THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 20, 1996 TAG: 9607200243
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: OREGON INLET LENGTH: 93 lines
To protect a nest of endangered shorebirds, officials with the National Park Service roped off an area about five football fields long around this Outer Banks inlet Friday.
The move angered some anglers, who feel they're being edged out of one of the last areas that four-wheel-drive vehicles may drive across in the northern beaches.
Others applauded the efforts to preserve the piping plover.
``I think it's pretty cool,'' said 27-year-old Mark Griffith, a Virginia Beach resident who was catching flounder near the closed-off area Friday. ``This is the birds' habitat. They lived here before we did.''
Robby Carr agreed. ``There's still plenty of beach left for us to get around on,'' said the 38-year-old Franklin, Va., resident, who spent Friday fishing near the base of the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge. ``I'd guess they left us a quarter or half-mile area to drive on. I'm not saying close all the sand. But you need to preserve where those eggs are because you need to keep what's down here.''
Nags Head angler Norman Bradford, however, said the Park Service should have held a public hearing before shutting down the spit of sand - or at least notified people about the pending closure. Rangers doubled the size of the off-limits area Friday and roped it off with white twine. They refused to confirm where the nest is out of fear that someone might intentionally damage it - and would not even divulge the exact size of the off-limits area.
``We're having to give up the ability to fish under one section of the bridge,'' Bradford said. ``We're losing an ideal safe place for parents to take their small children to crab, fish and play in shallow water. The fishermen are going to lose a valuable area.''
Park Service officials, who oversee the four-mile spit of sand on the north side of Oregon Inlet, have closed a quarter-mile-long area around the northeast end of the pond for the past three or four years to protect a traditional feeding and nesting area that least terns and oyster catchers seem to favor. Traditionally, that spot is off limits from April through October. During parts of each day, it's under water - and inaccessible to four-wheel-drive vehicles anyway.
This spring, rangers also roped off an area near the northern base of the Oregon Inlet bridge. Piping plover showed up there in May for the first time in more than 20 years. Dogs, foxes and gulls have been after the tiny birds - and traffic has endangered their nests even further, rangers said.
Towns from Nags Head through Southern Shores prohibit driving on the beach during the summer. About half of Hatteras Island's 65 miles of oceanfront also is closed to vehicles. And the sandy spit that stretches from east of the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center to under the Bonner Bridge is about the only area between the inlet and Corolla that's open to four-wheel-drive traffic during the Outer Banks' busiest season.
``Those eggs are due to hatch in the next week or so. We wanted to give them a little more breathing space,'' Assistant District Ranger Steve Ryan said. ``Disturbing the birds can flush them off their nests.''
Intentionally harassing a piping plover is a violation of the federal Endangered Species Act. Penalties range from a fine up to $50,000 or one year in jail. Letting a dog run loose on Park Service property is punishable by a $50 fine.
The piping plover nest near the northern base of the Bonner bridge is the only one north of Oregon Inlet, Ryan said. It became even more important to preserve this month after ocean overwash from Hurricane Bertha destroyed six or eight colonies of piping plover on Hatteras Island. The only remaining plover nest Park Service officials know of on the Outer Banks is on Pea Island.
``We put signs up this morning and erected a symbolic fence to rope off the closed area,'' Ryan said Friday. ``We built a wire enclosure around the nests earlier to keep animals and other birds out. But the mesh is small enough to let the piping plovers fly through.''
Named for their lyrical peep, piping plover were hunted during the 19th century for their feathers, which were used in women's hats. The federal government declared the stocky, sand-colored shorebirds an endangered species in 1986 after their populations sank dangerously low due to increased beach development and other human intrusions. Since then, the 3-inch-long birds have shown some recovery in their Atlantic range, from Newfoundland to North Carolina.
But recent surveys show there are still fewer than 1,000 pairs of piping plover left along the East Coast.
Trying to preserve them, however, has ruffled some fishermen's feathers.
Tackle shop owners said they received some complaints Friday about the expanded off-limits area.
``I've had one or two guys in here complaining about it just since lunch,'' said Walter Widmer, a clerk at Fishing Unlimited near Whalebone Junction. ``They didn't think it was right because they didn't see any birds out there.''
Ryan said the closure is only temporary, until the baby birds hatch and fly away. He projected rangers would remove the ropes by the end of August. Anglers say that makes the area off-limits for the rest of the summer.
``I guess it needs to be done, in a way,'' Widmer said. ``But that's one of our main places to catch flounder this time of year. As long as they leave us enough room to drive by, though, I guess it's OK.''
KEYWORDS: ENDANGERED SPECIES by CNB