Coastal Services Center

For 30 years, the Mississippi Coast Audubon Society has been working to protect beach-nesting least terns, other birds, and the habitats on which those species depend. One of the Audubon chapter’s key and recently expanded projects has been Nest in Peace, a model for local stewardship that involves sand fencing and signage to protect habitat, public education and involvement, and monitoring and research.

On the day the interview to talk about Nest in Peace was scheduled with Mark LaSalle, coastal project director for Mississippi Audubon, Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast.

A week later, after he and his family had safely evacuated from their flooded home in Ocean Springs, LaSalle talked about the impacts of Katrina on the project and how Nest in Peace would come back better than ever. He also saw the opportunity the storm would provide for environmental groups to join with regulators to rebuild beaches with habitat and storm protection in mind, and to help spur the state’s economic recovery through ecotourism.

The Big One

“Obviously, we didn’t talk on Monday,” was the start of the e-mail LaSalle sent four days after the massive storm devastated the Gulf Coast. While news coverage provided the nation with horrific images of lost lives and destroyed homes and businesses, from LaSalle’s vantage point in Vicksburg , it was difficult to evaluate the environmental damage that also was experienced along Mississippi’s shore.

“As for the terns or [Nest in Peace] signs, I doubt that any of that survived. I am assuming that the beach profile was altered significantly,” LaSalle wrote.

During a telephone conversation a few days later, LaSalle admits to anxiously awaiting next year’s tern nesting season, but predicts “these birds will come back.”

One reason for his optimism is that Katrina hit the coast after the tern nesting season ended.

LaSalle also believes that “hurricanes are natural phenomena. Every so often they come in and reset the clocks in an area. It’s all part of the natural cycle.”

Project Interrupted

Under the Nest in Peace project, Mississippi Audubon, with support from the Harrison County Sand Beach Department, works to maintain four safe nesting areas for the endangered least terns on beaches in Gulfport and Biloxi.

Over the past three decades, Mississippi Audubon has helped census those colonies, put up protective sand fencing, and erected and maintained the Nest in Peace signs, as well as interpretive signage designed to educate beachgoers about the need to protect the
habitat and birds. In addition to using the Nest in Peace logo on bumper stickers and road signs, the society constructed an interpretive boardwalk, complete with viewing benches, so visitors could see the colonies without disturbing the birds.

“People need to understand why they have to leave these animals alone,” LaSalle says. “Any disturbance can be catastrophic” because terns are easily chased off their nests, and a chick or egg can die after as little as 15 minutes exposure to intense midday sun.

Recent Additions

This year, Mississippi Audubon “did some different things,” LaSalle notes.

The group expanded efforts to engage youth and the general public in the project, and worked with the National Audubon Society as part of its Coastal Bird Conservation Program to conduct an exhaustive survey of all coastal nesting birds along the state’s shoreline.

During the summer, area schoolteachers involved students in research, monitoring, and protection efforts. This included constructing a selection of shelters that tern chicks could use for protection if they should wander from the nest, and monitoring to see if the chicks used the shelters and which shelter worked best.

The middle school student volunteers “dutifully went out there for six to eight weeks taking down data,” LaSalle says. “The bottom line of what they found is that the chicks did use the shelters.”

LaSalle says that the work the chapter and volunteers did as part of the field-based, science-driven Coastal Bird Conservation Program “improved the value of 25 years of tern census data.”

“What we really want to do,” he says, “is take that data . . . and look in-depth at trends and what we can do to improve the habitat.”

After the Storm

LaSalle is adamant that Mississippi Audubon will continue the Nest in Peace project, “Katrina or no Katrina.”

“If anything, it will revitalize our program even more than before,” he says. “We really did pick it up a couple notches this year, and we will pick up where we left off next year.”

He also believes the storm is granting resource organizations and regulatory agencies the opportunity to better plan the environmental recovery.

“We are drafting white papers right now to get to the Mississippi regulatory folks,” LaSalle says. “We want to engage them in a conversation as soon as is practicable to identify good-quality areas that can be restored to help protect human resources and to provide habitat for animals.

“Hopefully, we can lessen the impacts of future storms, within reason, and provide wonderful natural habitat that can support wildlife and restore the beauty of the Gulf Coast.” This in turn will serve to prime the area’s economic generator.

“Having good, high-quality natural areas is part of the tourist economy,” LaSalle explains.

Even before the storm, LaSalle was working to establish an education and ecotourism center
for the region, and he plans to continue those efforts. “We really need to be promoting nature-based ecotourism on the Gulf Coast. This is the first big effort to identify a facility that would help support that.”

Positive Attitude

LaSalle is confident that Mississippi’s coast can recover from the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina.

“Let’s clean up and get back to work,” he says. “I grew up in coastal Louisiana and the people who live in these areas, well, you pull up your britches and you go on. What else can you do?”

For more information on Mississippi Coast Audubon Society’s Nest in Peace project, contact Mark LaSalle at (228) 475-0825, or mlasalle@audubon.org.