Editor's note:
Before this story was published, Shiloh Schulte, a senior shorebird scientist with Manomet Conservation Sciences, died in a helicopter crash while in Alaska doing conservation work. Schulte coordinated the American Oystercatcher Working Group, the multi-state species recovery partnership to which Florida belongs.
Even as populations dwindle for hundreds of bird species across the United States, there are some success stories taking flight: like for the American oystercatcher, one of Florida's most iconic — and threatened — shorebirds.
Compared to 15 years ago, the oystercatcher population that breeds along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts is up 43%, according to the American Bird Conservancy. There are nearly 15,000 oystercatchers in North America today,compared to about 10,000 in 2008, according to Shiloh Schulte, a former senior shorebird scientist with Manomet Conservation Sciences.
It's a welcome outlier in the world of shorebird conservation, Schulte said. "Shorebirds, as a species group, are declining rapidly. And oystercatchers are one of the few that's not."
Schulte first began working with American oystercatchers in the early 2000s, when he participated in an expansive aerial survey of North American shorebirds revealing the species was at risk. "We flew the whole coast, the Atlantic coast and then the Gulf, in a little Cessna at about 400 feet up."
The initial national survey revealed oystercatchers were threatened by habitat loss, Schulte said. The species doesn't move inland, depending on coastal habitats and forage to survive. Before long, Schulte started coordinating the multi-state working group credited for helping drive oystercatchers' gains since 2008.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is involved in the working group, and so is the Florida Shorebird Alliance, a statewide network of local partnerships focused on shorebird and seabird conservation. Within the network, volunteers contribute to the state's long-term monitoring data by helping survey and count bird populations throughout the year.
Volunteer David Hartgrove was one of the FSA's very first members. Today, Hartgrove is co-conservation chair for Halifax River Audubon, one of three Audubon Florida chapters in Volusia County.
For about 20 years now, Hartgrove has been monitoring oystercatchers who nest on the Halifax River in Port Orange, he said one June morning from a pavilion at Port Orange Causeway Park. Steps away from the park's fishing pier and boat launch, Hartgrove uses a spotting scope — basically, a telescope — to view nesting oystercatchers on three spoil islands (one of which is a state-designated Critical Wildlife Area).
"If I've got oystercatchers that I know are incubating eggs over here, I'll be here three or four times a week, at least," Hartgrove said. Right now, in late June, most young oystercatchers have hatched and are getting ready to fly.
Holding onto habitat
Looking collectively at all the years he's been tracking oystercatchers in Port Orange, Hartgrove said, the population appears relatively stable.
"It's not going up, it's not going down. It's pretty much staying the same all the time," Hartgrove said.
That's despite a range of threats facing shorebirds in Florida, from predators and human interference to nest overwash from storms and rising high tides. On the Nature Coast, which draws in the largest concentration of wintering oystercatchers each year, longer-lasting high tides corresponded with a 7.3% decline in annual survival over 12 years, according to a 2023 study by FWC researchers.
Co-author Janell Brush with FWC's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute leads the agency's research on seabirds and shorebirds. For Brush, the study's results underscore what she said is her biggest concern for oystercatchers in Florida: habitat loss.
"With the tides getting higher and higher, less habitat is available for oystercatchers at high tide," Brush said. "With the degradation of coastal habitats due to repeated storms and erosion, we've been focusing our attention more on: how can we restore and enhance the habitats where these birds want to be?"
Ideally, oystercatchers will return to the same nesting site year after year, preferably while keeping their distance from other oystercatchers (although if the habitat is just too good to pass up, like at Cedar Key, they'll begrudgingly nest in closer quarters together, Brush said).
But as Florida becomes increasingly developed, especially near the coast, prime nesting habitat is getting harder to come by. "The more developed an area you have, the less suitable habitat that you have that's available for species like oystercatchers to nest," Brush said.
Oystercatchers like to nest in low-lying coastal areas, above the high tide line. And it's especially key for their nesting habitat to be near a food source, which for oystercatchers is primarily (and perhaps unsurprisingly) oysters.
"The closer that food source is to the oystercatchers and oystercatcher chicks, the more likely those chicks are going to survive," Brush said.
Unlike most shorebird babies, young oystercatchers can't feed themselves right away. They need time to learn their parents' technique for cracking open mollusk shells, and for their beaks to grow long enough to do so. In the meantime, oystercatcher parents take turns watching their young and foraging for food nearby — which, in Central Florida, usually means a trip to the nearest oyster reef.
Supporting a "habitat mosaic"
Globally, a majority of oyster habitats have been lost, due largely to decades of overharvesting and coastal urbanization. Reflecting this trend, the Indian River Lagoon has lost about 63% of its oyster reef acreage since 1943, according to Linda Walters, a marine biology professor at the University of Central Florida.
Since 2007, Walters and the lab she runs at UCF have been working to restore oyster reefs in the lagoon's northernmost section, the Mosquito Lagoon. Boating activity and sea level rise have caused damage, breaking up reefs into smaller pieces and reducing the estuary's overall oyster coverage. That loss can have big consequences for a complex marine ecosystem like the Indian River Lagoon.
"Oysters filter the water. They make it so the seagrass can thrive, which makes it so the fish can thrive, and the crabs, the other invertebrates," Walters said.
To put it simply, more oysters means a healthier lagoon. That, in turn, is as good for ecotourism as it is for shorebirds who depend on the estuary for habitat and to forage for food, Walters said.
"The more good habitat we have, the more birds we'll have," Walters said.
The oyster reef restorations led by Walters and completed in collaboration with local conservation and community partners have translated to documented habitat improvements in and around the Mosquito Lagoon, according to UCF.
But this work supporting the estuary's "habitat mosaic," as Walters calls it, hasn't stopped with oyster reefs. Seagrass restoration is the newest layer of Walters's conservation work, which in 2011 also began to include living shoreline projects.
Living shorelines are a type of green infrastructure technique, using native vegetation and other natural materials to stabilize shorelines against erosion while enhancing biodiversity, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Walters described it as "the least destructive way to protect a shoreline."
"We are trying to get it back to what it was naturally," Walters said. "So as opposed to using any sort of hard armoring, [like] a seawall or putting really large rocks out, this is the low-tech way to protect your shoreline."
Seawalls, living shorelines and hybrid solutions
Seawalls are hard structures, usually made of concrete or metal, installed along shorelines to protect against erosion. They can be very effective at stabilizing coastal areas, at least for a time. But seawalls also have some big drawbacks, including for wildlife habitat, according to Jason Evans, an ecologist by training who runs Stetson University's Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience.
"We've simplified these ecosystems," Evans said. "We've gone in and destroyed enormous amounts of coastal wetlands in Florida, [by] putting in these seawalls."
Shorebirds tend to avoid seawalls and other man-made structures built to defend shorelines from sea level rise and erosion, according to some studies, including one from the United States Geological Survey.
Some creatures, like barnacles, can survive on a seawall. But generally, the hard-armoring technique tends to make marine ecosystems less productive, Evans said. "They're very poor habitat, compared to what the natural habitat would be."
Hardening a shoreline can displace important organisms, like oysters, which are in themselves "natural stabilizers of shorelines," Evans said. In the long-term, seawalls can actually make erosion worse, especially along sandy beaches, where waves crashing against one side of the seawall can scour out sand on the other side.
"You oftentimes will lose your beach a lot faster because of the seawall," Evans said.
A quarter of Florida's seawall permits issued since 2004 are for structures in Volusia County, where Mosquito Lagoon begins, according to a 2024 analysis commissioned by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Mosquito Lagoon stretches south into Brevard County, which prohibits the installation of new shoreline hardening structures except in emergency situations.
Good for birds, good for fish — and good for us
In certain cases, seawalls might be the best way to stabilize a shoreline, Evans said: such as at a port, where huge waves are constantly rolling in from ship traffic. But generally, he said, living shorelines are a highly effective, more environmentally friendly — and, often, more affordable — solution.
"[It's] a win-win," Evans said. "We're getting the fisheries back that we want, we're getting the water quality back that we want. We're getting those benefits, and we're also getting the benefit of reduced amounts of erosion."
Hybrid solutions, like a buried seawall, can also be an effective alternative to fully hardening a shoreline, Evans said. For those structures, a hardened seawall serves as the core, buried beneath a sandy dune layer that often features native vegetation more conducive to wildlife habitat.
For oystercatchers in the Mosquito Lagoon, a living shoreline can serve as valuable high ground for the birds to roost during high tide, without straying far from the oyster reefs they depend on for food.
And a living system of mangroves and marsh grasses comes with another superpower, Evans said: built-in resilience. The native plants' roots help hold sediment from the lagoon in place, effectively allowing the land to "grow up."
"Even as the sea rises, then your mangroves can, in theory, keep up with it, because they're grabbing sediments," Evans said. "Just like a seawall is engineered, living shorelines are engineered: to stabilize, to withstand storms, and even in some cases to withstand a little bit of sea level rise."
Shorelines and beaches naturally shift over time, drifting and changing shape with the winds and waves. That makes a living shoreline's capacity to adapt to its surroundings — unlike a static seawall — one of its biggest strengths, said Melinda Donnelly, an assistant research scientist and biology professor at UCF who works with Walters.
Right now, Donnelly is working on a model to help predict where in the Indian River Lagoon living shorelines are most likely to succeed, based on variables like tidal conditions and wave energy thresholds for different plants. Many previous living shoreline projects have largely relied on trial and error, Donnelly said.
The goal is for the model to help maximize time and resources when planning how to stabilize a shoreline, and ultimately "end up with sort of a combination of methods, rather than just basically hardening every shoreline throughout the lagoon," Donnelly said.
Especially over time, more living shorelines will translate to a healthier lagoon ecosystem overall, Walters said. That means more attractive shorebird habitat.
"It's good for birds, it's good for fish. It's good for commercial species, recreational species," Walters said. "It's good for all the plants and just everything in the lagoon. So basically, it means it's good for us."
"A lot of potential"
Moving forward, managing the species' continued recovery in Florida will require prioritizing ways to help nesting oystercatchers. Right now, there are only 419 breeding adults documented statewide, according to Brush with FWC. In 2013, there were also fewer than 500, according to the agency's species action plan.
"Because there's not that many birds, every single nesting pair is important. And every time you get a new nesting pair entering the breeding population, that's huge," Brush said.
Specifically along the Atlantic coast in Central Florida, there is great opportunity to help grow oystercatcher populations, Brush said. "In general, where we are seeing birds try to enter the breeding population in great numbers [in Florida] is along the Atlantic coast."
But the challenge of habitat loss and degradation persists, especially as Central Florida's coasts are developed and hardened. If more oystercatchers here are to grow and breed successfully, improving habitat conditions will be critical.
"At some point, we will be limited by available habitat," Brush said. "There's a lot of potential to grow the population of oystercatchers on the Atlantic coast … if we have some more resources to dedicate toward habitat enhancement and restoration."
While resources are limited, Brush said, FWC is adept at making good use of them. "We're constantly in FWC keeping the pulse on how species are doing, and where we need to allocate resources where species may not be doing as well."
One huge part of that equation, Brush said, is partnership. The national oystercatcher working group helps foster collaboration between states.
"We watched our local population improve in Florida as part of that network," Brush said. "The state of Florida can't do it without our conservation partners."
A culture of partnership will be crucial to continuing American oystercatchers' recovery, according to conservation experts. Although oystercatchers have made promising gains in the last 15 years, the work is by no means over.
The (flight) path forward: "It takes a village"
Oystercatchers continue to face existential threats, from predators like rats and raccoons to habitat loss caused by human interference, sea level rise and storms.
"The difference is we as a working group have discovered many of the ways to manage and mitigate many of those threats, as long as we have people in the field doing that work," Schulte said.
That last piece is critical — and a growing concern for wildlife experts like Schulte, as the Trump administration's sweeping "waste-reduction" measures usher longtime experts out of staff positions and interrupt some grant-funded projects already underway.
It's not uncommon for conservation funds to fluctuate between (and sometimes during) presidential administrations, Schulte said. But this time is different.
"There's always uncertainty. It's never been like: 'We're stopping everything,' and no necessary guarantee as to whether it's going back," Schulte said. "We haven't seen that before, at all, where a project that's underway gets canceled."
Nationally and within states where oystercatchers breed, including Florida, government agencies are now missing some core personnel who made up the "bedrock" of shorebird conservation, Schulte said.
"We're seeing it kind of everywhere, especially with state and federal employees, who are usually the most consistent and stable aspect of the group," Schulte said in late May. "Some of these people were coordinating multiple sets of volunteers, or out there in the field themselves, doing a lot of this assessment work."
Departing experts take with them a depth of specialized knowledge, often built up over decades of fieldwork and experience.
"It's a huge loss. And it's hard to quantify," Schulte said. "It's not universal. But it's very widespread, and it is having significant impacts on our ability to do basic conservation work."
Fewer experienced people in the field means fewer, less robust assessments of shorebird health, Schulte said. "We actually won't know as much information about how well the birds are doing … or what the challenges are."
Restoring shorebird populations is a long-term commitment, Schulte said. Even in the smoothest of political climates, armed with the newest and best science, conservation experts know their work is bound to involve a certain level of uncertainty.
Instead of running away from the inevitable, Brush, with FWC, said she focuses on learning from the (literally) changing tides. "We need to keep looking for opportunities while we're navigating the uncertainty.
"That uncertainty is always looming," Brush said. "When a storm hits, you have to be looking for opportunity as you're evaluating your habitat loss."
Adaptation is no strange concept in a state where hurricanes routinely ravage and refashion coastlines and communities. Still, the ability to quickly pivot and seek out new possible solutions requires a strong foundation, like the network of partners making up the oystercatcher working group. And citizen scientists, like Hartgrove in Port Orange, are also "absolutely instrumental" to shorebird recovery, Brush said.
"It takes a village," Brush said. "There's always opportunities. You just have to look for them."
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