Here are four quick iPhone photos that I took yesterday while walking the length of Stratford’s Long Beach all the way to Bridgeport’s Pleasure Beach during string fencing and signage removal operations with the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and Audubon Connecticut, our partners in the Audubon Alliance for Coastal Waterbirds. I did not haul my camera gear a half mile plus down the beach because we were doing physical labor, pulling up wooden stakes and then carrying them back to the parking lot. While walking all the way out I saw a Gatorade bottle and, of course, had to find a Powerade bottle as well among all the trash. The landscape photo features a red balloon on the beach, as always – stop letting them fly away already, huh? The fourth shot is of an Piping Plover exclosure, now that we can get close to it as breeding season is over and the only birds that remain are grown juveniles. These exclosures work very well to protect the threatened species and their eggs! The biggest problem we had in 2015 was aerial predation after the young hatched. Nevertheless, it was a tremendous season with much more to come on that soon. We have weeks of field work to go, but thank you once again to all of our tremendous volunteers! Education will go on, and on..and on…whether it is about our birds or all of the garbage we keep filling our environment with…
Scott Kruitbosch
Conservation & Outreach Coordinator
