Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch and Shorebird Monitoring (AMITWSBM) have cordoned off an area in Bradenton Beach where Black Skimmers have been gathering for the last week.
Black Skimmers spend their entire lives in coastal areas, usually around sandy beaches and islands, although a few colonies can be found in inland locations with very large lakes, particularly in Florida and California. Nesting birds use open sandy areas, gravel or shell bars with sparse vegetation, or broad mats of wrack (dead vegetation) in saltmarsh. Foraging birds frequent places that concentrate prey: tidal waters of bays, estuaries, lagoons, creeks, rivers, ditches, and saltmarsh pools. Because so many coastal habitats have been developed or otherwise modified, skimmers have become limited in their distribution over most of their range.
Mates take turns scraping, using an exaggerated posture (with the neck, head, bill, and tail raised) to kick sand behind them with alternating foot strokes. They then rotate in their scrape to create a saucer-shaped depression, like the resting scrapes they use throughout the year. The depression takes only a few minutes to create, and the birds may make several scrapes before eggs are laid. Males do more scraping and make larger scrapes than females. The average scrape is 10 inches in diameter and 1 inch deep…