Protecting the Capes

Kiptopeke State Park

The Wilson's warbler is a jewel of a bird, golden yellow with a black tail and a bit of olive along the back. Here in eastern Virginia it's a rare jewel as well. The Wilson's is common on the West Coast, but seldom seen here in the East.

Bart Paxton, who works for the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary, was holding one on the back of his hand, the bird's legs gently pressed between his fingers. It did look like a jewel, a living, feathered ring.

Paxton was pulling a shift at the bird banding station at Kiptopeke State Park near the southern tip of the Eastern Shore. Kiptopeke once was a ferry terminal, and after the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel opened in 1964, plans were made to turn the bayside site into a residential development. Streets were bulldozed through the woods, and the banding center is in the middle of what was intended to be a residential thoroughfare. There's a large gazebo, a shelter where banders work, a few picnic tables and signs that explain Kiptopeke's role in studying the fall migration of songbirds and raptors.

The street is pretty much overgrown now as pines, black cherries, wax myrtles and cedars have taken over. Some of the roads have become hiking trails, some link the network of mist nets used by the banders and others have totally reverted to woodland.

Forest is a precious commodity here at the narrow tip of the peninsula. Tens of thousands of songbirds gather here during the fall migration, and they use the forest and shrub thickets to rest and find food before they make the 17-mile crossing of the Chesapeake Bay. Eliminate this wooded sanctuary at the southern tip and the birds are in serious trouble.

"This area is one of the most important avian migration funnels in North America," said Sue Rice, manager of Eastern Shore of Virginia and Fisherman Island National Wildlife Refuges. "Each fall the refuge has millions of songbirds and thousands of raptors converging at the peninsula's tip."

Fortunately, many acres of forest on the tip are protected. Eastern Shore of Virginia NWR is located on the eastern side of the tip, at the entrance of the bridge-tunnel, which traverses Fisherman Island NWR just below the mainland of the Shore. The Nature Conservancy owns Smith Island and some farmland on the ocean side of the mainland peninsula. The state's Mockhorn Island Wildlife Management Area protects a large interior island. And the state park lies a few miles farther north on the Chesapeake Bay.

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