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Educating Students and Beachgoers with Shorebird Signs
In partnership with The Coastal Discovery Museum, Hilton Head Audubon is helping young students learn about shorebirds. Dawn Brut, the Education Curator at the CDM developed a number of conservation-focused courses, including Sharing With Shorebirds. In this course, teachers and their students discover the shorebirds that visit and live on South Carolina beaches, learning how shorebirds live from nesting to migration.
Exploring the lives of shorebirds also shows students many of the challenges shorebirds face in light of human disturbances such as unleashed dogs chasing birds, disturbing nests, and litter – all of which can be harmful and even life-threatening to the birds. So as part of their final project, students draw signs showing ways we can protect shorebirds. This excellent program plants the seeds for students to continue to think about conservation throughout their lives, and work to save our shorebirds.
Many of the student signs form part of a gallery showing at the Coastal Discovery Museum each year, along with photographs of beach flora and fauna from local photographers. A few of these drawings are selected and made into signs now hanging at the entrances to some of our public beaches. These signs are eye-catching ways to get the message out to all beach goers – visitors and residents alike.
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Hilton Head Audubon is a proud partner of the program and pays for one or two drawings to be made into signs each year. In 2020, two signs were posted at Fish Haul Beach park, in 2021, one sign was posted at Burkes Beach, and in 2022 one sign was posted at Mitchelville beach. To learn more about our protecting shorebirds, please see HHA’s Share the Shore with Shorebirds.
One of these student signs tells us to keep an eye out for nesting shorebirds and to give them lots of space so they stay free from disturbances and even curiosity. Another shows us that birds need to rest, especially during their migrations. And another promotes one of HHA’s biggest initiatives to keep dogs leashed at the beach to prevent chasing our shorebirds.
Did you know?
Chasing or disturbing shorebirds causes the most harm to shorebirds on our Hilton Head Island beaches. Leashing dogs and keeping at least 100 feet away from them gives shorebirds the space they need to rest and refuel. Whether they’re resident shorebirds or they’ve migrated here for the season from hundreds of miles away, causing shorebirds to flee is life-threatening to them. It prevents them from finding food and resting and can even change their body chemistry and shorten their lives.
What can you do?
Give Shorebirds 100 feet of space.
If they fly away, you’ve come too close!
Watch this 2020 Shorebird Sign news story from Beaufort County School District highlighting the two students whose artworks were made into signs. Along with the students interviewed in the video, Dawn Brut, Curator of Education at the Coastal Discovery Museum, and John Bloomfield, 2020 Hilton Head Audubon President, discuss how these signs can make a big difference in the lives of our shorebirds. Keep an eye out for them and make sure to tell everyone about them. too.
To learn more about signing up for the Sharing With Shorebirds or other educational programs, visit the CDM’s Conservation in the Classroom programs webpage.
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