It’s been a record-breaking summer at our nesting sanctuaries across the North Carolina coast. We banded 191 American Oystercatchers—the most ever since banding began in the state in the early 2000s. We also welcomed 87 volunteer Wrightsville Beach Bird Stewards who helped protect our most public nesting bird posting on the south end of Wrightsville Beach. 

“This has been a great year for us,” said Coastal Biologist Lindsay Addison. “We’ve had a record-breaking number of bird stewards volunteering with us, which enables us to educate more people about the nesting birds, and we’ve been able to carry forward long-term banding projects with our wonderful partners as well as add new science to our research portfolio.”  

The bird stewards spent over 4,000 hours monitoring the sanctuary and educating the public about the birds nesting within the posting at the south end of Wrightsville Beach. Though small, the site supports significant numbers of Black Skimmers and Least Terns, as well as other beach-nesting species that are vulnerable to human disturbance.  

According to a recent report, the 2025 estimated value of a volunteer hour in North Carolina is $33 per hour, which means the total contribution of stewards reached a value of more than $132,000! We are so thankful to our Volunteer Coordinator Marlene Eader who has led the program since 2013. 

Along with Lindsay and Biological Technician Ashlyn Newberry, a seasonal Biological Technician Kaitlyn Kuykendall and two volunteer interns, Blair Shuffler and Anji Sipkins-Chenn, joined us this summer. They helped monitor our sanctuaries and band hundreds of oystercatchers, skimmers, and terns. 

Big News This Year 

This spring we coordinated the statewide American Oystercatcher and Wilson’s Plover census, which takes place every three years with the support of the NC Wildlife Resources Commission and other partners around the state. The state is divided into survey areas, and each is visited during high tide, when oystercatchers are most detectable, between April 15 and June 15. “The results are still being tabulated,” said Addison, “but because the survey goes back to 2004, it allows us to detect trends in abundance and distribution for these species.” 

We also have good news to share about Blaze—the hand-reared Piping Plover from the shores of Lake Michigan. Blaze spends her summer in Waukegan, IL at a site managed by Lake County Audubon Society and winters in North Carolina with us. She was spotted by our coastal team in August at Masonboro Inlet where she’ll overwinter. Learn more about Blaze and how she gets help from Audubon on both sides of her migration journey. 

Now that the nesting season has wrapped up, let’s take a look back at how the summer played out for some of our most iconic beach nesting birds. 

Black Skimmers 

Our favorite orange and black-beaked friends had a generally successful year on the North Carolina coast. Predation and flooding are typically the main challenges for skimmers. Colonies that aren’t on elevated dredged-material islands tend to be on low-lying overwash fans or inlet spits. This helps them avoid visits from mammalian predators like coyotes but does expose them to danger from high tides or storms. 

The south end of Wrightsville Beach regularly supports a large colony which Audubon manages, and this year was no different. Aside from human disturbance, which is managed at the site by posting and volunteer bird stewards, skimmers at this site deal with predation by Ruddy Turnstones.  

These shorebirds flip over small stones and shells to find food but readily learn to peck eggs open as well. As they linger later and later into the spring before migrating, they increasingly overlap with skimmers trying to initiate clutches. This year once they left, however, the colony was able to keep nests active and the 200 pairs at the site fledged about 110 chicks, a good rate of success for beach-nesting birds. 

In addition to management activities, we also work to band skimmers at colonies around the state. Bird banding provides important data on movements, survival, and demographics, which helps us conserve and manage them year after year. In addition to banding at Wrightsville Beach, we partnered with the National Park Service and North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission to band skimmers at Cape Lookout National Seashore and two state-managed colonies. In total we banded 165 chicks in 2025, and they're already on the move—one chick banded near Hatteras Inlet was spotted near the south end of Topsail Island. 

Brown Pelican Research 

The Lower Cape Fear River, where Audubon manages bird-nesting islands, supports about 30 percent of the state’s coastal nesting waterbirds, and about 20 percent of the state’s Brown Pelicans. This year, pelicans formed two main colonies, one on Battery Island and one on South Pelican Island, and both produced a lot of dinosaur-like chicks. We don't monitor pelican reproduction as closely as we do some species, but we've been working to better understand pelican health since 2023. 

Building on work in 2023 and 2024 to collect samples for PFAS testing, we lead two trips to South Pelican Island to collect additional data. The first was with UNC-W graduate student Mara Cobb, who is taking a deep dive into the different kinds of cells found in the pelicans’ blood. Differences in red and white blood cell counts can be indicators of health and past or present exposure to disease.  

The second trip was with Kelly Douglass from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Miranda Turner with the NC Wildlife Resources Commission. They collaborated to collect swabs to test for vibrio, a common bacterial infection, and avian influenza. 

Lea-Hutaff Island 

With the partnership of NC State Parks and the Coastal Land Trust, Audubon manages Lea-Hutaff Island, an undeveloped barrier island in the southern part of the state. The site hosts large numbers of Least Terns and other nesting birds, and boaters flock to the island to recreate as well. To protect the birds, we post nesting areas annually and monitor both sea turtle and bird nesting all summer long. 

Least Terns and American Oystercatchers had early successes on Lea-Hutaff island, thanks to predator management and cooperation from the public, which largely respected the posted areas. Across the five Least Tern colonies on the island, we counted 933 pairs, or nearly a third of the state’s nesting Least Terns.  

And the 25 pairs of American Oystercatchers on Lea-Hutaff Island surpassed 0.5 fledglings per pair, the metric needed to maintain and slightly grow their population. Focused management focused on reducing predation and human disturbance has turned around American Oystercatchers declines in the early 2000s, and the species has seen population growth thanks to efforts like these. 

Other bird species that nest on Lea-Hutaff Island include Wilson’s Plovers, Piping Plovers, and Common Nighthawks. In addition to the birds, Audubon works with the NC Wildlife Resources Commission to monitor sea turtle nesting on the island.  

This year, we had 23 nests and we are still waiting for the last few to hatch. Although loggerhead sea turtles make up the vast majority of nesting on the island, we had a rare Kemp’s ridley nest this year. It was only the second-ever documented Kemp’s ridley nest on the island. 

Royal and Sandwich Terns Tracking and Banding 

Our end of season coastal nesting update wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the large colony of Royal and Sandwich Terns hosted by South Pelican Island on the Cape Fear River. Dr. Kate Goodenough returned this year to continue her GPS tracking project with Royal Terns and added Sandwich Terns to the study.  

Adult terns are captured at the colony and given lightweight data loggers that communicate with satellites to record high-accuracy locations at intervals ranging from 5 minutes to an hour. When they return to the colony, they download the data to a receiver station installed on South Pelican Island.  

So far, we have tracked 18 Royal Terns and 8 Sandwich Terns. “A lot of management rightfully focused on protecting nesting sites,” explained Addition. “However, the footprint of habitat that birds need to survive is much broader than just where they lay their eggs and raise their chicks. The tracking data gives us a more complete illustration of how the birds are using the landscape throughout the year.” We’ve already gotten a lot of great information back from last year’s cohort—including breeding and non-breeding season movements—and are excited to have continued the project this year. 

We also track the terns through banding. Volunteers flocked to the island earlier in the summer to help band 1,000 chicks with federally issued metal bands. Five hundred of them also got field readable bands, designed to be read by observers with binoculars, scopes, or cameras with zoom lenses. This is exciting work and will tell us more about the resources that our birds rely on so we can better protect and conserve them. 

Overall, the 2025 nesting season was a busy one, with more birds banded and more people and partners involved than ever before. 

*All banding, marking, and sampling is being conducted under a federally authorized Bird Banding Permit issued by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Bird Banding Lab.