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Every weekday morning CAI brings you coverage of local issues, news, and stories that matter. Join us for Morning Edition from 6 a.m. to 9a.m., with Kathryn Eident.

Seashore Crafts Plan to Protect Shorebirds

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Officials at the Cape Cod National Seashore have released a 200-page shorebird protection plan, which could include killing some of the birds' predators.

The Cape Cod National Seashore has released a lengthy plan designed to protect endangered shorebirds at the Seashore. The plan includes selectively killing or removing predators that threaten the birds -- an initiative that's been controversial in the past.

The 200-plus-page document is aimed at helping officials meet federal mandates for protecting endangered birds, while also ensuring access for the 4 million people that visit the area each year. The federal government also has protection benchmarks that must be met, such as how many birds should survive nesting season.
 
WCAI's Kathryn Eident spoke about the plan with Mary Hake, resource management specialist at the Cape Cod National Seashore. Eident asked Hake about the balance between federal protective mandates and beach-goers access.  

"These shorebirds are very sensitive to these human disturbances, and because of that, their populations have been in decline," Hake said. "We do our best to provide visitor use, but we also have some concerns and problems with compliance."

It’s not just human impacts that Seashore officials need to account for; Hake says they also have to take into account predators and habitat loss. 
 
"We’re dealing with sort of a broken system," she said.  "One of those broken systems is the number of predators that we are experiencing here. Predators eating the eggs, and likely the chicks, are likely for egg loss and are the main reason why we are not reaching these productivity goals, or the number of chicks that fledge in a given year."
 
American crows, coyotes and fox are the main predators on shorebird eggs. The official term for dealing with these predators is “selective predator management," which requires killing or removing animals that are eating endangered shorebirds and their eggs.

Hake said that usually it’s just one or two animals that cause the most trouble.
 
"So if you remove that one individual crow, or a particular coyote that is keyed into this nesting area, you would create a window of time to allow for these ground-nesting shorebirds to breed and raise their young without constantly re-nesting," she said.   
 
Seashore officials are not seeing these endangered and threatened bird populations recover—in fact, they’re declining, she said. So they’ve come up with four proposals for action and will choose one to implement. 
 
These proposals range from not doing anything differently, to basically closing down entire sections of beach to protect the birds during nesting season, which runs from March through October. Hake said they’re hoping to strike a balance somewhere in the middle.
 
"It would provide a sort of comprehensive and adaptive management plan to protect these special status species," she said. "And we would hope that it would likely meet and possibly exceed species recovery goals by managing these predator impacts through non lethal methods like putting up predator exclosures but also through lethal predator removal." 
 
While Hake recognizes that the thought of killing one animal to save another can be difficult for some people to accept, she says the results can be dramatic. 
 
"In 2010," she said, "the USDA removed one coyote from Plymouth that had a large population of tern species. And 3.4 pounds of tern chicks were in the stomach of this coyote, so that means that 50-100 chicks were predated on a single night by a single coyote."  
 
The National Seashore is taking comments about the management proposal for the next 30 days. People interested can go to its website -- http://www.nps.gov/caco/index.htm -- to register a comment.