BATON
ROUGE, La. (LOCAL 33) (FOX 44) - Louisiana wildlife officials are helming a $19
million project to save their state bird's breeding space from shrinking
coastlines.
Subsidence
and coastal erosion have dwindled the brown pelican habitat on Queen Bess
Island to roughly six acres. Officials with the state's Department of
Wildlife and Fisheries, along with the Coastal Protection and Restoration
Authority, hope to restore damaged rookeries using settlement funds from the
2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.
"Those
birds need a little more room to spread out," said Todd Baker, a state
biologist aiding the reconstruction project. "Hopefully we can provide
that for them."
The
project would add 30 acres for pelicans to nest, with another 7 acres for terns
and skimmers. Biologists say the grounds must be high enough for eggs to
stay above water — and low enough to hide from predators.
Construction
is slated to cost $17 million. Roughly $2 million have already gone toward
design. The project would be the first of its kind for the state.
"Louisiana
has never gone out and purposely restored a rookery for the purpose of
restoring a rookery," Baker said. "It will teach us a lot about how
we're going to do projects in the future, not just for brown pelicans but a
whole suite of colonial waterbirds."
The
eroding Gulf Coast hardly marks the first threat in the brown
pelican's history. In 1961, brown pelicans stopped hatching in Louisiana,
after heavy use of the pesticide DDT made eggshells too thin to incubate.
By 1963, the birds disappeared from Louisiana marshes.
State
officials started reviving the pelican population in 1968. They
shipped chicks from Florida and brought them fish twice a day until they
got old enough to fly. In 1971, the birds returned to Queen Bess and laid
11 nests, from which the population gradually rose. Brown pelicans were removed
from the federal endangered species list in 2009.
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