Huguenot Memorial Park on the Northeast side of Jacksonville is leased by the City of Jacksonville from the Army Corps of Engineers and the State of Florida. This remarkable park hosts a wealth of declining species, but has struggled historically with balancing the protection of these resources with intense recreational use, including high volumes of cars driving on the beach. In response to resource impacts like the death of chicks from the park’s interior colony due to beach driving and the all-too-common swamping of cars by the tide, the State required a new management plan, conditionally approved last December, to better manage the park’s resources and use.
This Thursday, the state Acquisition and Restoration Council will be reviewing the implementation of the plan. Write them now and voice your support for the wildlife at Huguenot!
Better protection of the park’s birdlife was urgently needed and Audubon and natural resource agencies like USFWS and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission got right to work helping City staff implement the plan. We
lent biological expertise through the park’s shorebird management team, and provided hundreds of hours of volunteer “bird stewards” to implement protected areas and provide outreach to park visitors.
Together we successfully created a protected area for migrating Red Knots. Other protections allowed better foraging for large flocks of declining species on the cove mudflats (including some unlikely birds, see sidebar at right!).
However, not all aspects of the plan were implemented as they were intended. Funding and staffing shortfalls, as well as a lack of political support, made it difficult for park staff to implement some of the protection measures. Pressure from beach driving interests made the city delay the creation of protected areas for flightless chicks, and this year again, too many young royal terns and laughing gulls died. The sensitive emergent flats on the point of the park were not closed to driving and swimming as they should have been, for the protection of wildlife, as well as for human safety. And now the city appears to be backing away from their previous commitments to protect these shoals vital to Red Knots and other shorebirds.
Thursday, ARC will have an opportunity to modify this plan again. Audubon is recommending a simpler plan, that will be less expensive to implement, less susceptible to outside pressure, and would adequately protect the wildlife. Setting aside a portion of the park’s beach as vehicle-free will provide the right balance: decent protection of the wildlife and, a car-free area for nature lovers and families.
Why’s Huguenot So Special? This remarkable park at the mouth of the St. Johns hosts a wealth of declining species, providing vital stopover habitat for imperiled Red Knots, federally designated critical wintering habitat for threatened Piping Plovers, a state-designated critical wildlife area for Florida’s only Atlantic coast Royal Tern and Laughing Gull colony, nesting habitat for marine turtles as well as historic nesting habitat for declining American Oystercatchers, Gull-billed Terns, Least Terns, Black Skimmers and Wilson’s Plovers.
Protect It and They Will Come: This May, after protections were implemented to exclude vehicles from Huguenot’s sensitive cove-side mudflats, a Greater Sand Plover arrived on the scene! This vagrant from Asia was only the second US record and lingered for two weeks on this attractive foraging habitat, drawing birdwatchers from as far as Canada!
