WILMINGTON — When controversial development plans spring up in a neighborhood, many adjoining property owners often react with the “not in my backyard” approach.

But that’s not the case for the family who owns the land at 8006 Masonboro Sound Rd. off Seabreeze Boulevard, where Cape Fear Public Utility Authority is set to begin work this month on a pump station that will allow public sewer system extension to the area.

“That’s where we want it is in our backyard, and they just won’t do it,” said Jack McPhail, the son of the late Clara Fales, who owns the land with two of his sisters. He lives in California but grew up on the land.

Jack McPhail

Instead, the pump station is going on what amounts to a small piece of the parcel’s front yard, McPhail said. But the view is not the major problem, he added.

He’d like to see the site, which is about 60 feet by 50 feet, moved back about 100 to 150 feet because he said that land is about four feet higher in elevation and would offer more protection against flooding from the nearby Intracoastal Waterway.

“Where they’re putting it is an area that, according to my grandmother through my father, was inundated with stormwater during a major hurricane in the 1890s,” said McPhail, whose family has owned the land since 1883. “We just don’t like this specific location, and they could cooperate with us. I’ve always maintained we need sewer down there. We have never objected to there being sewer there. We’ve always objected to the location.”

Despite the pleas, a now-closed online petition, a paper petition and a “Masonboro Sound Ecosystem Support Network” Facebook page set up by McPhail’s niece, Joyce Bowden, to raise awareness to the opposition effort, there doesn’t seem to be much recourse left for the family, who has been fighting the location since the inception of the Masonboro Sound Service Extension project in 2001. The utility has condemned the property through eminent domain while negotiations over its fair market value continue and are expected to go to court early next year.

“I don’t feel like there’s hope at all,” McPhail said. “I don’t believe in miracles any longer.”

Mike McGill, a utility spokesman, said officials have looked at four nearby alternatives and deemed this specific location to be the “most feasible and most constructible” option for the 36,000-gallon-per-day pump station.

“It’s a public health and environmental protection project,” he said. “We’re going to get those people out there off of septic.”

A recent utility press release reads: “As noted during prior public discussions, the groundwater table in the area is at a high level, placing the septic systems operated by owners at particular risk of having them fail, flood or simply leach out their waste into the surrounding soils and waterways.”

Mike McGill

McGill elaborated: “It’s during a flooding event where this pump station is far superior to having these people on septic. The pump station will have redundancy built in to keep it pumping through flooding while septic systems will be completely inundated and leach directly into the sound.”

The utility has reached out to the community with two public information sessions, the most recent of which was Oct. 3, to explain the project to those most affected by it. About 70 people attend the last gathering, held on the heels of the authority’s unanimous vote to approve a $2.5 million construction contract, McGill said.

The presentation stated that the pump station will be built as far west as the land allows and that other changes have been incorporated as a result of community input over the years.

The pump station’s footprint is small, similar in size to one near the intersection of South College Road and New Centre Drive, McGill added.

“It’s wrapped around with landscaping and you can hardly see it,” he said.

The project came about as a result of the area’s 1998 annexation by Wilmington. Plans for water and sewer extension emerged in 2001, and the utility took over the effort after its formation in 2008 to combine the water and sewer operations of the city and New Hanover County.

After the pump station construction, which starts within the next few weeks, water and sewer lines will be extended along Seabreeze Boulevard. The second stage involves installing sewer lines in Oyster Bay, Windchase and Whiskey Creek neighborhoods beginning shortly after Jan. 1. The third and final stage calls for putting sewer and water lines north along Masonboro Sound Road, with estimated completion next summer.

Bowden said she worries that because the project has been ongoing for more than a decade, the utility is not seeking the most up-to-date infrastructure options for the neighborhood.

“There are solutions that would work better than what CFPUA has in mind, better solutions that weren’t there when they came up with the idea,” she said. “I feel like it will be obsolete in a couple of years. I think it’s not going to serve the environment. I don’t think it’s going to serve the people either.

“We want them to stop, look and listen, do some research, listen to the various neighbors and try to individualize their solutions in small community ways,” Bowden added. “I don’t want to fight anybody because it’s too much stress. I would just like for them to shift their perspective. I just hope that they will open their minds to other possibilities.”

McPhail said he is not optimistic.

“It’s like moving a mountain,” he said. “They have made up their mind.”

The Eastern wild turkey is one of the success stories in wildlife management. In the in the early 1930s this grand game bird was on the verge of extinction. But today, thanks to hunters and wildlife restoration programs, the wild turkey is abundant and present throughout North Carolina. Like bears, turkeys need a varied habitat of both open and covered area. Gobblers have beards, as seen here, which are tufts of filaments, or modified feathers, growing out from the chest. Beards can grow to an average of 9 inches.

CASTLE HAYNE — Nestled among public streets and private property, the ubiquitous hidden camera is there to record what once went undetected. Even animals that roam the banks of the Northeast Cape Fear River can no longer escape the watchful eye of technology.

Three environmental organizations have teamed up to get an up-close look at the behavior of terrestrial and avian wildlife that call the corridor around Castle Hayne home. Since February, officials from Cape Fear River Watch, the N.C. Coastal Federation and Wildlands Network have placed and monitored 24 cameras situated in areas likely to get significant animal activity.

“Together we’re focused on the Northeast Cape Fear because of the potential impact of the proposed Titan cement plant,” said Mike Giles, a coastal advocate for the federation who works out of the Wrightsville Beach office. “As we grow and proposer and develop, the habitat is getting fragmented. It’s getting divided by highways and by residential development that you see along the river and industrial development. And with industrial development comes other issues such as air pollution and impact to both the surface water and ground water.”

Titan America, based in Norfolk, Va., is planning to build a cement kiln and expanded limestone quarry on more than 1,800 acres along the Northeast Cape Fear River east of Castle Hayne. The proposal has resulted in years of fierce opposition from various environmental groups and residents, many of whom have formed the Stop Titan Action Network.

The wildlife cameras are the result of a one-year, $35,000 grant from wildlife philanthropists Brad and Shelli Stanback of Asheville. About $23,000 of that pays for equipment, primarily the Reconyx infrared trail cameras at $750 each as well as rechargeable lithium batteries, housing for the devices and special locks that secure the camouflaged devices to trees. The remaining money goes toward staff time required for the monthly changing of batteries and memory cards. Many of the cameras, which are positioned about two feet off the ground, are accessible only by boat.

The red fox can range in color from deep red to gray and are capable predators. It’s the largest of the foxes and the most geographically spread member of this species. Foxes have a long history of association with humans, having been extensively hunted as a pest and furbearer for centuries, as well as being prominently represented in human folklore and mythology. If you hear a haunting and sometimes frightening howling late at night in the springtime it is not the neighborhood cat but fox establishing his dominance during mating season.
These night pictures of what seems to be different black bears were taken in a span of five minutes off Island Creek in June. North American black bears may look smaller than other bears, but they are powerful and muscular. The average black bear weighs 150 to 300 pounds, and mature males can weigh as much as 600 pounds. Black bears are secretive and need large tracts of land to survive. They are omnivorous, which means they eat almost anything, including insects, honey, fruit, bark, nuts, small animals, garbage and carrion left by other predators. North American black bears live an average of 10 years, but some can survive in the wild for as long as 30 years.

On a muggy July afternoon, Giles and Kemp Burdette of Cape Fear River Watch navigated the Northeast Cape Fear in the federation’s 22-foot Jones Brothers skiff. Using GPS to locate the cameras, they coated themselves in bug spray and trekked through mud and brush to reach the devices and perform the necessary changing out, which takes only a few minutes per camera. The men sometimes encounter snakes, wasp nests and other potential hazards during this process.

The project has already netted thousands of images of species including various birds, whitetail deer, wild turkeys, coyotes, bobcats and even a black bear. The cameras take high-quality photos during the day and night as quickly as every fifth of a second, which enables them to capture fleeting images of animals that move rapidly.

Ron Sutherland, conservation scientist for Wildlands Network, has been involved with the project from the beginning and said the images collected thus far are fairly typical of what he would expect in the region.

“I think they are representative of an intact coastal terrain landscape,” he said. “I’m not surprised that there’s a good bit of wildlife along there, particularly in the wide open parts of it. It’s been impressive how many different species we’ve gotten so quickly and how robust the fauna seems to be.”

The photos are unique in that they show the animals “totally relaxed and just doing their thing,” in some instances “just sitting down in front of the camera,” Sutherland added.

The primary goal is to better illustrate the impact that the proposed Titan cement plant will have on this “biodiversity hotspot,” Giles said.

The most common wildcat in North America, the bobcat is named for its short, bobbed tail but are infrequently seen due to their shy and secretive nature. They are medium-sized cats and are slightly smaller but similar in appearance to their cousin, the lynx. Their coats vary in color from shades of beige to brown fur with spotted or lined markings in dark brown or black. This cat is a large mature female and haunts deep forests and swamps throughout North Carolina. Similar in habitat needs to bears, the deep forests and river bottom lands are critical to the survival of this magnificent feline. Females never share territory with each other while male territories tend to overlap.

“Wildlife can coexist with good development,” he said. “We feel Titan is not the type of development and industrial use that this type of disappearing landscape can tolerate.”

But the project also sends a larger environmental message, Giles added. It’s about showing why it’s necessary to preserve the few remaining large tracts of undisturbed habitat that are crucial for many species to survive, he said.

“The program is meant as public education to say this is what’s here, this is why the Northeast Cape Fear River is special and this is what lives here and it’s important,” Giles said. “If we continue on our path of development and degradation of this ecosystem, this eco-region, we’ll lose those animals. They’re already squeezed. This is the place they have left to live.”

Eventually, the three groups involved in the wildlife cameras project hope to have many of the photos available to view on their websites. They’re also planning a press conference and unveiling of some of the best images sometime in early fall.

While initial funding was for one year, Giles and others hope the Stanbacks will continue to support the project for an additional year or two.

“This is all part of a concerted effort to let the people know how special these places like this are, not only to public use and enjoyment but also to our economy,” Giles said. “This produces jobs. Recreation, tourism and fishing produce a lot more jobs than Titan cement will ever produce.”

WILMINGTON — It’s a pleasantly warm May morning, and a small center-console boat containing three men and five fish is gliding along the Brunswick River, a 14-mile-long fork of the Cape Fear River between Navassa and Eagle Island. The hum of nearby traffic on U.S. 17 and the cackle of seagulls are audible above the sputtering of the motor and the splashing sound of four fish thrashing around in a tub full of water. A fifth, not-so-fortunate fish rests on the deck of the boat.

While the men are enjoying their time out on the water, this is not a pleasure cruise, nor is it a commercial fishing operation. The team is part of an effort to tag and study the prehistoric-looking sturgeon, an ancient fish that researchers think has been around since the dinosaurs. Those who work with the species hope to be able to say that for years to come, thus the reason for their tagging operation, funded through a 2011 federal grant split among North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

Joe Facendola of the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries surgically implants a sonar device inside a sturgeon found along the Brunswick River near Wilmington. Photo: Judy Royal

Both species of sturgeon found in the Cape Fear River, Atlantic and the less common shortnose, are listed as endangered. The shortnose has been protected for decades, while the Atlantic just joined the list in 2012. The moratorium on fishing these has been around since 1998.

“I think we’re just now starting to see the results of the offspring of those fish that successfully were reproducing,” said Joe Facendola, a technician with the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries.

The four fish in the tub are all juvenile Atlantic sturgeon. Before being returned to the water, all of them will receive an external and internal tag, and the largest will get an extra sonar implant that allows more detailed studying of its movements.

And the fish flopping around on the deck? Well, this flathead catfish won’t be so lucky.

“It’s a non-native species that has been shown to eat sturgeon, so we’ll take him back to look at his gut contents,” Facendola said. “And someone will have him for dinner.”

Once common along the East Coast, Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus) became sparse due to a variety of factors, including overfishing for their meat and caviar, dams and locks that block their migration to historic spawning ranges and the eight to 10 years it takes them to become mature enough to reproduce, Facendola said.

“So they have a lot of stuff going against them to be numerous,” he said.

During the tagging trip, Facendola has the most hands-on role. He weighs and measures each sturgeon and clips a small section of their fins with surgical scissors to collect a DNA sample that will allow researchers to age the fish and reveal other important data. He calls out the data to a team member who records it with an electronic tablet, while the other man navigates the boat. Then the tagging begins.

The first is an external anchor tag hanging near the fish’s tail. It’s similar to what you’ll see affixing price tags to items of clothing in a store. Those are designed to alert fishermen on sight that the fish has been tagged for tracking purposes.

Anchor tags obviously won’t last during a sturgeon’s entire lifespan, which can be up to 60 years, so each fish also gets an internal Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) tag, which is inserted behind its head using a plastic gun with a sharp metal tip. It’s similar to a microchip that’s implanted in a pet dog or cat. Researchers who catch the same sturgeon later may scan it with a reader to see if it’s already been implanted with a PIT tag. None of this day’s catch has previous anchor or PIT tags.
“Basically it beeps out a code and ultrasound, and we have receivers throughout the river from Bald Head…all the way up to Lock and Dam No. 2, and each time one of the fish that we’ve implanted with a receiver swims by the receiver it will pick up the coded beep from that fish so we can tell where it’s gone,” Facendola said. “And the nice thing is the tags we’re using, they’re used fairly commonly so up and down the Atlantic coast all the researchers that are using these tags can pick up the fish from each other’s receivers. I’ll know not only within the Cape Fear where my fish is going, but pretty much up and down the Atlantic coast.”After three of the four fish are tagged and released back into the river, Facendola prepares for his role as sturgeon surgeon on the last one. This fish, which weighs almost 15 pounds, gets an internal sonar implant that will last for three years. Adult sturgeon can reach 15 feet in length and weigh up to 800 pounds.

Before the surgery, Facendola pours an anesthetizing liquid into the tub to relax the fish. A few minutes later, he uses a scalpel to cut an inch-long incision on its belly and pries it open with surgical scissors to insert the cylindrical-shaped transmitter between the fish’s third and fourth scute, or diamond-shaped scale. These scutes can make surgery somewhat difficult.

“I think a good description for cutting into an average one would be like cutting into a football,” Facendola said. “They’re definitely physically resilient.”

The sturgeon barely moves during this process due to a phenomenon called tonic immobility, a state of near-paralysis that occurs when the fish is upside-down and its brain presses on itself. This happens to sharks and alligators, too, Facendola said.

After stitching the fish up and flipping it back over, the sturgeon is ready to return the river and live out its life while helping researchers continue to protect the species.

“We’re trying to figure out some of the areas that are important to the sturgeon for feeding and reproduction in case we need to mitigate any impact that development or land use or anything like that will have,” Facendola said. “We’ll have a better idea of where these important core habitats are. For being kind of commercially exploited and an important fish we still don’t know very much about them in the Cape Fear, although we’re learning more and more.”

Wilmington looked more like Anchorage on Christmas Eve, 1989.

WILMINGTON — December has almost been more like summer than winter in southeastern North Carolina the past two years.

It wasn’t so different in 1989 – until a few days before Christmas.

“It looked like just a typical December,” said Tim Armstrong, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Wilmington. “Earlier in the month it was in the 60s and 70s.”

The snow started falling just before midnight on Friday, Dec. 22, 1989. First there was an inch. Then came 9.6 inches on Saturday. And another 4.7 inches on Sunday, Christmas Eve. By Christmas morning, a total of 15.3 inches of snow had fallen and 13 inches continued to blanket the ground in Wilmington as the temperature dipped to 0 degrees.

By Weather Service standards, it was the only white Christmas the Port City and surrounding areas have ever had. The traces of snow that fell in 1948 and 1999 don’t count because they didn’t total an inch.

Both the 1989 snowfall and thermometer reading were historic for the N.C. coast. Snowfall totals were in the double digits throughout the region. Onslow and Carteret counties measured as many as 17 inches. Along the northern coast, snow amounts ranged from 13.3 inches at Cape Hatteras, 10 inches at Manteo to one inch at the Virginia border. Gale-force winds piled snow drifts four to eight feet high all along the coast. Many towns were paralyzed.

“There’s nothing else even close in the entire records that go back to 1871,” Armstrong said. “It takes a lot of crazy finagling in the atmosphere to get snow down here, especially that early in the season.”

The reason for this is the ocean temperature typically remains above 50 degrees in December, and that tends to throw warm air back onto shore, he said. We’re much more likely to get snow in January and February, when the water temperature bottoms out, he added.

“Generally when we have really cold air we have dry air, so we don’t have any precipitation,” said Rick Krietner, a meteorologist at the Weather Service’s Wilmington office. “If it’s moist enough it’s usually too warm.”

But in 1989, a low-pressure system developed over “a crazy intense Arctic cold mass that came down from Canada,” drawing moisture from the Atlantic back into the cold air, Armstrong said.

The result was a rare coastal North Carolina snow event.

“That was like the perfect storm for the Southeast,” said Mike Caropolo, the meteorologist in charge of the Weather Service office. “Everything has to line up just perfectly. It’s hard to get all those ingredients to come together at the same time here.”

Caropolo was an intern at the Wilmington office in 1989. He said “the forecast had no mention of snow in it.” So he started his drive home to New York for holiday vacation just after he got off work the night of Friday, Dec. 22. The white Christmas didn’t follow him there.

“For the two weeks I was up in New York I didn’t even see a flurry,” Caropolo said.

So could it happen here 23 years later? Not likely, meteorologists say.

The Weather Service website has a page dedicated to Christmas climatology. It shows a white Christmas probability of less than 5 percent for almost all of North Carolina. While it’s a little too soon to make an accurate call for Dec. 25, NWS meteorologists say look for slightly below-normal temperatures but don’t get your hopes up for snow.

Because the ocean temperature at Wrightsville Beach is currently 58 degrees, “it would take a heck of a cold air mass to overcome that heat coming out of the water,” Armstrong said.

But even if not at Christmas, don’t completely count out the possibility of another significant snowfall somewhere down the line in the Port City’s future.

“You just wonder if it’s a matter of time before we get another big winter storm,” Caropolo said.

This year is not likely to break records on the other end of the spectrum, either. The warmest it has ever been on Christmas Day was 77 degrees in 1955.

Those who lived through the coastal winter storm of 1989 remember it well, even more than two decades later.

Kathy Tolley, now single-copy manager at the Star-News, Wilmington’s daily newspaper, had just begun delivering papers for the company a few months before the snowstorm.

“I had a VW Rabbit diesel and it wouldn’t start to get to work,” she said. “They sent one of the district managers after me, and we delivered a route on the way back to the office. It was a nightmare. The city DMs (district managers) were trying their best to deliver to the customers in New Hanover County. They were in vans, sliding all over the place. I think we wound up with one stuck in a snow bank and one in a ditch.”

About five inches of snow covered downtown Washington in Beaufort County. Photo: Stan Deatherage, Beaufort County Now.

Gail Smyth of Wilmington did not yet live here back then but was visiting family near Wrightsville Beach.

“The only cars allowed on the road were 4-wheel-drive,” she said. “Thank god my dad had just bought a small Blazer, and being from New England I knew how to drive in the snow. Plus they were using farm equipment to try to clear the roads.”

Kristin Lubben of Boiling Spring Lakes in Brunswick County was also experienced in winter weather.

“We had just a few years earlier moved here from New York and were amazed at all the panic,” she said.

Over in Carolina Beach, some recalled snow drifts that reached several feet high and being stranded on the island for days.

For Carolina Beach resident Ryan Powell, who was 10 at the time, the thrill of a new Christmas present was too much to resist, even in the treacherous weather conditions.

“I got a go-cart that year and almost died when it slid and almost put me in the canal,” he said.

For others, Christmas went on much longer than planned.

“I will never forget my first Christmas in Wilmington,” said former resident Linda Honour, who now lives in Winston-Salem. “Friends visited for the holiday and stayed and stayed and stayed.”

For me, growing up in Sampson County an hour inland we had our fair share of snow that Christmas, too. I remember a photo of my 15-year-old self on the porch wearing my new brown leather bomber jacket, afraid to venture out too far into the snow for fear it would ruin my cherished present. The power was out for some time, and the plunging temperatures caused the whole family to sleep in the living room huddled around the fireplace.

Back in the 1980s, people on the N.C. coast rarely saw wild turkeys alongside roadways and in fields. In fact, the bird was quite scarce all over the Tar Heel State.

But by 2005, wild turkeys were flourishing across North Carolina and continue to proliferate today. Now it’s very common to see flocks of them in rural parts of eastern counties or even a few in more urban settings from time to time, including one photographed along a median near Target in Wilmington last year. The N.C. Coastal Federation’s Sam Bland routinely takes pictures of them grazing along the roads of Carteret County.

Numbers from the National Wild Turkey Federation show that the population growth is nationwide: 1 million in 1973 vs. 7-8 million today.

Bryan Perry

“Everyone talks about the good-old days,” said Bryan Perry, president of the federation’s N.C. chapter. “For turkeys these are the good-old days. There are more turkeys then there have ever been, including when the settlers were here.”

This didn’t happen by accident, however, but was rather the result of a 16-year plan that involved collaboration among agencies and many other states.

“It’s arguably the greatest conservation story ever,” said Zac Morton, the federation’s N.C. regional director. “It’s what brought the turkeys back.”

He’s referring to a restoration program that started here in 1989. The concept was simply to move turkeys from locations where they were abundant to those where they were scarce or absent. From 1989 to 2000, North Carolina brought in 1,743 birds from nine states at a cost of about $900,000, Morton said. Most of the money came from the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, with about $300,000 from the federation’s state chapter, which raises money through private donations at fund-raising events. In addition, the state received 150 wild turkeys from West Virginia in a trade for 100 river otters.

The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission had been working to replenish the wild turkey population with in-state trapping efforts since 1953 but “things really went into warp speed” when the federation got involved, said Robbie Norville, a coastal supervising wildlife biologist with the state agency.

“Turkey numbers had dwindled to the point that there were just a few isolated populations in North Carolina,” he said. “They were almost done on the coast.”

A flock of hens surround a tom in a field near Cape Carteret in Carteret County. Photo: Sam Bland.

The decline, which started around 1900 and continued into the 1960s, was primarily due to unregulated and heavy market hunting, rapid deforestation and habitat destruction throughout the state, according to the wildlife commission.

The state agency reports that 6,031 wild turkeys have been released on 358 restoration sites across the state since 1953. About three-fourths of these birds, or 4,443, were relocated just since 1990. The state’s wild turkey population has increased from an estimated 2,000 birds in 1970 to an estimated 260,000 in 2010. Restoration efforts wrapped up in 2005.

Wild turkeys now exist in all of North Carolina’s 100 counties, and they all have a spring gobbler season.

“We’re in wonderful shape,” said Norville, who recently saw a flock of at least 70 wild turkeys in Craven County. “Birds are showing up everywhere. Hunters are commenting to me all the time that they’re just seeing turkeys everywhere. We really don’t have a county here on the coast that doesn’t have a good flock of birds.”

Many hunters seek out wild turkeys just for sport, he said. “It’s real hunting, if you will,” Norville said. “It involves scouting and calling to the birds either with your voice by yelping or with devices. They are a very vocal animal, and since they are a flock bird they do ‘talk’ to each other.”

But many wild turkey hunters like to prepare and eat their catch, which has a “very rich flavor” and “tastes like a turkey should taste,” he added.

A tom struts his stuff. Photo: Sam Bland.

While coastal areas are teeming with wild turkeys nowadays, don’t expect to see them wading in the surf down at the beach, Morton said.

“Never say never, but there’s not much for a turkey to eat in the sand and they’re not going to drink the salt water,” he said. “You see them more in the spring in the fields during mating season. The male turkey is fanned out looking for females, and they do this in fields so they have more room.”

While they’re not into catching waves, there have been reports of seeing wild turkeys along wooded areas not far from the ocean in Carolina Beach and Emerald Isle.

“The turkey is an extremely adaptable animal, and that’s why the project has been so successful, “ Morton said. “Basically turkeys can survive almost anywhere.”

The male eastern wild turkey has dark plumage with bronze, copper and green iridescent colors. On the inside of their legs, males have pointed growths known as spurs that they use when battling other males for mates. They average about 20 pounds.

Males also have a growth of bristle-like feathers known as the beard that extends from the chest. It is not uncommon, however, to find females with a beard. The head and neck of adult males are largely bare and vary in color from red to blue to white, depending on the bird’s mood. Females, which weigh about 10 pounds, are usually duller in color than males, which helps camouflage them while they are nesting.

The eastern wild turkey, or Meleagris gallopavo, thrives best in areas with a mix of forested and open land habitats. Forested areas are used for cover, foraging and for roosting in trees at night. Open land areas are used for foraging, mating and brood rearing.

While North Carolina is in its wild turkey heyday, many other states in the Southeast are starting to see declines again, some as much as 75 percent. A task force created in 2010 and researchers at the University of Georgia are working to identify the reasons and mitigate the impact.

“It’s more than a fluke because there are too many states seeing it,” Perry said. “We haven’t seen it here yet, but once people started seeing turkeys everywhere we all got kind of somewhat complacent. There’s still work to be done to make sure what we have is going to stay.”

SOUTHPORT — It’s been two years since a couple members of No Port Southport joined forces to form a separate group that strives to look at the bigger picture. Now they’re taking a big step toward reaching their goals, one of which is establishing a national seashore along the lower Cape Fear River.

Save the Cape has leased office space and officially opened its doors at 618 N. Howe St. in Southport on Monday.  The historic building on the city’s main thoroughfare offers a front porch complete with a swing for the group’s leaders and members to congregate on pleasant days.

The founders and co-directors of the nonprofit group, Mike Rice and Toby Bronstein, hope this high-visibility location will allow them more frequent interaction with the public so they can promote the national seashore concept more widely and gain as much support as possible.

“It’s going to be challenging, but we’ve never shied away from a challenge,” Bronstein said.

Mike Rice and Toby Bronstein. Photo: Judy Royal.

The group is proposing the Cape Fear National Seashore, a protected area taking in Masonboro Island on the Atlantic Coast and all of the state parks and natural areas on the east side of the Cape Fear River south of Snow’s Cut to Bald Head Island. On the west side of the river, the northern limit would be the Town Creek swamp forest, and the reserved area would extend south to the sea at Caswell Beach. The reserved area would not include existing incorporated communities and the Military Ocean Terminal at Sunny Point.

The effort grew out of public opposition to the N.C. State Ports Authority’s N.C. International Terminal, a proposed mega-port in southeastern North Carolina for large container ships. The authority purchased more than 600 acres of old farming fields and woodlands stretching 4,000 feet along the Cape Fear River off East Moore Street near Southport for $30 million in 2006 for the new port. That idea, however, appears to be somewhat of a pipe dream after political opposition and funding snags have put the project on hold indefinitely. The land is now worth just under $13 million.

“It occurred to us that we should push for something really big: a national seashore,” Rice said.

The Save the Cape folks aren’t sure how the 600-acre tract would fit into the equation, but they think at least 200 acres could be a direct part of the protected area. As for the rest of the land, they are open to possibilities such allowing the local movie industry to use it as a backlot, having a national seashore headquarters there or even building an incubator for light industry.

But one thing is certain: They do not think it’s appropriate for heavy industry and will not rest until it’s rezoned “to something more benign,” Bronstein said. She and Rice admit most of their efforts thus far have been on the immediate goal of stopping the port with the national seashore idea still in conceptual stages.

“I think we’ll always be in stop-the-port mode until there’s disposition of that land,” Bronstein said. “We don’t believe it’s dead. We believe it’s simmering on the back burner. We don’t believe it’s as threatening today as it was a year ago, but we don’t believe it’s dead.”

“Right now there’s a virus that’s very much alive but dormant,” Rice added. “Until it’s snuffed out somehow, it’s a danger.”

They do, however, want to move forward with establishing a Cape Fear National Seashore as a parallel activity. They’ve spoken to Don Barger, senior director of the Southeast Regional Office of the National Parks Conservation Association, who has helped them identify the criteria for obtaining a feasibility study for national park status. They are:

• National, historical significance
• Suitability or uniqueness of the area
• Feasibility, or whether the physical integrity of the area remains intact and pristine

Save the Cape hopes to include some portion of the land that the state bought for the proposed International Terminal in to new national park.

Save the Cape leaders are looking into ways the public can acquire the land and are exploring possibilities, such as working with the N.C. Coastal Land Trust. The group acquires and protects of undeveloped land along the coast. It has, for instance, protected tracts on Masonboro and Lea islands. The group sometimes purchases lots in the areas identified for protection, but owners also occasionally donate them. Bronstein said she doesn’t think the latter is a possibility with the pricy parcels in question, but they plan to forge ahead.

“People have moved here from all over the country because of its unique charms,” she said.

North Carolina already has two of the country’s 10 national seashore areas: Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout. Establishing such a designation literally takes an act of Congress, and the National Park Service requires many studies before that can happen.

Rice and Bronstein know they have a big task ahead of them, but that’s why they formed Save the Cape.

“You can’t fight something with nothing, and a positive approach might resonate better and give people an objective,” Rice said. “What Toby and I sense in this area is that it’s a very special place that is unique in many ways. There are creatures and plants here that live nowhere else.”

She and Rice stressed that they are not environmental extremists but rather concerned citizens seeking a more balanced approach to growth.

“We are not opposed to economic development,” Bronstein said. “We want economic development, but we want responsible economic development. We want to foster a respect and an appreciation for this unique area that we live in but not to the exclusion of job creation and economic development.”

They’ve modeled their organization after Save the Bay, an effort to protect Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, established in 1970 as a result of a number of grassroots groups. Now, Save the Bay boasts dozens of employees, regular funding and political clout in the state.

“When a project comes along they get a seat at the table because they’re recognized as representing a lot of constituents and as someone who has to be reckoned with,” Rice said. “So that’s why we’re doing this. There should be an objective of changing people’s attitudes about what this area is all about.”