Rapid Assessment Report Highlights Resiliency of Texas’ Coastal Waterbirds After Tropical Weather

The Black Skimmer and Royal Tern are two of the Gulf of Mexico’s most fascinating and distinctive waterbirds, and after Tropical Storm Alberto they showed their resilience.

When Alberto hit the upper Mexican coast in June the storm surge was felt as far north as Port Aransas, Texas, and nesting sites for Black Skimmers and Royal Terns on islands along the lower Texas Coast from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande River were inundated with surge. A few weeks later, Black Skimmer nests began popping up on a large man-made island near Port Mansfield along the southern Texas coast (NE Mansfield Intersection Island).

The nesting continued after Hurricane Beryl, a category 2 storm, made landfall in July near Matagorda Bay and the Port Mansfield colony island had more than 600 nests detected. Unfortunately, many of those nests failed but a few small colonies on other islands had reformed throughout the Upper Laguna Madre and even one in Nueces Bay. By the middle of August, many of those nests had chicks.

“We were excited that of the 300 or so colony islands on the Texas coast the skimmers chose to renest on Mansfield, an island created from dredge spoil and rock specifically for bird nesting,” said Dr. Dale Gawlik, Chair for Conservation and Biodiversity at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. “Although the nesting ultimately failed from unknown causes, it showed us that we can engineer islands that are attractive to birds in the face of rising seas.”

The fate of the Black Skimmer and Royal Terns during Tropical Storm Alberto and Hurricane Beryl are part of a rapid assessment report on the effect of waterbirds after the storms conducted by collaborating researchers from the Harte Research Institute, Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program and the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University-Kingsville.

The two storms offered a rare opportunity to assess the impact on waterbirds before and after the storms. Typically, it is hard to do assessments because of the unpredictable nature of tropical weather, but the researchers took advantage of the chance.  

Researchers with the groups were already in the process of collecting data on waterbird island conditions and the number of nesting colonial waterbird nests for the ongoing Colony Island Network Design and Implementation (CINDI) project along the coast.

The assessment highlights key factors after the two storms such as island erosion, habitat loss and nest failure and survival on bird islands along the coast for birds such as Black Skimmers and Royal Terns. The two storms differed in their location at landfall along Texas’ coast, along with differing storm surge, wind speeds and precipitation.

“The differences in these storms show just how important it is that these colonial nesting birds have many options for colony islands,” Dr. Gawlik said. “In one area nests are flooded from surge whereas in another area they are pummeled by winds. But these birds are resilient if given enough islands, even created ones.”

The assessment will be shared with multiple agencies and non-governmental organizations that help manage coastal ecosystems and inform them of the impacts from tropical weather.