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The climate is changing so quickly, some species common to Aquidneck can’t keep up.
Todd McLeish
Newport Life magazine
At the Sweet Flag Preserve adjacent to Bailey’s Brook in Middletown, Jameson Chace and his students at Salve Regina University spend two days a week each autumn capturing and banding birds as they fly through the area on migration. They’ve found it to be a hotspot of activity, and one that many birds depend on for rest and refueling before continuing on their long journey south.
“If there’s a migratory bird that comes through the Northeast, it’s shown up there,” says Chace, associate professor of biology and chairman of Salve’s biology and biomedical sciences department. “These little bits of riparian conservation zones are doing a whole lot more for wildlife than we probably ever imagined. That’s the big takeaway from our research.”
Ornithologist Jameson Chace and his students at Salve Regina University walk the Cliff Walk in Newport every other week from December through March to count the ducks they see in the water. They often count large numbers of scoters, eiders, scaup, buffleheads and goldeneyes, but their numbers vary significantly from year to year.
The same phenomenon occurs throughout Narragansett Bay: Large numbers of ducks are observed some years and many fewer during other years. No one seems to know why.
âBecause birds move around a lot, we canât really say much about trends, but there have been years when Iâve seen rafts of scoters in massive numbers and many years when thereâs not,â said Chace, a professor of biology at Salve Regina and president of the Wilson Ornithological Society.