A few minutes before sunrise, Megan Hatten arrives at the Ten Thousand Islands Field Research Station in Goodland. As the Southwest shorebird program manager for Audubon Florida, she and Derek Salge, her counterpart with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, start assembling the day’s supplies: first aid kit, handheld radio, life jackets, and boat keys. Today, they plan to mark off shorebird nesting areas at Dickmans Island, a small island just south of Marco Island, located within the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve boundary.
“We’ll take these smaller signs to put up at the front section, which is where most people are walking,” Hatten says to Salge. She loads two types of signs, a box with spools of string and colorful flagging, and various power tools onto a cart and rolls it down the dock to the boat. They both climb onboard; Hatten starts the engine and points the boat out toward the open water.
As they arrive at the beach, they see that several boats have already pulled up on the sand. Eager beachcombers pick through mounds of shells along the breaking waves, paying little attention to the flocks of shorebirds that are doing the same. Hatten and Salge split up, each taking a set of signs and various tools in different directions to mark the areas of the beach where threatened shorebirds like Wilson’s Plovers have already started setting up territories…