I made a general tour of several parts of the Hoover Nature Preserve today
to determine how much damage was done to my nest box trail by the storms Sunday
afternoon. The damage was devastating in many areas. So many trees with nest
boxes were down in the areas I checked that I will begin doing maintenance
as if I had never started. I will recover the boxes from the downed trees and
reinstall them at new locations. The bottom line, instead of 81 boxes to go,
it's 250 again, as I will need to determine the nest boxes that will need to
be reinstalled or replaced if damaged beyond use. The one positive is that
this occurred after the Prothonotary Warblers finished nesting and headed
south.
Linda came along with me and while there we did note what activity was
present. The five American White Pelicans are still present and we watched them as
they fed right off the boardwalk at Area M. Later they all perched on a log
in the water further off the boardwalk, but they were still very viewable.
There were a variety of shorebirds near the boardwalk including 13 Short-billed
Dowitchers, 6 Long-billed Dowitchers, 2 Stilt Sandpipers, 4 Greater
Yellowlegs, 2 Lesser Yellowlegs, 2 Solitary Sandpipers, 1 Spotted Sandpiper, 11
Sanderlings, 6 Least Sandpipers, 3 Semipalmated Plovers and many Killdeer. We could
see many other shorebirds south of the island with the Osprey platform and
over by Wiese Road, but sans a spotting scope we didn't identify them. There
also were 9 Great Egrets, 1 immature Bald Eagle and 1 Osprey at Area M.
Area N looked like the area had been bombed. Trees were toppled like
pick-up-sticks. I will need to recover and reinstall 9 nest boxes in just this area.
As we walked through the devastation in the back portion of Area N we
stumbled into a flourish of warblers.They included Tennessee, Orange-crowned, Cape
May, Blackburnian, Yellow-throated, Black-and-white and Wilson's Warblers.
Charlie Bombaci
Hoover Nature Preserve
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