawning time in traditional spawning grounds, the rocky bottoms of the fall line where the piedmont meets the coastal plain.

Since that leap, spawning-ready sturgeon weighing an estimated 50 to 70 pounds have been captured for three succeeding autumns, rather than  spring, in the Roanoke near Weldon. Joseph Hightower of N.C. State University and the U.S. Geological Survey conducted the study, along with NCSU graduate student Jared Flowers and representatives of the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission and the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries.

Last September, they came up with what they consider the Holy Grail, a fertilized egg. It was deposited on a bristly floor-sander pad attached to the river bottom to simulate pebbles.

They popped the egg in a fish tank at NCSU, where “that little thing hatched into a little sturgeon,” Hightower says.

The Roanoke River in North Carolina and Virginia.

The one-inch long fish was returned to the Roanoke, and now, “Hopefully it’s hanging out in Albemarle Sound until it gets a little bigger,” Hightower says.

Starting in 2009, sturgeon have been similarly confounding Virginia scientists with tantalizing clues of a fall spawning in the James River.

At Hopewell, Va., a freshwater site about 25 miles southeast of Richmond, researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Environmental Studies have handled nearly 300 fish, some nearly six feet long.

“In the fall, most of the males are just running milt (seminal fluid), just running down the side of the fish,” says Greg Garman, center director.

A female captured last fall by graduate student Matt Balazik was “throwing eggs,” says Garman. Females drop eggs in the water to be fertilized by sperm.

Balazik was only able to collect a few unfertilized eggs “before the female tore out of the gill net and swam away. It was a brief encounter, but these are big, powerful fish and when they decide they want to leave, there’s not a whole lot you’re going to do about it,” Garman says.

Other sturgeon gave downtown Richmond, presumed to be part of their traditional spawning grounds, quite a start last fall. Several adults were spotted swimming in three to four feet of water under the 14th Street Bridge, next to the financial district and surrounded by skyscrapers.

“People were lining the bridge, taking pictures, bringing their kids,” Garman recalls.

There hasn’t been a sturgeon caught in Richmond since the late 1940s, he says. Some 10 years ago, “Most of us here thought the sturgeon was gone from the James and probably from Chesapeake Bay,” Garman says.

In preceding centuries, N.C. and Virginia waters teemed with the sturgeon, praised by Hightower as “such a neat fish.” Despite their science-fiction looks, the creatures aren’t harmful to humans. They use their pointed snouts, shark-like tails and sucker-like mouths to scarf up snails and worms from the ocean floors.

Adults, which periodically take prodigious leaps for no apparent reason, swim as far as Nova Scotia. Juveniles wait until they’re about a yard long before venturing out into the ocean from the estuaries.

Overfishing, dams that blocked their passage to spawning grounds, plus a general lack of understanding of their slow maturation are all thought to have brought them to their diminished state.

“People didn’t understand sturgeon biology, so they were overfished in short order,” says Hightower.

Once fished heavily, Atlantic sturgeon were prized for their roe and fleshy white meat. This big one was caught in the Potomac River. Photo: Library of Congress

By 1998, there were so few on the East Coast that, like North Carolina, all states had placed moratoria against their capture. Then, the big fish went on the endangered list.

So why are the sturgeon showing up now, and in the fall, when common wisdom considered them to be spring spawners like other fish that live in the ocean but spawn in freshwater rivers?

They are, says Hightower, “a hard-to-detect species unless they jump; they can be there but nobody knows it. They live in deep holes typically. They don’t strike at a lure.

“They were obviously there and people just didn’t realize it.”

A fall spawning run may have gone on “under the radar” because people were focused on the more abundant spring spawns of the past, he says.

Bennett Wynne, anadromous fish coordinator for the state’s wildlife commission, also points out that 15 years have passed since catching them on the East Coast became illegal, long enough for some young fish to have gained adulthood.

In Virginia, “what we think we’re seeing in the James right now is a bit of a population recovery, and we aren’t quite sure why,” says Garman.  “Certainly the fact that there are fishing harvest moratoria – you  can’t legally capture them – that’s helped, and maybe water quality in the James has improved enough that they’re able to come back.”

Rohde expects the Roanoke’s sturgeon to be on the agenda at an upcoming conference on Kerr Scott Dam, which is managed by the Army Corps of Engineers with input from the protective services division of the National Marine Fisheries Service. Water releases from Kerr feed the Roanoke.

“We really don’t know what flows are needed,” says Rohde. “Obviously there’s enough flow going on right now (in the fall) that the sturgeon are spawning.”

A separate, multi-agency, NOAA-funded study of sturgeon migration patterns in the Carolinas and Georgia rivers is already upending some conventional wisdom.

Chip Collier of the marine fisheries division has captured and tagged what he calls a “surprising” number of Atlantic sturgeon – 80 – plus two of their rarer and smaller cousins, the shortnose sturgeon, in the Cape Fear and Northeast Cape Fear estuaries.

Most of the Atlantics were juveniles, but the biggest he caught was a 70- to 80-pound adult, he says. “When a big one jumps, it sounds like a tree fell in the water,” Collier reports.

The shortnose, thought to be homebodies that don’t venture into the ocean, were tracked leaving North Carolina and swimming up rivers in South Carolina and Georgia.

This spring, Collier hopes his tracking shows sturgeon making it over the new $13 million rock arch rapids on the Cape Fear above Wilmington. The manmade rapids, a sloping wall of rock leading up to a 11-foot dam, was completed last fall as an aid to spawning fish of several species.

His and the other researchers’ task, he says, is to identify “hot spots” where sturgeon congregate so that those river areas can be protected from threats like dredging and wastewater dumping

Hightower would like to see the Atlantics muscle their way to the kind of comeback their cousins, the Gulf sturgeon, enjoy.

Listed as threatened in 1991, those fish have rebounded to the point that unwary boaters and water skiers on Florida rivers are warned, “Beware of airborne sturgeon,” he says.

OAK ISLAND — When Mary Ellen Rogers retired to Oak Island in 2005, the lifelong environmentalist looked around for sea turtles to help.

During her just-ended real estate career in Charleston, she’d founded the Island Turtle Team to protect nesting turtles on Sullivans Island and the Isle of Palms.

But Oak Island’s turtles were already being cared for, she was told.

How about sea birds, she wanted to know. Those creatures caught in nets, sliced up by boat propellers, or washed up on shore exhausted by the rigors of migration.

Nobody, she was told, was doing anything to get the winged creatures healed and back in the air. The nearest coastal wildlife shelters serving the large birds – pelicans, ospreys and the like – were north in Morehead City and south in Charleston.

Mary Ellen Rogers cuddles a large and feathery resident of Sea Biscuit Shelter. Photo by Hannah Miller.

So Rogers apprenticed at the shelter in Morehead City, got her license as a wildlife rehabilitator, and in 2007 opened Sea Biscuit Wildlife Shelter in the bottom floor of her home in Oak Island.

A baby osprey, a wobbly oystercatcher and whatever else turns up with a critical problem live there. Pelicans and loons live in a shelter outside, where they have access to a therapeutic pool.

“In winter, I’ll have as many as 26 pelicans at a time,” Rogers said recently. “Last week I had a beautiful great white egret. These birds all coexist very nicely in the wild.”

Raptors, which the center accepts, are a different matter, requiring separate quarters. In addition to them, Sea Biscuit also accepts songbirds.

All those birds coming in – 378 last year, more than one a day – mean somebody’s got to come up with a lot of fish and mice for the birds to eat. And in the case of loons and oystercatchers, the dinner has to be still alive.

So Rogers fishes every day in the tidal creek behind her house, carving out time for her second career in an island dress shop, a job she took “to support my wildlife habit.”

“If I throw live fish in the water, the loons will zoom around underwater. They’ll swim and go to great lengths to get something alive,” she says.

A wondrously diverse assortment of friends and supporters provides equally diverse means of support for the birds.

When one local couple goes out fishing, they set two lines behind the boat, one for their dinner and one for the birds. The Oak Island Warrior Ride, motorcycle-riding armed forces veterans, drilled a well to supply water to the pool built with a grant from Brunswick Electric Membership Cooperative. Somebody else came up with a used swimming-pool pump. A service club at St. James Plantation near Wilmington paid for a shelter roof and trap door that gives access to the pool.

Another couple brings their kids and comes down from Virginia once a year to do whatever Rogers wants: painting, cleaning, feeding.

Some eight volunteers regularly help out at the shelter; another 10 pick up and deliver fish; and there are 15 to 20 that Rodgers can depend on to go get birds called in by law enforcement and beach-goers who happen upon them in Brunswick and New Hanover counties. “I got a call from 911, ‘There’s a hawk on Snow’s Cut Bridge (Carolina Beach); could I go get it?’ This is 10 o’clock at night.”

She called a volunteer, who dashed out and temporarily deposited the rescued hawk in her own garage.

Six corporations join individuals and organizations in ponying up the $11,000 in cash that keeps the shelter going each year, and that, says Rogers, doesn’t count the multitude of in-kind gifts she receives. Like three coolers of fish from three guys who teach summer campers at the N.C. Aquarium at Fort Fisher. They froze leftover bait and brought it to her.

Dr. Greg Massey of N.C. State University’s veterinary school checks out a reluctant owl. Photo by Hannah Miller.

Then there are the veterinarians, both local and at N.C. State University’s veterinary school, who provide medicines, diagnoses and the often inevitable euthanasia.

A large number of the birds are in such bad shape that they either die or are euthanized.

Some others are so damaged that, after treatment, they go on to educational or other rehab centers rather than being released in the wild.

But then there are the 45 percent that are success stories. After treatment, volunteers send them soaring into the air, or in the case of Canadian-bound gannets, into the waves.

Gannets return to their home in the Maritime Provinces after wintering in the U.S. Southeast by riding the Gulf Stream. They float because they can’t fly; their feathers haven’t grown back after spring molt.

“They get hit by boats, bitten by sharks,” says Rogers. She rescued one several years ago only to have it refuse to go back in the ocean because there were no other gannets around.

Until one day when a new flock arrived. A fishermen friend called and said, “Hey, Rogers. Grab that bird and run out there.”

When she let the bird go this time, “He went right into the waves. I never saw him again.”

In addition to the usual injuries and instances of young birds too hungry and tired to continue their migration, Rogers sees a lot of frostbitten pelicans in winter.

Adults know to fly south when the temperature drops, but first-year birds think, “I’m going to stay right here at the pier because that’s where people feed me,” she says.

A mystery this year has been the large number of loons, including the more rarely seen adults. Residents of Canada and northern U.S. lakes, they migrate to southerly spots including the Gulf of Mexico and Florida for the winter.

By late July, Sea Biscuit had taken in 34 loons in distress. In all of last year, there were only 18. Of the 34, 28 died.

Some appeared to be having the kind of breathing problems associated with a fungal disease that attacks already-weakened birds. A couple of others that Rogers examined after death had a tarry substance in their digestive tracts.

She’s contacting scientists to try to discover the cause or causes, but meanwhile, she’s rigged up the kind of nebulizer familiar to asthma sufferers. It mists a treatment usually applied to chickens into the loons’ tent.

“You never know what’s going to happen next,” she says. “I’m ready for anything.”

WILMINGTON — Rich farmland lies just inland of the N.C. coast. Along the coast and in adjacent areas live hundreds of people eager for the fresh, local produce grown on that land.

Recently, several groups of small farmers and gardeners, assisted by grants, have turned to the Internet to connect to that vast potential market.

In the process, they’re changing not only food buying, but food growing, local economics, even social relations between farmers and consumers.

They’re also introducing foods nontraditional to Eastern North Carolina and lending a hand to both new and recycled farmers.

In the past year, four groups have sold some $100,000 worth of berries, beans, pork – even homemade cheesecake – through their communal, nonprofit Web sites. Growers share the cost of quick, often same-day-as-harvest, delivery.

A fresh strawberry and an overalls-clad youngster meet in Down East Connect’s Farmers Photo Booth at a Healthy Kids Day celebration in Wilmington. Photo courtesy of Down East Connect.

“The ones that are buying are thrilled with the product,” says Lynn Davis, director of one of them, Eastern Carolina Food Ventures. “They feel like it’s more nutritious because it’s local. It’s just out of the field.”

The groups include three modeled after long-established Farmers Fresh Market in Rutherfordton   and another, www.feastdowneast.org, that’s linked to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

The number of growers changes seasonally, but the Farmers Fresh Market clones and their Web sites are:

• Down East Connect, about 25 sellers in Columbus, Pender,  Brunswick , New Hanover, and Bladen counties in North Carolina and Horry in South Carolina delivering to pick-up points in New Hanover,  Brunswick, Pender and Columbus counties.
• Kenansville-based Eastern Carolina Food Ventures, with 20 growers from Duplin, Sampson, Pender and Lenoir counties delivering to individuals and pickup points in Lenoir and Duplin counties.
• Williamston-based Eastern Local Food, a small number of growers near the central and northern coast selling to five Outer Banks restaurants and some individuals.
• Feast Down East, a multifaceted economic development initiative in Burgaw, promotes farmers markets, virtual and otherwise, farmer/grower co-ops known as Community Supported Agriculture and the purchase of local produce by schools, restaurants, groceries and food-service buyers as well as individuals.

Feast Down East’s 30 growers are in an eight-county east of I-95. Some 30 wholesale and 200 individual buying-club members order online, and delivery is to wholesale sites and buying-club drop-off points in Wilmington and Burgaw.

After its debut in spring of 2011, “It took off,” says Director Jane Steigerwald. First-year sales were $40,000, and, in keeping with Feast Down East’s goal of getting more fresh produce into school cafeterias, farmers sold to schools in Brunswick, New Hanover and Onslow counties and Camp Lejeune.

Handy and Healthful

A Down East Connect customer, loaded down with produce, leaves a pickup spot. Photo courtesy of Down East Connect.

Allison Ballard, who blogs about food in the Wilmington Star-News, buys from both Feast Down East and Down East Connect.

She’s a big local-food fan, and while it’s available in the grocery store, “Having another way to buy that fits your schedule better, or your budget, is a good idea,” she says. “It’s good to have a lot of choices.

“Sometimes, you don’t expect what you see. I’ll click on veggies and think, “I didn’t know they grew that here!”

“We have such a nice warm and moderate climate here we can grow things outside what’s traditionally grown,” says Martha Campagna, project manager for Down East Connect. “I’ve been excited to see a lot of different kinds of salad mixes, things like arugula, microgreens, also some of the Asian greens. And we do have a huge variety of peppers, chili, cayenne, habanero, bishop’s cap, jalapenos and pimiento.”

Down East Connect’s growers include at least one high school student and some former tobacco and corn farmers who’re making a move into produce.  The area used to have a lot of produce farms, Campagna says, but when supermarkets took over most food sales, “You basically had to switch to row crops to keep your farm alive.”

Most farm-to-customer sales of produce in the Eastern Carolina Food Ventures area have traditionally been by large growers who operate their own roadside stands, says Davis. She manages the online market in her role as director of James Sprunt Community College’s Small Business Center.

But now that the Internet brings the small grower into the mix, other avenues are opening up.

Eastern Carolina Food Ventures, begun last spring, not only sold $6,000 worth of home-raised produce, meats, desserts and specialty items in 2011, it was approached to start a roadside farmers market near Wallace and the intersection of N.C. 41 and I-40.

“We used a combination of farmers attending our sustainable farming classes and producers selling on Farmers Fresh Market/Eastern Carolina Food Ventures,” Davis says.

Though there’s no requirement that online farms be certified organic, many growers have taken courses in sustainable agriculture, which de-emphasizes synthetic chemicals.

Hoping to recover from Hurricane Irene’s devastation of crops and its customer base last year, Williamston-based Eastern Local Food sought to add to its pool of growers by joining several community colleges in seeking grant support for such classes.

That grant was not forthcoming, but a core group of growers hasn’t given up, says Director Jeff Ivey, who manages the organization as an outgrowth of Martin County’s Economic Development Corp. They’re maintaining a reduced level of sales while they seek other sources of operating and training funds.

Sharing the Wealth

Since money usually moves from disadvantaged areas into wealthier ones, Down East Connect’s growers were heartened last year when 80 percent of their $52,107 in sales was in Wilmington, says Executive Director Joshua Heinberg.

New Hanover, home to Wilmington, is in the top rank of N.C. counties economically, as determined by the state Department of Commerce. Columbus County, where most of the produce is grown, is in the lowest.

Growers had a term for it, saying the money had “gone west.” The year’s sales to Down East’s 850 registered customers were five times more than the $10,000 originally projected.

The co-op is also working with The Full Belly project in developing a solar-powered system for small-scale irrigation. Full Belly tries to solve farming problems in developing countries. Since the water table near the coast is relatively close to the surface, the hope is that inexpensive shallow wells powered by solar pumps would give farmers sufficient water for fields and greenhouse-type operations.

That affinity for experimentation is mirrored in the co-ops’ customers.

When customer Ballard checks online offerings, “If there’s something unusual, I’ll try it,” she says.