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THERESA BLACKWELLNative vegetation planted to bolster beauty and wildlife is paying dividends years later as a home to black skimmers.
CLEARWATER - They celebrated the start of construction on two 21-story condominiums on Sand Key wielding trowels, not shovels.
The developer, officials and condo buyers wore garden gloves as they broke ground for the Grande on Sand Key in 1995. But instead of flinging dirt, they dug into the dunes to plant sea oats, the first of 24,000 native plants that would send their roots down to hold the sand.
This summer, about 550 black skimmers have validated that effort by settling in to nest there. That's nearly 15 percent of Florida's black skimmers, according to statistics from Audubon of Florida.
"It's a perfect area for them," said Monique Abrams, a St. Petersburg Audubon volunteer who leads a project on another shore-nesting bird, the least tern. "There is no disturbance coming from behind them, so it makes them feel safer."
The bird, black and white with a black-tipped red bill, is listed by the state as a species of special concern, primarily because so little beach habitat is left for nesting. Even those sites are frequently disturbed. When parents are scared off the nest, eggs cook and young dehydrate in the Florida sun, or predators such as gulls and crows swoop in for a meal. Beach raking, beach renourishment and flooding from storms may also take a toll.
From the start, the unique groundbreaking at the Grande was meant to counteract some of those perils.
The builder and developer, JMC Communities of St. Petersburg, wanted to do more than mitigate for the disturbance of development. It aimed to restore natural Florida habitat for sea turtles, birds and other wildlife as well as enhance the landscape's beauty. It also gave the condominiums storm surge protection behind heaps of sand.
So developers studied Florida's natural beach vegetation and tried to replicate it by removing exotic plants, shoring up the dunes with a little sand and planting sea oats, cord grass and beach sunflower.
This summer, that work paid off as a bumper crop of black skimmer chicks grew to adult size at the Grande. Audubon volunteers posted the site, roping off the nesting area and installing signs. Most residents and visitors respected the posted area, and Clearwater police volunteers monitored beach activity.
On one visit, 220 juvenile black skimmers were counted. It is, by far, Pinellas County's most successful colony of the birds.
By comparison, a colony of black skimmers at Shell Key abandoned their first nests. Then 25 black skimmers were nesting again at last count, with no chicks. Similarly, Audubon volunteers counted 18 fledged or near-flying young at Three Rooker Bar. And a small colony at Indian Shores had produced just two chicks at last count.
JMC Communities Chief Executive Officer J. Michael Cheezem said it was exciting and rewarding to hear about the success of the black skimmers at the Grande.
Steve McAuliffe, vice president of sales and marketing, said JMC takes the environment seriously and tries to do something to enhance the natural environment at all the communities it builds. They can only hope for an outcome like that at the Grande.
"When it does happen, it's thrilling," he said.
Alex Kropp, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, attributed some of the colony's outcome to the fact that someone noticed it and it was posted to keep out intruders.
"It's a big success story when those colonies are reported and we can post it," he said. "It just makes such a difference to the birds."
The Audubon volunteer in charge of posting most Pinellas nesting sites is David Hopkins of Sand Key, 64, a retired environmental engineer.
When the black skimmers began to settle in next to the dunes at the Grande, Hopkins and other volunteers posted the area with stakes, string, flagging and signs on May 10. Then Hopkins counted 11 chicks, the first ones, on June 18.
The fight for survival was on as more and more chicks hatched. Gulls took some, and fireworks littered the area around the colony after July 4. A beach raker agreed to suspend raking in the area for nesting season, and a child with a big kite sent parents to the air.
But most chicks thrived, reaching the size of their parents before long and taking little jaunts to practice dipping their beaks into the gulf, a prelude to flying and fishing.
The short-legged black skimmers look squatty on earth, but they are beauties in flight. With long, graceful wings, they maneuver expertly and skim the water's surface with the lower part of their long beaks to catch fish. Sometimes a dozen fly together in a spiraling swirl, a dance of precision a Blue Angel would envy.
Hopkins put up "chick crossing" signs to warn beachgoers to watch out for the chicks visiting the shore, and took down the posted area when the juveniles started exploring farther afield to the north in front of the Sheraton Sand Key Resort and Sand Key Park and farther south to the Meridian condominiums.
When Hopkins visited the colony Aug. 5, winds were up and the speckled juveniles were mostly hunkered down in the sand, hardly moving in the late morning sun except when a runner or a child ran close by them. The black skimmer parents could afford less vigilance now, with the chicks grown to full size. Lessons in fishing would come when the wind and water settled down.
Hopkins gives credit to the residents for giving the birds some peace while they nested and to all the others who helped, such as the Clearwater police volunteers who patrol the beach. But he feels a special debt to JMC Communities for providing a natural setting for nesting.
Hopkins has become active in Audubon only in the past three years, he said.
"Audubon used to be a bunch of bird watchers," he said. "But then they figured out that unless they preserved that habitat, there wouldn't be any birds to watch.
"So, thank you, developer," he said in the direction of the Grande.