Education is a cornerstone for all of Audubon Florida’s outreach activities to people young and not-so-young. In the St. Petersburg area, summer was a time for educating elementary and middle school science teachers and for outreach to young students at summer nature camps. Audubon Florida received a generous two-year grant from the Jessie Ball DuPont Foundation which is funding these education outreach activities focused on beach-nesting birds.
Marianne Korosy, Florida Important Bird Area Coordinator, taught a unit on beach-nesting birds twice in June at St. Pete Audubon’s teacher ecology camp, an annual camp led by educators Jeanne Murphy and Brian Lane, of Sensing Nature, Inc. Eighteen or more teachers attended each week-long camp of presentations and hands-on outdoor field trips to bio-hotspots such as the beach-nesting bird sanctuary at Fort Desoto County Park and a large rooftop-nesting colony of Least Terns.
In June and twice in August, Marianne taught a unit on beach-nesting birds to mostly elementary school-age children at Boyd Hill Nature Camp in south St. Petersburg. The youngsters learned that although Least Terns and Black Skimmers may appear to be resting on beaches in spring and summer, they are actually caring for speckled eggs or tiny chicks that blend in with beach sand so they are less visible to predators like Fish Crows. A sand-box demonstration using skimmer and tern decoys with nest scrapes and painted eggs illustrated the importance of staying outside of roped-off beach areas around bird-parents while they are incubating eggs and tending flightless chicks.
The highlight of the workshop was egg-painting, in which each child used watercolors to paint one beach-nesting bird egg and the other egg to paint in colors of their choice. When the egg-painting was completed we took kids and eggs back outdoors to the sandbox to make their own sand-scrape nests in which to display their eggs. Camp instructor, Dave Goodwin, plans to include this unit in camp next summer and also plans to add a trip to Fort Desoto Park that will focus on beach-nesting birds!
