A 35-acre island between Folly Beach and Kiawah Island is off-limits to people, but it's become essential real estate for thousands of nesting birds. This is Bird Key Stono, and in 2018 it received what can only be described as an unglamorous facelift: 40,000 cubic yards of river sand, dredged from the water and dumped onto its shrunken shoreline.
It's easy to overlook a story about sand, dredging, and government contracts, but if you stand back and take the long view, a 2019 study titled “Decline of the North American Avifauna,” in the journal Science, takes on new meaning. It found that the continent's bird populations had fallen by a net 2.9 billion individuals since 1970, a roughly 29% drop in total abundance across all species combined. With that in mind, an island receiving a sand treatment doesn't seem so unimportant.
