Black Rail is the smallest and rarest of the North American rails. Photo courtesy of Mike Legare/USFWS The Black Rail is the smallest and rarest of the North American rails. This elusive species has a striking appearance with its dark body and bright red iris, and of the five subspecies of Black Rail, [...]
South Carolina Department of Natural resources is celebrating a successful nesting season for seabirds and shorebirds. The beaches that are critical for these nesting seabirds are also places were people enjoy recreational activities. To allow the birds to nest and raise their chicks undisturbed, portions of several of the islands were closed temporarily to provide [...]
Birds face many threats related to humans, including predation by petcats, and collisions with buildings, towers and automobiles. Experts estimate that the greatest source of mortality in human-dominated landscapes is bird-window collisions (BWCs). Sheet glass placed in the exterior walls of buildings represents an invisible barrier to bird flight, and collisions occur as birds attempt [...]
The Swallow-tailed Kite (STKI) Alliance met in mid-September to discuss priorities for management and conservation of STKIs and the tentative results of a recent range-wide survey in the United States. Topics discussed included: habitat modeling; predation; best management practices; conservation partnerships and the importance of private lands to the conservation efforts for STKI; managing kites [...]
The Joint Northeast/Southeast Partners in Flight conference was October 6-9 in Virginia Beach and provided a valuable forum for bird conservationists, managers, and researchers across the Eastern U.S. to gather in person, share information, and develop collaborative strategies for addressing high priority threats. The conference was attended by over 150 people, representing almost 60 different [...]
Beaches, along with the accompanying dunes and shoreface environments were established after stabilization of sea level less than 7,000 years ago. The coastal dunes behind beaches and the shoreface regime seaward of the beach are tied together as a beach system with each of these features having unique differences. However, the exchange of sand between [...]
Bottomland hardwood forests are river swamps. They are found along rivers and streams of the southeast and south central United States, generally in broad floodplains. These ecosystems are commonly found wherever streams or rivers at least occasionally cause flooding beyond their channel confines. They are deciduous forested wetlands, made up of different species of Gum [...]
Early successional habitat is habitat with vigorously growing grasses, forbs, shrubs and trees, which provide excellent food and cover for wildlife but need disturbance to be maintained. Examples of early successional habitats include weedy areas, grasslands, old fields or pastures, shrub thickets (e.g. dogwood or alder), and young forest. If these habitats are not mowed, [...]
Freshwater wetlands are unified primarily by the fact that they are all nontidal freshwater systems dominated by grasses, sedges, and other freshwater plants. However, they differ in their geologic origins and their driving hydrologic forces, and they vary in size from small pothole marshes less than a hectare in size to the immense saw grass [...]
The term “forested swamp” usually refers to a wetlands system dominated by trees or other woody vegetation. A wide variety of such systems are found throughout the world. In temperate regions forested swamps can be dominated by trees that tolerate permanent to semipermanent flooding such as the bald cypress or swamp tupelo in the southern [...]