Students from Long Island Elementary Schools Awarded in Annual Shorebird Sign Contest

Nesting season for Piping Plovers, American Oystercatchers, and Least Terns is effectively on its approach on Lengthy Island seashores. When individuals, pets, or predators get too shut, these birds typically fly away or retreat to a different space of the seashore, leaving their nests and chicks weak to hazard.

Incidents like this critically affect shorebird populations, which is why educators from the Theodore Roosevelt Sanctuary and Audubon Middle have been working with college students from Lengthy Island colleges to lift consciousness about it—utilizing artwork!

That is one thrilling a part of Audubon New York’s coastal stewardship program, the place native college students are given the instruments to take motion by designing instructional indicators of their artwork courses. The messages they share immediate beachgoers to remain out of fenced off areas, maintain canines off pet-free seashores, and clear up rubbish after a seashore day.

These college students—from Connolly and Touchdown Elementary Colleges in Glen Cove, James H. Vernon College in Oyster Bay, and Drexel Elementary College in Westbury—discovered all about birds and the work being finished to preserve them in classes with the Sanctuary’s training workers all year long.

This artwork venture is a fruits of their classes, giving college students the chance to take what they’ve discovered and use their very own voices to assist preserve our native shorebirds.

For a lot of college students, this contains sharing their messages in a number of languages. This 12 months, a powerful 5 languages had been represented within the signage, together with Spanish, Korean, and Italian, permitting the necessary info on the indicators to be shared with much more individuals.

Watch two college students do a bilingual presentation on their indicators!

Annually, the Sanctuary hosts an occasion to rejoice the scholars and their artwork. Chosen college students get the chance to current and talk about their designs to their classmates, native officers, and the press. These college students additionally obtain awards for his or her dedication to chicken conservation and the laborious work they put into their designs.

At this 12 months’s celebration, which occurred earlier this month, college students from Drexel Elementary College and James H. Vernon College had been joined by Oyster Bay Cove Mayor Charles Goulding, Director of High-quality Arts for the Oyster Bay College District Erica Giglio Pac, and Consultant from City of Oyster Bay Parks Bryan Rhoads.

“I sit up for working with college students on this venture every year,” says Julie Nelson, the Sanctuary’s training supervisor. “I’m all the time impressed by how artistic and considerate they’re, and the way a lot from our classes they bring about into their designs.”

Simply in time for summer season, the chosen designs might be printed onto indicators and put in on seashores throughout Lengthy Island to remind beachgoers of the significance of sharing the shore with beach-nesting birds.

This work is funded by the Nationwide Fish and Wildlife Basis’s Lengthy Island Sound Futures Fund.