by Emmy Casper, Wildlife Biologist

This year, CWF embarked on a new, ambitious project to monitor and characterize the previously understudied population of American oystercatchers nesting along the Delaware Bayshore. Since so little is known about this breeding population, we had a lot of ground to cover this first field season, both physically and metaphorically. One of the goals of the project is to characterize threats to oystercatcher nest success on the bayshore, whether it be predators, flooding, or something else entirely. It sounds straightforward, but when you consider the span of the project (35 sites across approximately 45 miles of bayshore), monitoring nesting pairs gets a bit more challenging. That’s where game cameras come in.

Game cameras are an extremely useful tool for wildlife monitoring. Cameras deployed at nest sites can provide valuable information about oystercatcher behavior, predator presence, and nest fate (whether the nest hatched or was lost prior to hatching). This is especially important for our Delaware Bay sites, many of which are remote and cannot be monitored as frequently as other locations. Game cameras enhance our in-the-field monitoring and can pinpoint the true cause of nest loss that would otherwise be difficult to determine in the field. Accurate knowledge of nest fate and predator presence is crucial for understanding which factors significantly impact oystercatcher success along the bayshore.

I will admit, after looking through hours of game camera footage it begins to feel like you’re binge-watching a reality TV show series. Keeping Up with the Oystercatchers, anyone? Like any good reality TV show, there’s always a bit of entertaining drama, like an oystercatcher pair’s ongoing feud with their Canada geese neighbors. Other moments, like a chick predation or nest loss, can be heartbreaking and difficult to watch. For almost every sad moment, there is something beautiful to see, like a rainbow over a nest or parents caring for their freshly hatched chicks. And there are some seriously surprising plot twists. We were most surprised this year by the constant presence of bald eagles at oystercatcher nests. Imagine our shock when we watched two juvenile eagles accidentally destroy an oystercatcher nest with a piece of wood!

We were able to deploy game cameras at almost every bayshore oystercatcher nest we monitored this season. Processing all of the footage can be time consuming, but the results have been worth the work. We’ve already been able to gain valuable information about predator communities and factors influencing nest success at each site, and we plan to continue using cameras as monitoring tools next season. Check out some of the highlights from this season, below.

Tags: american oystercatcher, bald eagle, Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey, CWF, Delaware Bayshore, Fox, Game cameras, Great-horned owl, Nest Monitoring, New Jersey, NJ

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2023 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Beach Nesting Birds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.