Hi Rich and all, The Line Islands aren't what they used to be. Pat and I visited with John Zarudsky from the Town of Hempstead on 29 July 2011 (by the way, somebody ought to call Shane Blodgett and ask him if he remembers that day!) and spent some very enjoyable time around Egg Island and North Line Island. I haven't yet eBirded my notes from that era, but the flats near Egg Island held around 400 Short-billed Dowitchers and the margins of North Line hosted around 400 Semipalmated Sandpipers, all adult. We saw no godwits or Whimbrels. According to our own impressions and John's experienced testimony, the configuration of the flats has changed greatly over several decades since this area's glory days.
This is the same old story for so many coastal shorebird hotspots, which tend to show extreme changes in productivity over a variety of time-scales. The West Pond at Jamaica Bay was lost overnight, but the critical habitat features of many others fade almost imperceptibly over years or decades, as at the Line Islands, and also two other pillars of late 20th Century Long Island shorebirding: Cedar Beach and Democrat Pt. Very occasionally the coastal dynamism manages a feeble bid for symmetry in its impacts, as in our gaining productive new habitat at Sunken Meadow. Almost always, however, this is impossible, for a variety of more or less perverse reasons. The main one is that when a formerly superb site becomes less good: (1) resource managers lose the ability to protect it for the special features that used to be there (and would, if they could, cycle back there again); (2) various human interests swoop in and step on it, hard; (3) five or ten or twenty years later, when if left alone it would have cycled back into productivity, it is no longer ecologically resilient enough to do so. Think about the West Pond. This is a once in a generation opportunity to subvert the ratchet and make things better! Shai Mitra Bay Shore ________________________________ CSI Represents NY in Nationwide State Rankings. Learn more>>><http://csitoday.com/2014/04/csi-represents-ny-in-nationwide-state-rankings/> -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
