Eleven birdwatchers recently walked and drove through the Vertac Superfund plant site in Jacksonville and saw 43 species of birds.
Just outside the borders of Little Rock Air Force Base, the Vertac site once held a plant that manufactured Agent Orange, the powerful defoliant used to strip jungles in southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. The plant also made herbicides for general agricultural uses.
Dioxin, a carcinogen, and other pollutants escaped from the Vertac plant during the manufacturing process. Three decades of cleanup efforts have attempted to restore the acreage and its surrounding watershed, but the site is off-limits to the public.
Terracon Consultants, a national environmental engineering firm with an office in Bryant, monitors the site. On Feb. 15, Jody Adams, senior staff geologist for Terracon, acted as a guide for the first bird-watching group allowed inside the 93-acre fenced area that was the herbicide manufacturing plant.
Adams and two of his associates had surveyed bird populations on the Vertac site on two days during 2013 - once in the spring and once in the fall - but they had not set aside a day for counting wintering birds. So the February visit filled that gap in his monitoring records. Terracon has yet to collect reliable information about the birds that reside inside the fences of the Vertac plant at midsummer.
HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY
Here’s how the birding trip came about:
I knew about what has been happening to wildlife at Vertac because I’ve done alittle consulting work for Terracon, first on a project to mitigate airplane and bird collisions at Hot Springs Memorial Field Airport and then at the Vertac site, to determine what species of birds had returned. The changes are dramatic, and I knew that because I remember visiting the grounds of the plant - then owned by Hercules Powder Co. - in the late 1960s.
I remember its stark, treeless ruin.
I got to thinking about the Great Backyard Bird Count, a winter event co-sponsored every year by Cornell University and the National Audubon Society. Though its name doesn’t suggest it, the count encourages everyone to look for birds in all types of settings - parks, woodlands, remote deserts, even once-polluted manufacturing areas.
Would Terracon let birdwatchers hold a count at Vertac? I asked, and the answer was yes.
I knew other serious birders like me would relish the chance as historic. So I posted an open invitation on ARBird-L, an Internet listserv sponsored by the University of Arkansas. That’s how I recruited the birders to go inside the 8-foot-tall chain-link fence that surrounds the site. WHAT WE FOUND
Dr. Karen Konarski-Hart of Little Rock tallied the data the birders collected on this trip, including the names of each species of bird seen and how many individuals of each species were seen.
Craig Provost, a retired psychologist who lives in Little Rock, submitted that data to eBird. A project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, eBird is an electronic database documenting bird populations in the Western Hemisphere. The information is collected by citizen scientists and used by ornithologists and naturalists to understand patterns of bird migration and the health of North American birds.
According to a GPS app on Provost’s smartphone, the birders drove and walked five miles inside the 93-acre plot in doing their survey.
WHAT WAS SEEN AND WHY
The variety of species and the number of birds or animals in a particular habitat are often cited as a general measure of the health and well-being of that environment. By that biodiversity standard, the Vertac plant site looks pretty good.
When ducks no longer come to a pond, usually that pond has environmental problems. When homeowners use strong pesticides and herbicides on the lawn, plant only exotic grasses and keepit mowed short, fewer birds come to the bird feeder. Seeing more and more diverse animals suggests a healthier ecosystem in general.
The first species birders spotted at Vertac was not avian: It was a pack of three coyotes. They stood atop one of the site’s pollution-containment mounds, two coyotes silhouetted against the sky, the other thinly camouflaged in weedy vegetation. The birders got good looks through their binoculars at the rangy, rusty-colored critters.
Most of the photographers in the group were just removing their cameras from their cars when the coyotes slinked out of sight.
Four kinds of ducks bobbed about on the small pond created by Rocky Branch, a creek that rolls through the Vertac property: mallards, gadwalls, Northern shovelers and the glamour birds of the day, a pair of hooded mergansers in their striking breeding plumage. The tally was 74 individual quackers.
Many types of songbirds were seen or heard - our group included experienced identifiers - including cardinals, mockingbirds, Carolina wrens, tufted titmice and Carolina chickadees. The most frequently seen bird was the American robin.
Birders also reported three Eastern towhees. It is unusual to see so many of these puffy breasted songsters in a single outing.
Hermit thrushes, brown thrashers, two yellow-rumped warblers and three Eastern phoebes were seen, as well as a flock of about 20 cedar waxwings.
EXTRAPOLATION
Judging from Adams’ reports and evidence we saw, other songbirds will migrate through the property in the spring and some will stop to nest at Vertac this summer.
Among the summer-nesting birds, I would look for the white-eyed vireo, a bird attracted to new growth forests like those at Vertac. I photographed a fragile, abandoned nest that was suspended from a limb by spider webs and after the outing emailed the image to ornithologist Dan Scheiman, bird conservation director for Audubon Arkansas. He agreed it was probably that of a white-eyed vireo.
The group saw a large number of birds of prey for only 93 acres of territory. Among them were a red-tailed hawk, a Cooper’s hawk, a sharp-shinned hawk, a Northern harrier, an American kestrel and at least two red-shouldered hawks.
It is difficult to know how many red-shouldered hawks were present, because the birders might have seen the same individuals over and over. At one point they saw two at the same time. Some birders thought there were three.
The presence of all those hawks argues for an abundance of rabbits and mice at Vertac, too, because small furry creatures provide much of a hawk’s diet; but the birders did not report seeing such rodents. They did see gray squirrels, another rodent on the menu for the red-shouldered hawk and also for owls.
Hawks also like to divebomb and devour birds that stay on the ground most of the time in open fields. Two such birds, the Eastern meadowlark and killdeer, were not spotted Feb. 15, but Adams reported seeing both species in abundance last year. We speculated that the meadowlarks and killdeer were aware of the hawks and had taken cover.
The presence of the hawks also would explain why the birders saw mourning doves and collared doves perched in the trees and on power lines but not on the ground. Had the doves been feeding on the ground in open fields, as they often will, they would have been easy marks for the birds of prey.
TURKEYS?
Also unseen and unheard by any of the birders was the wild turkey. But Terracon employees had spotted seven turkeys only days before the birders arrived. Turkeys are generally very shy in the wild.They have keen hearing and good eyesight. It is unlikely that 12 people driving around in five cars on a gravel road and getting in and out of their vehicles every 10 minutes or so to look around and talk could ever be quiet enough to see a wild turkey.
But birdwatchers did find turkey tracks and it is likely the gobblers were camouflaged in the brambles and people-watching.
HOW DO THEY DO IT?
We saw at least 11 white-tailed deer. None of them had antlers. Deer shed their antlers each year and “sheds” have been frequently found on the Vertac property.
Some of the birders wondered how the deer got inside the fences. Even tall chainlink fences like those around Vertac offer little more barrier to deer than they do to birds. Perhaps the animals we saw simply leaped over, crawled under or squeezed through gaps.
MISCELLANEOUS
We counted four Eastern bluebirds. Probably they were hatched from one or more of the four nesting boxes Terracon biologists have placed around the property.
A mixed kettle of 50 vultures (both turkey vultures and black vultures) rode the thermals above Vertac.
From the woodpecker tribe, three representatives were seen: three downys, a red-bellied and a yellow-bellied sapsucker.
Blue jays were seen and heard scolding one another in the trees on the western side of the property.
The skies over Vertac held many blackbirds, including common grackles, cowbirds, red-winged blackbirds and starlings. American crows and fish crows were also seen and heard.
LITTLE BROWN BIRDS
The casual birdwatcher may call any small bird an LBBJ or “little brown bird jobber.” Birders like those on this trip pride themselves on their ability to distinguish the many species of sparrows from one another by the subtle differences in field markings. The group identified five sparrow-size bird species: four Savannah sparrows, seven song sparrows, 18 white-throated sparrows, two white crowned sparrows and 22 dark-eyed juncos. Juncos are also known as “snow-birds.”
In total the group saw and reported 688 individual birds and 43 species. We also saw three kinds of terrestrial animals and enjoyed being outdoors with new friends on the warmest day Arkansans had seen since New Year’s Day.
Jerry Butler often writes about birds for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He welcomes stories and comments at
ActiveStyle, Pages 26 on 03/17/2014